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sc94597 on 10 October 2015
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AlfredoTurkey said:
sc94597 said:

I think the bolded is insulting. People who come from poor families in the U.S who later are successful aren't solely successful because of their genetics. It is also how they learned to succeed from their environment. 

 


Bullshit. Going from rags to riches is like winning the lotto... of DNA. The reason poor people stay poor has nothing to do with environment. They don't do drugs because they learned to do them. They don't drink all day, because they learned to drink all day. They do it because their parents were addicts, and their parents etc. People are poor because they flat out don't have what it takes mentally to go out there and succeed. You can give these people all the tools in the world, and almost all of them will just fuck it up and end up RIGHT back where they started.

 

Steve Job's and people of his ilk are born, not made. In the US, the problem is that we actually have this delusion that "all men are created equal". They're not. And the sooner we accept this, the sooner we can get to the business of taking care of those who can't take care of themselves and the sooner we can stop being an international disgrace. 

That makes no sense. It is not the environment, but it is the environment is essentially what you are saying. That was precisely my point. Their parents do drugs, and that is the environment set up for them, that is what they know. However, the majority of poor people aren't drug addicts, so your point is moot. Like I said, I had a friend in my grade who lived in the same apartment building, who would get C's and D's in high school. He was accepted to college conditionally, he had to get A's and B's over a summer before his freshman year. He got serious, put in the work, and succeeded. He will be graduating this year. My babysitter from when I was a child lost all of her children because she tampered with hard drugs when she was young, and then after she had her kids, she went to jail for continual marijuana possession. The adoptive parents of her daughters still give her information about them, and they are all doing very well. It is environment primarily and genetics secondarily..

We aren't all equally capable biologically, I agree. But the variation in our biology is small enough for all people to be able to determine their status in life with a well though out plan, assuming there are not too many obstacles socio-economically. The economic portion is covered in the U.S, if not overly so, but wrongly it is the belief of many that it is not.  The social part has ways to go, but what do you expect from a diverse country vs. homogenous ones?