'structural'
luka
Well-known member
you should read my famous work 'prediction tablet' to get a clearer picture of how all this works in practice
craner
Beast of Burden
In Henry Kissinger's World Order he basically says that order is maintained by treaties that are contingent and fragile, but outside of those agreements it does not exist. There are only national interests that are culturally determined and fundamentally different, usually compete and occasionally overlap. He's somebody who came as close as anybody to imposing some order on arbitrary events from above, and his final statement is extremely relativistic.
But then, maybe he would say that because he wants to hide the strings.
But then, maybe he would say that because he wants to hide the strings.
I know what a data structure is, because it's a thing I use and work with; I write programs that build them up, and take them apart to build up other such structures. But they're rather static things, a bit like bundles of filled-out forms with other forms attached, and sub-forms and sub-sub forms and so on. Bureaucratic things. Social "structures" aren't really like that, because they're usually patterns of action and expectation reinforced by material conditions that they in turn tend to reproduce. There may be bureaucratic strata to them - think of what it means to have a passport or a driver's licence, what you have to do and who you have to be in order to get one, what other things might depend on whether you have one or not - but the bureaucracies are not the only "structural" elements of the situation.
"Structural racism" isn't "structural bigotry" because the "racism" in the first phrase isn't an attitude of mind - like a "bigotry" or a "phobia" - that has somehow migrated out into the external environment and is now roaming free of human hosts.
When things are set up in a way that produces discriminatory outcomes, the outcomes and the set-up can be mutually reinforcing. You live somewhere where there's a lot of car theft. Your car insurance is higher, because the insurer has a database of car theft prevalence by postcode. You have less disposable income as a result. You are poorer, and others in your situation are poorer, and so you have less money to spend in the local economy and the tax base for your area is weak. Services are cut and businesses do not thrive; there are fewer jobs. Crime takes root. There is a higher rate of car theft. Chicken-and-egg stuff like this is how social structures exist and are perpetuated.
Is the insurer at fault, for observing that crime happens more often to people where you live, and making use of that information to keep down insurance premiums for people who live in nicer places, so they can remain competitive with other insurers who are all doing the same thing? Now the circuit of reinforcement runs wider. "We're not discriminatory, we just don't want to go out of business". The insurer, and the insurers they are competing against, are feeding reinforcing input into a circuit that produces discriminatory outcomes. They become, willy-nilly, one of the component parts of a structure, a pattern frozen into the overall dynamic.
Racism as an ideology is people who live in the nicer areas saying "it's all their own fault, they have untameable criminal tendencies, we try to assist them but they always revert to type" - giving a genetic (both literally, as in DNA, and figuratively, as in "this is the root of everything, the genesis") causal explanation for how the structure came to be the way it is and why it unfortunately has to be perpetuated. But the ideology exists to give an apologia for maintaining the structure, whose real history and reasons for existing they don't want to look at, or take any responsibility for.
"Structural racism" isn't "structural bigotry" because the "racism" in the first phrase isn't an attitude of mind - like a "bigotry" or a "phobia" - that has somehow migrated out into the external environment and is now roaming free of human hosts.
When things are set up in a way that produces discriminatory outcomes, the outcomes and the set-up can be mutually reinforcing. You live somewhere where there's a lot of car theft. Your car insurance is higher, because the insurer has a database of car theft prevalence by postcode. You have less disposable income as a result. You are poorer, and others in your situation are poorer, and so you have less money to spend in the local economy and the tax base for your area is weak. Services are cut and businesses do not thrive; there are fewer jobs. Crime takes root. There is a higher rate of car theft. Chicken-and-egg stuff like this is how social structures exist and are perpetuated.
Is the insurer at fault, for observing that crime happens more often to people where you live, and making use of that information to keep down insurance premiums for people who live in nicer places, so they can remain competitive with other insurers who are all doing the same thing? Now the circuit of reinforcement runs wider. "We're not discriminatory, we just don't want to go out of business". The insurer, and the insurers they are competing against, are feeding reinforcing input into a circuit that produces discriminatory outcomes. They become, willy-nilly, one of the component parts of a structure, a pattern frozen into the overall dynamic.
Racism as an ideology is people who live in the nicer areas saying "it's all their own fault, they have untameable criminal tendencies, we try to assist them but they always revert to type" - giving a genetic (both literally, as in DNA, and figuratively, as in "this is the root of everything, the genesis") causal explanation for how the structure came to be the way it is and why it unfortunately has to be perpetuated. But the ideology exists to give an apologia for maintaining the structure, whose real history and reasons for existing they don't want to look at, or take any responsibility for.
craner
Beast of Burden
It's your fault, you took us way off topic.
craner
Beast of Burden
Most of them can't even drive, they'll just sit there dribbling at the screen.
luka
Well-known member
you have to answer quickly or craner will say you spent all night drafting a response