[Larry Heinberg]

Originally Posted by Antiochus Epiphanes

bullshit, this is the total bullshit that flies in the face of common sense.

if you know that black males are disrpoportionately resposnsible for violent crimes, such as muggings, or rapes against white women, which they provably and statistically most certainly are-- then if you are a white woman walking down the street at night and a coon is following you, then you SHOULD indeed you MUST assume based on his GROUP that he presents a serious potential threat.

This doesn't actually relate to what I said. Race membership is not defined by these things.

And what you say isn't quite right. Just because blacks are disproportionately responsible for violent crimes, doesn't mean that you should treat a black man following you any differently from a white man. Perhaps neither group commits many violent crimes at all. Perhaps both groups are risky enough to be careful of. In this case, I think the latter option applies.

Indeed, I'm not against all racial judgements, just some (perhaps most) of them.

Reaching inside the purse to ready the revolver is a rational response

Let's not go into that one haha.

Social groups such as race or ethnic-tribal belonging-- Jewishness for example-- when you know the group, it tells you something probably about the individual, in certain contexts.

Not really. It gives you a way to guess about the individual. The guess (prejudgement) may or may not be accurate enough to bother with.

THe information is useful. We should want to know it, and we should use the information whenever its useful to us. Just like marketers who spend billions of dollars a year studying group demographics including age, sex, religion, neighborhood, geographic, class, income, edcuational level, blah blah blah, a thousand group belongings, do this and spend tons of money on it because it is useful.

Sure. I've not argued against this.

And to be honest, it's a bit laughable that you'd compare the goings on on this website to marketing schemes.

YET: the purpose of the thread topic as I see it, is not to justify the rational use of social groupings, such as race, but to point out that just because someone agrees with us that race may be used for rational and constructive purposes, and just beause that person is our own race, doesnt mean that person is a good person with ethics we would approve of or desire to associate ourselves with.

And just because a person is not of your own race, doesn't mean that person is a bad person with ethics you should disaprove of. And so on.

There is nothing contradictory between observing group tendencies, and being able to take this or that individual as an exception to the group tendency, in some important way.

Larry, now you can go back to your mikvah, or doing your metzizah b'peh, or making matzohs or whatever it is that all do this time of year.

Cutting it fine with these two bits, aren't you?

Edit: Also, it seems you know a lot more about Jewish culture than I do. Heh.