ijahdan said:
Emptiness, Ill try to address some of your points briefly, as we're both hijacking this thread with a debate that should probably be in the politics section.
Firstly, I'm not part of the PC brigade, nor afraid to critisize people over their lifestyles, attitudes or beliefs, but as I said previously, there is a big difference between judging an individual and judging the entire class, race, or sex they belong to.
You talk about stereotypes being useful, helping us make quick judgements regarding the danger posed by certain people. I agree that one must make an initial assessment of someone, ie that they appear 'shifty', looking to pick a fight etc. But this is done individually with each person we encounter, based on our previous experiences with people. Judging people based on cultural stereotypes is like saying 'all gypsies are thieves' or 'all hippies are junkies', and avoiding interaction with these groups for fear of ones safety. Many people reading this forum would conclude that we are a bunch of deluded druggies.
Moving on to virtues, I agree that being virtuous is something to aspire to, but as with stereotyping, your definition of virtue is slightly different to mine. You give an example of an acceptable level of virtue being 'what the law dictates', yet you and I regularily break laws that dont fit our lifestyle. Maybe someone struggling to feed their kids wouldnt consider selling weed or even stealing food from a supermarket to be morally wrong.
I also disagree that as you say 'it is well accepted that other classes are more civilised...' I have lived and worked with people from all walks of life over many years and have had my own predgudices overturned time and time again. I know many people from the middle and upper clases, who, despite having a veneer of civilisation and respectability, are decidedly unvituous in all meanings of the word. I also know many highly intelligent, sensitive people from deprived backgrounds, with little formal education, and prone to violence and drug abuse.
Oh and I would say that some corporate arseholes are more of a problem than your aussie trailer park characters, having a lot more money, power and influence, and a lot less chance of being brought to justice for their white collar crimes.
If I could just chime in briefly,
He specifically addressed that stereotyping doesn't give reason to make judgements like "all gypsies are thieves' or 'all hippies are junkies'. In fact he quite blatantly said that that wasn't the case at all. I side with him here because of that. His point was simply that: more often than not certain groups or kinds of people exhibit certain behaviors and while it isn't acceptable to say that
all people in that cultural domain exhibit those behaviors, it nevertheless is intrinsically reliable to claim those people are exhibiting them
a lot of the time. Which is exactly what true stereotyping is and which what makes stereotyping useful. It only gets a bad name when people start appropriating absolute truth on to a group or class of people. At the same time, promoting absolutes of anything is generally not a smart thing to do (only the sith deals in absolutes)

To state this more simply, if you were to meet a person and they are part of a group of people that 80% of the time act in a certain sour way, then you have to be pretty naive to think that your judgements aren't going to be influenced by that probability. Perhaps your point here is that we shouldn't let our judgements be prone to very likely probabilities of the group the individual belongs to for the sake of promoting every individual a chance at proving themselves an exception to the stereotype, in which case, I would agree with you. However it is one thing to do that, it is another to outright claim that the probabilities are false, don't reflect reality in anyway and are not dependable. That would be evidently bad reasoning.
On another note, Emptiness only gave one example of something that would constitute virtue, he also gave many other examples (which you admit). I agree with you though that virtues are relative to the individual but it is super clear to me that he was pointing out how there are common virtues shared by mankind that are good for itself (like not to steal or harm others) and it is completely intuitive to think from that, that on all occasions, there are going to be times where virtues trump other virtues and sometimes that can mean breaking the law. However, common sense and principles like the golden rule largely dictate interactions of those kinds. There are laws that are bad and laws that are good. Some laws need to be revised because they only exist as a result of some virtue-less influences from 1) a by-gone era that didn't have good reason on their side and 2) a society that isn't currently listening to the science behind certain drugs. My point here is that you are tyring to create counter-examples that really dont exist to what Emptiness is trying to say, purely because he is coming from a place of relativism already.
Again, your last point of knowing people who are an exception to the rule is something he pointed out is not a point substantial enough to prove the invalidity of stereotyping within society classes. I mean, class attributes are largely consistent enough that the psychological sciences study them all the time and find very reliable correlations (especially on matters of IQ). Sure, there are going to be people who don't fit the stereotype, as you have figured out first hand. In fact, when I personally meet one of these people I am always so much more intrigued by them because of the sheer improbability of it. Nevertheless, I am in agreement with Emptiness here as it is pretty apparent to see the middleclass are the most dominant placeholders for civilized living, at least with respect for one another. They pay their taxes, live in boxes, put the bins out once a week, say hi to their neighbours occasionaly and go to work first thing monday. They aren't (for the most part) scheming how to rip someone off because for one reason or another a good education system has taught them enough about morality to not do so. What I would be concerned about though, is if you found that a large percentage of middle class people were indeed 'decidedly unvituous in all meanings of the word'. Then I would have to re-consider my stereotypes of the middle-class! :lol:
My only point of contention to you Emptiness is that you didn't mention the parts of the lower social classes that are of a different cultural background (such as immigrants) who usually (from what I have seen) have a strong work ethic (coming from poorer parts of the world) and are a big portion of the lower social classes (measured by income). However, I anticipate your response would be that your comment wern't intended to be inclusive of them. Which I suppose is something you could argue ijahdan in that there are sub-groups within the classes, which may be where some stereotypes of this kind fall short in to improbability.
edit: sorry emptiness if you are a girl, i just assumed ur gender
