Fun talk:Mississippi

Ironic, coming from a Welshman. he he he You might want to remove some of this which could be considered racist. Bohdan 21:33, 27 August 2007 (CDT)
 * Hmm, Wales: the birthplace of the industrial revolution. Mississippi: its deathbed.  Anyway, what might be considered racist?  Mississippians aren't a race (yet), right?  Also, all my States articles are unrefutable, documented truth-filled eclairs! Ooh, I have to go edit Oklahoma again! human be in 21:59, 27 August 2007 (CDT)
 * Melungians are a "race" to the bottom of the gene pool!St. CЯacke ® 22:02, 27 August 2007 (CDT)
 * The race accusations could be this: You criticize them for bringing down education and civilization. It is a known fact that they have one of (if not the) highest number of African Americans of all the 50 states.  Your comments could be interpreted by some as a corralation of those two. Wales, the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution? Nice try, it was England. Bohdan 22:06, 27 August 2007 (CDT)
 * Ah, ok. I see where you are coming from. I would counter that by saying that the reason MI is run so badly is a racist attitude on the part of whites running the show most of the time, not the direct fault of the African Americans (ex-slaves, of course).  Sure, England was also the birthplace of the IR, but you should read up on how important South Wales and its coal and iron ore were.  It's pretty again now, but a couple-three hundred years ago it was an industrial wasteland/hive of production, kind of like China today. human be in 22:18, 27 August 2007 (CDT)
 * China is pretty? Bohdan 22:19, 27 August 2007 (CDT)
 * While I'm sure China still offers much natural beauty (yes, it's a very beautiful place), right now they are doing the same thing everywhere else did when revolving industrially (!?) - covering everything in a thick layer of toxic grime. The Welsh grime was gone by the time I got borned.  Ever see Yellow Submarine?  Some of the scenes show a bit of what Liverpool was like.  Covered in soot.  Remember the peppered moths (famous evilutionist lie?) that had to adapt by exploiting their darker pigment because the trees were all filthy? human be in 22:32, 27 August 2007 (CDT)

Some mention somewhere needed about the eponymous food related item (M Mud Pie).&mdash; Unsigned, by: 82.198.250.6 / talk / contribs July 14 2010

Average IQ
Apparently, it has the lowest of all the states, with an average of 93.8. In a funny twist, the lowest "non-state" would be D.C., with 91.2. The nat'l average is approximately 98. source: http://anepigone.blogspot.com/2010/05/state-iq-estimates-2009.html --Toasterstrudel64 (talk) 00:25, 24 April 2012 (UTC)

Nina Simone's song
Nina Simone - Mississippi Goddam  Talk to Civic Cat   20:08, 28 July 2015 (UTC)

Note about poverty in MS
While Mississippi is generally considered a poorer U.S. state, an analysis on a county-by-county basis would be more accurate, seeing as leftists often try use the state as a whole to correlate Republicans/conservatives with poverty. Looking at the relationship between political leaning and median income in the 2018 midterms, the poorer areas of the state tend to be Democrat-favoring. UShistoryanalyzer (talk) 04:31, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I don't think it's a huge surprise that income is correlated with where you lean in politics. This is also correlated with other factors for voting in politics; for instance minorities are disproportionately affected by poverty and historical mistreatment of them, and minorities are more likely to vote Democratic. 04:37, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * The current persistent poverty among minorities, especially blacks who make up a large part of Mississippi's population, has less to do with historical treatment and much more to do with the degradation of family units caused by Lyndon Johnson's welfare programs. The Great Society skyrocketed the number of children to be raised by only one parent, and it hit poor blacks hard. UShistoryanalyzer (talk) 04:49, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * What the fuck was the moronic drivel I just read? 05:01, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Curious to see the stats showing how rich black people were before the Johnson administration-Hastur! (talk) 05:04, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * It's the standard rightwing talking point in terms of race relations. Black people have a problem?  It's because of the welfare system.  05:12, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Yeesh GC, you don't need to take facts the wrong way like this. And to respond to Hastur, poverty and unemployment for blacks were consistently dropping prior to the Great Society. Then it tended to flat-line. It wasn't that blacks were necessarily rich overall prior to Johnson, it's that his policies significantly halted economic progress. UShistoryanalyzer (talk) 05:22, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Except those aren't the facts you disengenious cuntlicker. I demand peer reviewed papers for your extraordinary claims. Fail to to provide them and you can fuck right off to whatever shithole you came from. 05:27, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Perhaps we now need a new internet law that states that anyone in a discussion who responds with a profane, vulgar slew of nonsense with no factual substance related to the discussion automatically loses. Anyways, for starters, this is a good read on the general impact of the Great Society. UShistoryanalyzer (talk) 05:47, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Is that the Heritage Foundation? Mama mia. 05:55, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * The statistics they cite in that page is federal government data. UShistoryanalyzer (talk) 06:03, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Yeah, and nobody has ever misused data to draw incorrect or misleading conclusions before... 07:24, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Firstly, tone arguments are shit. Secondly, you're the one making the claim, you have to provide the evidence. Thirdly, neither the government data nor the Heritage Foundation are peer reviewed papers. You know, that thing I demanded you produce because your claims conflict with all known evidence. Oh, and for the record, I ran out of words before I ran out of citations, because it turns out that when you read the fucking relevant scientific literature instead of political think tanks you have fucking mountains of fucking evidence. But again, you must demonstrate peer reviewed evidence for your claims, not the other way around dipshit. 14:31, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Are you feeling alright, GC? After all, most sober people wouldn't be irrational enough to simply dismiss federal government data. UShistoryanalyzer (talk) 17:42, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

Appeal to authority. -- Goatspeed. 18:12, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * To the dipshit, I'm going to take your refusal to cite peer reviewed papers on this subject as you admitting that you're wrong. 18:17, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * We've already explained that data can be misinterpreted, and that it almost certainly will be if you cite the freakin' Heritage Foundation, which exists to deliberately misinterpret data to push a conservative agenda. 19:49, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Government data without appropriate contextualization and accommodation for external factors, can be kinda meaningless; you can basically find any data you want and you need to at least acknowledge possible confounding factors. For instance, Heritage going into food and how poor people aren't so bad with their "83 percent of poor families reported that they had enough food to eat"; yes poverty line is falling, but isn't it misleading to imply poor people lead comfortable food availability without mentioning, say, food insecurity, which low poverty rates can cloak? Additionally, do these numbers take into account government assistance programs that do provide food and so, these high numbers can indicate that these welfare nets keep a good amount of poor people from being hungry? Do you not understand correlation =/= causation because the Heritage Foundation awfully looks like this? 22:22, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * More importantly, the amount of food isn't the same as the quality of food. While "enough" quality is subjective, such as that Q-Shaman baby bitching about prisons not being Organic, EBT/food stamps won't exactly support eating even the cheaper salads all that often.  Grains and oil-seeds are heavily subsidized, and so are meats and dairy one way or another, so what you end up having as food is fried starch or fried porkchops.  Is it really any wonder that we have such high obesity rates when, even in season, apples or peaches cost more per pound than chicken bottoms or some other lower quality meats?  22:51, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Indeed. Add those costs on top of high rent (Black people are more likely to find themselves renting, and also more likely to find themselves stuck in a rent cycle, unable to save up enough to escape) low quality employment, poorer quality education (Black people are more likely to go to public schools in poorer areas, which are in turn more likely to be underfunded) High rates of incarceration or arrest (which can in turn affect employment, even if it's merely a series of petty offenses) and it's unsurprising that the majority of black people in the US are poor. Hell, it's a wonder they aren't all homeless given the adverse socioeconomic conditions they face. And it should be noted that people need more than the bare necessities to survive. Maslow's hierarchy of needs comes to mind quite readily in such discussions.  23:00, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * And to continue challenging that Heritage Foundation article, with Maslow's hierarchy of needs in mind, the Heritage article also cites percentage of poor people having possession of game systems, microwaves, plasma TVs, DVD players, vehicles, Internet access to paint a misleading picture that these people do not need poverty assistance. However, again, does this account for the contention that welfare nets do transfer costs somewhat away from food and other necessities (as well as costs of luxuries also going down over time naturally yet income inequality is still rising and people are feeling the big pressure of increasing rent, healthcare, stagnating wages, etc.) so they can also fulfill their lives with entertainment and a degree of comfortable convenience? 00:06, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

Trying to hide a request for you to back up your claims with peer reviewed papers? And after you spent so long concern trolling too... I guess that's what happens when you prioritize polemics over solid evidence... 19:45, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * It's not my fault that you don't like government data which contradicts your narratives so much so that you think they are completely meaningless. Nor is it my fault that you have so much confirmation bias, as you have quite demonstrated clearly in my time here so far. UShistoryanalyzer (talk) 22:56, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Data by itself is meaningless; unless the argument or inquiry is specifically regarding statistical values (i.e. are Black people arrested at higher rates than white people), they do not hold all that value on their own. It is how statistics are interpreted and used that determines their importance and positions. And it goes without saying that statistics can be interpreted incorrectly. Furthermore, statistics may be biased themselves, collected incorrectly, or used in a manner not befitting their scope. Government data is government data, no more or less, not the holy grail of arguments. IveBeenFrank (talk) 23:00, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Furthermore, your line about confirmation bias is weak; one could argue that your beliefs are built upon confirmation bias, coming from explicitly political sources. Sources cited in the above thread come from a variety of academic sources published in a variety of academic journals. IveBeenFrank (talk) 23:03, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Perhaps you guys should read the article I linked to and understand the concepts rather than exhibit obvious cognitive dissonance. But no, it appears that some of the admins of this site choose to behave less rationally and maturely than even teenagers do nowadays. And regarding the fact that my source is a page from the Heritage Foundation, most of their citations seem highly credible. UShistoryanalyzer (talk) 23:10, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Perhaps if you stopped faffing about and linked to actual peer reviewed papers, you know, science, we might be more inclined to consider your case. Of course, if you keep dodging that request, one can only infer that you are both full of crap and well aware of such. 23:12, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * (EC)Please stop throwing around terms you've heard before; they don't fit. But once again, they apply to you: you have yet to address the 5 academic sources with a variety of citations within them in this conversation. And as for the Heritage Foundation, I wonder if you understood what I said:interpreting statistics forms the brunt of such historical analysis - it is possible for the foundation to have interpreted and used these statistics incorrectly, rendering their citations moot. IveBeenFrank (talk) 23:14, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * "pot calling the kettle black" (idiom)
 * definition: when User:GrammarCommie accuses another user of being "full of crap" after denying reality in an earlier discussion


 * GC, don't you think you should stop embarrassing yourself as a petulant child and just let the adults in the room talk while you sober up? UShistoryanalyzer (talk) 23:19, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * You know, the fun thing about actually knowing my subject is that I know there are papers that could be used to support your case, it's just that you refuse to cite them... "That which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed with same." As the late Christopher Hitchens once wrote.  23:24, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * You're now merely further proving my point about your "pot calling the kettle black". UShistoryanalyzer (talk) 23:28, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * You know I linked citations supporting my case this morning right? You then began backpedaling to try to ignore them. I can link the edit in question if you want, but that doesn't really change the fact that you are indeed full of crap and driven entirely by ideological polemics, not evidence. 23:33, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

Now gentlemen, while I'm sure this has all been quite fun, can we please have a discussion on the variety of sources cited that run counter to the claim presented? As of the present, one side seems to be accusing the other of being out of reality and evading discussion, while simultaneously refusing to even acknowledge the existence of legitimate alternate arguments. IveBeenFrank (talk) 23:34, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * My citations supporting the article minus one I removed for being a mislink. Easiest thing in the world to do. 23:38, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * There's also my and IveBeenFrank's additional arguments. It's not full of sources like GC's but they're worth addressing anyhow. I moved past how your source is questionable (as simply dismissing a source can be accused genetic fallacy, but check the Bayesian subsection too) and instead looked at the problem of one aspect of it, the food availability being an accurate description of poverty. I talked about confounding factors. Have your sources accounted for it? If not, could you account for confounding factors? Could you account for contradictory evidence? Good research covers these important questions to the best of its ability. 00:00, 9 February 2021 (UTC)
 * A major problem with this argument: why isn't this "observation" linking social safety nets to single parenthood replicated throughout the world? Most developed nations have far less children living in single parent households. Most European nations have better social safety nets than America, too. According to one source, "socialist" Norway has about half the rate of single parent families.
 * (In most cases, of course, the rates in other countries are probably higher than they were in 1960 -- hard to get exact numbers -- but the "first glance" of the chart makes it seem there's a heavier correlation to single parent homes and national wealth...)
 * If you look for an opposing reason for black families in particular having a deteriorated family structure these days, and want an opinion that is rather different from the Heritage Foundation, you might come across the Cato Institute's paper on how the War On Some Drugs severely impacted the black family. Unlike social safety nets, the high use of prison (particularly for non-violent drug offenses) *is* one of the features of America that is unique in the Western European world.
 * Now, there is obviously more reasons to the rise than just incarceration policy -- other sources documenting single parent rise show an increase well before then, indicating other social changes afoot compared to when incarceration started severely accelerating upward (mid 1970s). It's probably a fairly complex subject if you dig into all of the factors, with not all of the factors necessarily being bad. Still, "social safety net=more single parent households!" certainly seems like bullshit when zooming out beyond the US borders.
 * Overall, the Southern United States has very high poverty rates compared to the rest of the nation. The reason here probably also is complex. However I will note that there are some books out there, such as this one, that reportedly explore the link between racial resentment (seen in this post!) and poor social safety nets, which certainly is at least part of the explanation of the pattern. PanGalacticGargleBlaster (talk) 01:07, 9 February 2021 (UTC)
 * The most amazing thing about all of that was that the Cato Institute, heavily biased towards libertarian policies as they are, admits the basic facts in regards to incarceration and poverty. That's pretty amazing. 01:15, 9 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Well, they are Libertarians. Any consistent interpretation of Libertarianism would probably not like the war on drugs...-Flandres (talk) 01:22, 9 February 2021 (UTC)
 * They still deny that systemic racism is a thing, which isn't unexpected but still... 01:33, 9 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Probably more scholarly links (such as this paper by the American Academy of Political and Social Science or this one by Families In Society) exploring the impact of incarceration on the Black family would have been a much better source (free of unnecessary NAACP bashing, to start). But alas, the better links are paywalled. Sigh. PanGalacticGargleBlaster (talk) 02:25, 9 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I'll take all of them. Nominally the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation are on the same page. To see them clash is very interesting indeed. Also, #FreeTheData. 02:33, 9 February 2021 (UTC)