The Great Debate - Free College For All

[sanantone]

You responded to me, so I believe you're the one who wants to spar. Mississippi has a lot of rural areas. And? You entirely missed the point of my post. It wasn't about whether Mississippi is rural or agrarian. It was about how being rural and agrarian is not an excuse for the poverty in the Deep South because states in other regions of the country that are more rural and more agrarian aren't nearly as poor. There are other reasons for why there are so many failures in the Deep South, but the social science lesson will throw the thread off topic more than it already is.

If anyone cares to know, however, I will gladly type up a lengthy post. You also missed the point of my original post. I don't know how you could read my post and not see the post I quoted. If Democrats wanted to keep people poor, then they are doing a bad job at it because Republicans in the Deep South have them beat. It's not that being a red state correlates with poverty; it's that being in a Democratic-controlled state does not correlate with poverty. LifeLongLearning made an idiotic, highly-political, off-topic statement. Like usual, the conservatives around here are being hypocrites by not addressing the person who started the exchange.

You cast aspersions on red-state governments in deep south states to.. make the point that Democratic governmental control doesn't necessarily have a poverty correlation? 

You then went on to attack me for being biased because I didn't agree with your aspersion. An ineffective, but interesting way to communicate. I'll give you that.

I'd be glad to have intelligent discourse on "social science" with you or anyone else who'd like to elucidate me on Mississippi's developmental concerns.

Ineffective is your opinion. I talked to LifeLongLearning at his level. In my opinion, not reading the post someone quoted and responded to is an inefficient way of communicating. It's not interesting either; I can't really think of anything positive to say about it. Ironically, your post doesn't make much sense in response to mine without the context of LifeLongLearning's post, so I'm still skeptical about your claim. You pretty much repeated what LifeLongLearning learning said. I said nothing about the Democratic Party, or any party, benefiting from keeping people poor.

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Sure, everyone has biases and there are all kinds of them. An inevitability, I guess, given humanity's need to create labels for everything we perceive. However, my response specifically addresses what was asserted by Sanantone, not psychological/sociological macrostructure.

Uh, no. When you categorize people by whether they are prone to biases, you are 1. Arguing ad hominem, and 2. Making a false dichotomy - all people are incredibly prone to biases.

He's trying to apply the self-fulfilling prophecy concept to this situation. Since I haven't seen MSK9 participate in political threads or remember many posts from him in political threads, my post was based on him conveniently being temporarily blind when glancing over LifeLongLearning's post AND the quote of what LifeLongLearning said in my post. Could that be the result of implicit bias? I don't know. I'll take MSK9's approach and say that I've found that people who are actually biased tend to miss obvious things.