So Trump May Get Enough Votes to be President of the US...
schopenhauer1 2016-11-09
So there's the big elephant in the forum...
Does anyone have thoughts on what this might mean?
Does anyone have thoughts on what this might mean?
Comments (516)
I see that now.
I guess that trumped any possible or perceived downsides to the candidate.
EDIT: It's also the ridiculous smugness of the Democratic party leadership that led them to even have Clinton as the candidate. It wasn't as if it wasn't clear from the beginning that Clinton was a controversial figure for many Democrats and non-Democrats alike. In hindsight, Michelle Obama should've run for president.
What I said.
Although I hope in all this, to be wrong. If Trump turns out OK, and I'm wrong, it would be a much better outcome.
I cannot believe the madman actually did it haha. What an incredible achievement! With almost the entire world against him - Clinton, the democrats, Obama, the entire mainstream media, the polling companies, most world leaders, United Nations, most celebrities, the list goes on and on - he still managed through the will of the American people a decisive victory! Incredible! The American people have spoken loud and clear! Senate! Congress! White House wooooooo it's a clean sweep!
MAGA!!! WOOOOOOO I AM ACTUALLY SO HAPPY RIGHT NOW
Haha cheer up you doomsdaying democrats above! Were you actually even *excited* for a Clinton victory? You're probably only disappointed that trump won, not that Hillary isn't Madame POTUS!
Also how ungracious was it for Hillary to not even give a concession speech?! If trump lost and did the same the entire freaking world would be outraged. She just had podesta send everyone home with a 'it's not over till it's over speech' and then right after called trump and conceded! Weak!
MAGA! What a historic day!
Maybe Trump can actually start mending the problem! A Hillary win would have just been another 4 (or God forbid, 8!) years of the same divided and polarised nation were living in right now. Literally nothing would have changed. For example, we have had a black president for 8 years and yet race relations are worse now than they were before Obama took office. Electing a more establishment (and corrupt) version of Obama wouldn't have made this any better.
You might say that things will be even worse and more divided under Trump, but we'll just have to wait and see! Trump made it this far against all odds, so what's to stop him going even further and actually making a greater country? I'm optimistic and you should be too!
MAGA!
For the record, I predicted this, all the way down to the Pennsylvania win (rust belt state that lost manufacturing jobs), and I won a free lunch from it.
I'd also say the media has been atrocious, acting as a PR machine for Clinton, not taking a candidate seriously, and abandoning its duty to just report the news. In truth, that rallied Trump supporters, a defiant group to begin with. The worst thing you can do is tell those folks what they have to do.
This really is a devastating blow to the Obama legacy, where his every accomplishment will be dismantled.
Crazy how Trump was right all along about the poll numbers not being right and he's campaigning with a silent majority. Although I'm not sure even he really believed it!
From what I've read there are plenty of Republicans who disagree with Trump. The fact that he's a Republican president doesn't entail that a Republican-controlled Congress will inevitably support him (or vice versa).
Guess he was wrong about the election being rigged, though. I wonder how many of his other accusations of corruption are also wrong?
What a bullshit reply to my observation that it's sad somebody can be this happy about the schism existing in the USA. Yes, it's a winner-takes-all system and no, I'm not even surprised. We already had Bush jr. for 8 years which was a farce as well. In the meantime popular votes for both candidates are almost equal. But never mind what a lot of other people think because the Republicans won. Just because Republicans won the election doesn't make your fellow Democratic countrymen irrelevant, nor their wishes and hopes for what the US government should be.
So yeah, I'm saddened by people celebrating that they're going to destroy things a lot of other people worked hard to achieve.
It took a multi billionaire to buck the establishment. I don't think his victory proves the system is open to outsiders.
Fat chance. Trump won, not backing the winner will be political suicide.
Perhaps I wasn't clear. Hanover claimed that Trump wouldn't be gridlocked by a Republican-controlled Congress, where Obama was. My point is that even though Trump is a Republican it doesn't then follow that the same can't happen to him.
All Presidents were the winners, but they still face opposition from the legislature.
Same can be said about Iran, and yet we still criticise their decisions.
Quoting Benkei
The country has been a divided, polarized mess before Trump got elected. You can think Obama for that.
Americans have show that they are united against govt. corruption - the lying, the cheating, the double standard in the judicial system for elites vs. the rest of us, and the silencing of millions of voters with Clinton being handed the nomination by the elitists in the Democratic party. It's good day.
I voted for Trump. I actually consider myself a "socialist libertarian" at this point (in lieu of something better to call myself . . . my views are a mixture of socialism and libertarianism, but my views are also extremely idiosyncratic), but I voted for Trump partially because there was no way I wanted Hillary to win. I've never liked Hillary, I didn't like Bill when he was president, and I'd rather have someone in office who isn't a career politician.
If I had been voting for the person whose views I most agree with, I would have voted for Jill Stein--I voted for her in 2012. Not that I agree with her on everything, but she was the best choice in my opinion. Of course, we're still nowhere near any party other than Republican and Democrat being a viable option for achieving the presidency, so a vote for Jill Stein from me this time around would have simply made it easier for Hillary to win.
I used to be pretty strictly capital-L Libertarian, a la the U.S. Libertarian party, and to a point where I was involved with the Libertarian party on local and national levels at one point in the past, but I no longer agree with them on economic issues.
I think that is entirely possible. I come from one of those working class families with many members who supported Trump, and can say with confidence that not all Trump supporters were motivated by bigotry and hate. That was a caricature disseminated by popular media, the motivation perhaps being to shame decent folk away from any association with Trump. I don't think that grotesque aspect of his candidacy was essential to all or even most of his voters. What was essential was the fact that a large segment of US citizens have been hit hard over the past 40 or so years in material and psychological terms, with loss of jobs, the breakup of families, increased drug use, the loss of status within the community and nation, etc. Those social, political and economic conditions were exploited by Trump, but not created by him. Dems bailed out on this group of what should have been their natural allies many years ago, and their cynical manipulation by the Republican establishment (based upon cultural rather than economic considerations) is now thankfully over.
I doubt Trump will truly serve the interests of this group he's made many promises to, but as mentioned they are now class conscious and anti-establishment. It's going to be a good opportunity to really battle over what it means to be an American now, as that question is far from settled. Hopefully an inclusive and forward-thinking answer to this question will be put forward, with a fixation on identity politics and other divisive things (although noble in intention) ultimately giving way to more transcendent and elevated sense of communal and environmental responsibility. This may take the next 20-30 years if not longer (again, Trump will not be able to provide the long-term answer IMO), but that corrupt status quo of unchecked capitalism with its dominance by moneyed interests is thankfully over, at least for the time being. Now the battle for the soul of America begins and us working-class stiffs will have a voice in that conversation.
Just trying to find the silver lining in this result. It requires separating Trump the fraud from the real conditions of hopelessness he tapped into and appropriated to his advantage. He's a consequence rather than cause of our predicament, and looking at it like this offers a bit of solace and hope. He's unwittingly doing a temporary service for a movement much larger and potentially greater than himself. That vague narrative is at least the illusion I'd like to maintain right now. Giving form to that amorphous group of disaffected will definitely take plenty of work, but it's a fresh start.
Of course you know better how I feel. How stupid can your comments get? >:O
And it's not the preservation of legacy I'm concerned with but tearing down something in its entirety that a slight majority of the people seem to support (or a slight minority, depending on how the popular vote will play out). But never mind them, because they lost, right? Here's the picture though, if voters would be evenly distributed according to their statistical occurence then your left door and right door neighbours would be Democrats.
Finally, not every vote for Trump was a vote for ending Obamacare as not every vote for Clinton was a vote for continuing Obamacare. The opinions of the candidates (or party line for that matter) do not reflect the myriad of interests of citizens that exist in the US and this is why representative democracies fail and will ultimately disintegrate. The USA is a very good example of that with its latest election. I'm looking forward to another 4 years of schadenfreude.
Ah yes, because Donald Trump has consistently resisted any temptation to protect his wealth by less than scrupulous means like false advertising, tax avoidance, and outsourcing and is in constant search of an ethical economic system! In no way is he going to use this Presidency to line his pockets and reward his rich friends!
This may be a bad theological analogy (my understanding of these matters is minimal), but it's almost like a corrupt preacher who lives a secret life of debauchery and possibly even unbelief somehow inspiring others with the message of the gospel. His motivation may have been to get their money through tithing, or to gain power and influence within that particular community, but the end result may have also been to change lives amongst the flock and make them somehow aware of their sin in a way they may not have understood before. I see no reason why the insincerity of the one (preacher) should necessarily lead to the insincerity of the other (church members or parishioners or whatever they're called). Like I said, that may not be a great analogy but I do think it makes the point to a certain degree. Trump appealed to the working class in a cynical and manipulative fashion, I think, but that doesn't mean his message didn't resonate amongst this large bloc of voters.
Sounds like you're sad because you don't believe in democracy!
I doubt you'd be crying over the electoral system right now if Hillary was POTUS!
One of the smartest things Trump did was to focus on Americans who have lost their jobs, and subsequently their homes, etc., because of companies sourcing work out to other countries. That's a tremendous amount of people. Whether Trump can actually do something about this is another matter, but the fact that he said he wants to do something about it was important. And that's why he won states like Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, etc.--those states have been hit hard by factories etc. closing down.
Yes, as I said in another thread, it doesn't matter which monkey pushes the button and when Baden was trying to call it I again I stated I don't care who'd win. Maybe if you'd have a bit more knowledge about democratic systems (historic and contemporary) you wouldn't be so hung up on the shitty system you have.
I considered her a marginally better option than Trump but effectively it's the same difference.
Actually yes. He wildly overspent on this campaign. He has failing businesses on his hands and he's going to want a slew of lawsuits to go away so can expect to have to dig deep to settle them on the quiet. I really can't see him wanting to come out of the Presidency as 'poor' as he'll be going into it.
But even if he didn't need it, when has that ever stopped rich men desiring to get richer? Isn't it that apparently needless and reckless adding of billions to personal fortunes that has gotten us, by which I mean pretty much the entire Western world not just USA, into this mess in the first place? I just don't see, for all the rhetoric, this leopard changing his spots.
I think that that is the worst decision that someone in your circumstances - someone who has socialist views, and views with much in common with those of Jill Stein - could have made. And I think that it is nothing short of a travesty that relatively large numbers of people in similar circumstances voted that way - including, and especially, Bernie supporters.
I follow Jill Stein on Twitter, so I was aware of her focus on attacking Hillary Clinton. But, although that might have been advantageous for her and her party, I think that, outside of that context, it was a mistake once Hillary became the Democratic candidate, given that Hillary was the better, and Trump was the worse, of the only two candidates with a realistic chance of winning.
It is completely against socialist interests 1) not to have voted for Hillary Clinton, in light of her clear socialist policy proposals and priorities, such as those relating to taxation and economic inequality, which no other candidate would have had a hope in hell of enacting; and 2) to have voted for Trump, in light of his policy proposals and priorities, again, such as those relating to taxation and economic inequality, the latter of which would be exacerbated, and the former of which would be relaxed in places where it should be maintained, if not increased.
Its like I keep saying, in over ten years of asking if anyone knows the simple distinction between a lynch mob and democracy I have yet to hear the correct answer. You simply can't have a democracy when nobody knows the meaning of the damned word and spends all their time arguing over the definition of stupid and who is the better example. What you have instead is Mob Rule. Its empire baby, and this train ain't stopping until she derails.
The money is doing all the driving because the lights are on, but nobody is home. Ranting and raving and complaining or even rioting won't make any significant difference because nobody is listening. At best such things will only temporarily address the worst symptoms of the problem. Your constitutional rights have been suspended indefinitely and almost every police department in the country has been buying surplus military equipment, while congress has already given the military the legal right to round up citizens like cattle and made all the necessary preparations to do so.
Sooner or later people might catch on, but I'm not holding my breath. The real worry is that the US could produce the next Adolf Hitler.
No it ain't. Don't kid yourself.
Trump has said he will significantly cut corporation tax, and, according to analysis, his plans would mean that the top 1% of earners would see their income increase by double-digits. This is not in the interests of the working class, it is in the interests of large corporations and the fattest of fat cats.
Trump looked scared during his speech. Maybe he was just tired from the whole election campaign. But I suspect he also was finally understanding the gravity of the situation.
As I said about my views, "in lieu of something better to call myself . . . my views are a mixture of socialism and libertarianism, but my views are also extremely idiosyncratic"
I can't stand Hillary. I didn't like Bill when he was president either. (And I didn't like Hillary when she was first lady either.) I don't dislike Trump. In fact, I like many things about him. I just do not agree with all of his views. But there is never a presidential candidate where I agree with all of their views, and I don't even usually agree with most of any candidate's views.
Also, another consideration is if something were to happen to the president. Tim Kaine comes across to me as completely sleazy/untrustworthy. I definitely do not agree with all of Mike Pence's views--he's very religious for one, but he comes across like a pleasant, even-keeled, intelligent guy who easily would have a presidential quality. There's no way in hell I'd want Kaine to be president.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/
http://journal-neo.org/2016/03/26/president-trump-us-war-machine-rolls-on/
https://thecolossus.co/2016/06/01/an-interview-with-noam-chomsky/
I stopped reading that one at "unconvicted sex criminal."
So, not only did you make the worst possible decision, you did so on shaky grounds. Is that supposed to be a defence?
If I can't stand waters that aren't infested with sharks, and I don't dislike sharks, but in fact like many things about them, should I go swimming in shark infested waters?
You know that "worst"/"best" etc. are subjective, right?
Quoting Sapientia
What does "can't stand" have to do with anything I said about Trump?
Ah, that old chestnut.
They are relative terms. And in this case, I'm talking about what is in the best/worst interests of you or of society, as opposed to mere preference or what you happen to like or dislike.
Quoting Terrapin Station
It doesn't. It has to do with what you said about Clinton. In the analogy, Clinton is the safe waters, Trump is the sharks, and voting for trump is swimming in shark infested waters.
It didn't stop being true at any point.
Quoting Sapientia
Yes, and subjective, and noncognitive. Statements containing those terms are never correct or incorrect, true or false. There is no coherent distinction to be had where those terms do not refer to preferences.
How about my second question?
How about you added that in after I had already begun to reply, so I didn't notice it? I have answered it in the edit to my reply.
If trump is the sharks, but I can't stand Clinton, then you'd be equivocating "sharks"
What? How so?
I applied the same form of argument as you did in a different context in order to show that it's a poor basis for reaching a decision, and I think that I have succeeded in doing so. You haven't answered my question because you know that it forces you to either accept a stupid conclusion or tacitly accept that that basis for reaching a decision is poor.
Ah--I misread you as saying "If I can't stand waters that ARE infested with sharks"--I didn't read it as "AREN'T" That's why it made no sense to me.
So yeah, if you like sharks, you can't stand waters that don't have them (which isn't what I said, but okay, we can go with that) and you want to go swimming with them, then sure, you should.
Okay.
Quoting Terrapin Station
>:O
So you bit the bullet and went with the stupid conclusion. At least you're consistent.
I believe that there are some pretty clearcut cases where prioritising preference over what's in one's best interests is more likely to lead to worse outcomes, and that worse outcomes should usually be avoided.
How are you attempting to separate preferences and best interests, outcome assessments, etc.? What's the distinction you attempt?
I don't know who they are. But I think you know what I'm getting at. The analogy doesn't have to be perfect.
Sure, so how are you attempting to separate preferences and best interests, outcome assessments, etc.? What's the distinction you attempt?
Right on the mark. Note the observation about 'changing democracy into dictatorship'.
Well, for starters, they each have distinct and inequivalent meanings.
Moreover, if it is possible for one's best interests to not always correspond to one's preferences, then they are separate. And if that specific knowledge can be obtained, then it can be used to differentiate between the one and the other.
The finer details aren't as important, since pointing to cases like the one in my analogy is sufficient to show that making decisions based on preference with disregard to what is in one's best interest can lead to detrimental consequences. The only way out of that one is to bite a bullet that most people wouldn't bite for good reason.
The question of what is in one's best interests, and the question of what is the best or worse outcome, are secondary questions, and open to debate. There is strong intuitive appeal in some cases, but perhaps the strongest arguments are based on using the person's own account of what is in their interests, and then comparing that with a decision which is counterproductive to those interests, as can be done in your case of voting for Trump.
That's the lesson to be learned from this. There are a lot of people who need to let sink in just how wrong they were. The media stations are all reporting that nobody saw it coming.' Yes, they did. You didn't see it coming. Because you are deeply, deeply deluded and incompetent.
Which I'm challenging analyzes to anything coherent.
Quoting Sapientia
Can you support how that would be possible? That would be a step in suggesting a coherent distinction.
I can raise a [i]reductio ad absurdum[/I] against the alternative. If it isn't, then examples like the one that I provided wouldn't make any sense. But they clearly do. There are numerous and clearcut cases of this. You yourself have no doubt found this out the hard way through experience, just like the rest of us - although I wouldn't be surprised if you deny this, like in our previous discussion, where you seemed to prioritise consistency at the expense of plausibility.
That's the polite way of saying we've merely traded one mob rule with more of a pretense of democracy for one that has fewer illusions. Its a rude awakening for many of the democrats and republicans alike, but at least its more honest. It is what the I-Ching describes as a possible "turning point". Hitler's Nazi Germany had its ugly side, but that is precisely what the German people needed to come to the realization of after the war, that they could not continue on with business as usual constantly going to war with their neighbors and supporting their traditional extreme authoritarian culture and bigotry.
I'm challening you to make sense of it not being (a) or (b).
Saying "it clearly makes sense" isn't any sort of philosophical support.
He's a demagogue, pure and simple.
The people who can't distinguish between media and reality are those who took anything CNN, Fox, or MSNBC said seriously for a second.
Well, given that Clinton seems to have won the popular vote I don't think it right to say that they're completely out of touch. They just underestimated Trump's support (or at least its geography).
But, you know, with only a 55.6% turn out, it's even more questionable.
Yeah, I'm pretty upset with the results, but I agree with this 100% (There were a few prescient voices among liberals, but they were drowned out by the consensus of their peers)
My original point was that swimming with sharks, as opposed to not swimming with sharks, for example, might not be in one's best interests. And that, if it isn't, then swimming with sharks would be a worse outcome than not swimming with sharks. And that swimming with sharks because one likes sharks wouldn't change that. And that swimming with sharks for that reason would therefore be a poor reason for deciding to swim with sharks.
Whether or not [i]not[/I] swimming with sharks being in one's best interests is (a) a subjective judgment of an individual, and (b) about their preferences, is irrelevant to my original point, and seems to have been a red herring from the start. What's your point? What if it is?
Quoting Terrapin Station
That it wouldn't make sense is a consequence of your position, which, when the evidence suggests otherwise, can indeed be used as part of an argument against your position.
Would you like me to elaborate on why it wouldn't make sense?
What I'd like is for you to give the specific characterization of the two terms that makes a distinction between them coherent.
Yeah, particularly people who came to the country legally and who worked hard to change their status to permanent resident and then citizen, who worked hard above the table to make money to pay for the things they own, etc., tend to resent immigrants whom they see as being given a free pass--having their status changed just because they snuck into the country, went into the underground economy, maybe received other government assistance, etc.
This isn't entirely true. Corporations don't like him. They didn't give much to his campaign (whereas loads of them donated to Hillary) and they hate his trade protectionism. Look at the markets today, too. They will rebound, but there was real uncertainty about his presidency coming into the day.
People are more likely to tell you what you want to hear if they think you're publically pressuring them, just to make you happy and go away.
Don't get me wrong, I'm pretty liberal myself, but it's hard not to see this dynamic at play.
Universities are heinous.
What is in a person's best interests need not be what that person likes or prefers. Hence, I can like sharks, and I might prefer swimming with sharks to watching them from afar, but, on the other hand, it might not be in my best interests to swim with sharks - for a number of possible reasons, and which may be related to other preferences, likes, or dislikes. But I don't see why that last part is presumably relevant, so what I'd like is for you explain that. [i]Quid pro quo[/I].
Well, it's relevant because that's all that I'm arguing and that you're supposedly arguing against--that "best interests" is a matter of preferences.
There is an important difference between these reactions.
Yes, good point. There's probably a reason for that. But I doubt they'll be complaining about the cuts to corporation tax.
No it isn't. Whether or not it's in a child's best interest to eat chocolate and drink sugary drinks every day is not simply a matter of the child's preferences. It's in their best interests that they don't, even if the child would prefer otherwise. The same with swimming in shark-infested waters. You might want to, but you shouldn't.
No, that doesn't argue against my original point, which I reiterated not long ago. So, why did you change the subject?
Best interests can be related to, or dependent on, preference. They can relate and overlap in some cases. But it certainly doesn't follow that they are one and the same, nor that basing a decision on preference rather than what is in one's best interests can't be a poor basis for reaching a decision.
What determines that in your view?
It wasn't changing the subject from my perspective. It was always what I was talking about.
Quoting Sapientia
And on that view, I'm asking you to specify a distinction.
http://www.smh.com.au/world/us-election/michael-moore-meet-the-man-who-got-this-election-right-20161109-gslwmd.html
Many of his stump speeches were improvised rants on whatever ideas were in his twitter feed. A very large percentage of his commentary was in exchanging insults and denigrating his opponents. So there's just nothing to show that he will now be able to turn around and act like a professional instead of a demagogue that manipulates public opinion.
(But the trouble with arguments like that is, they have big words, like 'manipulate' and 'demagogue'. 'Lock her up' is a much easier concept to understand.)
It wasn't changing the subject from your perspective, therefore it wasn't changing the subject? If that is what you are suggesting, that is a [I]non sequitur[/I].
Looking back, I see that you [i]did[/I] address [i]part[/I] of my comment when you responded with that question bringing up subjectivity, but you did not address the main point, which was that it is a poor basis for reaching that decision. And it's a poor basis for reaching that decision because, based on your own interests in the case of you voting for Trump, or based on my own interests if I am the person in the shark example, it will likely lead to consequences counterproductive to those interests.
It could be from your perspective (and obviously it was). It's always from someone's perspective.
What are my interests that voting for Trump will be counterproductive to in your view?
The thought, judgement, belief, etc., is. But that isn't as significant as you might think.
Quoting Terrapin Station
I already mentioned a few. Climate change is another one that might be applicable, given what you said about Jill Stein.
4 or 5 congressional cycles ago the Republican Party began a major effort to corral reasonably affluent (upper working class through upper class), suburban, more or less white voters and win control of state legislatures. This turned out to be very prudent. They were prepared in 2010 to control reapportionment based on the 2010 census (a process generally under the supervision of legislatures). In succeeding elections they had more friendly districts and were able to more efficiently elect Republicans to governorships, the senate, and house -- in state and federal elections.
Liberals, Democrats, etc. are going to have to work on this project too. They are also going to have to take more strenuous positions in the interests of the white working class, millennials--white or colored--African Americans, Latin Americans, et al. This isn't easy to do, because those interests are often at odds with the industrialist and ruling class interests. But Bernie Sanders showed that there is a large block ready to go that route.
Liberals and Democrats, etc. are, in a word, going to have to get "smarter" about winning. Running Hillary Clinton, who had a large following of people who already hated her at the beginning of her campaign--even if running a woman as candidate for president was a bold step--was not a good idea.
I'm not saying anything about significance quantification. It's just that whether something is still the same subject or not is always a matter of individual interpretation.
Quoting Sapientia
Upon what are you basing what's in my interests re climate change and climate change policy? Or are you just assuming that I'd have a particular view on that because I voted for Jill Stein and you're assuming I'd agree with her on that issue? Again, my views have just in much in common with Libertarianism, although my views aren't the same as either any other socialists, any other libertarians, or any other Green party members, etc. I've never met anyone else who has the same political views as I do, or in fact, anyone who feels that my political views are a good idea once I explain them in more detail, haha. That's why I call myself a "socialist libertarian" only in lieu of something better to call myself. No matter what I call myself, I'd have to just explain what my views are in detail.
This is so untrue on so many levels. I'm surprisd you would think that a Republican sweep would solve it if not exacerbate it.
Empirically demonstrable effects on health, with "best interests" being defined in part as good health.
Yes.
And people reading the polls (like me) need to be more careful. For instance, many of the polls I read have a "margin of error" of say, 3%. That means that there is a 6% range that can not be known. If the poll says Clinton is 3% ahead of Trump, it may be that they are actually tied. In a 3% MOE poll, a 2% lead may mean that the Clinton is actually behind Trump.
Early on, the distance between the candidates was very large and the MOE didn't matter very much. But as they came closer and closer, MOE mattered more and more.
The other thing people (like me) need to remember is that A POLL RESULT IS NOT A FACT. It may be that 2000 of 3000 people polled said they preferred Clinton. That doesn't mean they are definitely going to vote for Clinton, especially when the election is weeks or months off. It doesn't mean they are going to vote at all.
quoted Michael Moore saying last summer that "Donald Trump is going to win." Moore isn't the Oracle at Eleusis, but one does have to use "gut response" in prognostication. And one needs to watch out for crowd bias. Everyone I hang around with liked Clinton. If I suspected that somebody liked Trump I shied away from them. My siblings live in the small town America that grooved on Donald's affronts to good taste. We avoided the topic.
But people do the defining, right?
But that's irrelevant. The point is that when we say that such-and-such is in someone's best interests we're saying that such-and-such is going to help someone achieve good health (for example). Whether or not such-and-such is going to help someone achieve good health isn't simply a matter of preference.
You can't avoid getting fat from eating chocolate and drinking sugary drinks simply because you'd prefer not to.
First off, that's not people?
I'm going to address what we type sentence by sentence. If that's not addressing "the actual relevant point" in your view, then I suppose so. Addressing stuff sentence-by-sentence is how I do discussions like this (where there's a disputational tenor to the proceedings with a host of core disagreements).
Au contraire, BC, I think they've tried 'smart' and it hasn't worked. Trump won by trying 'dumb' - slogans, fear, hatred, 'the other', anger, doubt, and appeals to greed ('Look how rich I am'). So 'smart' is what has failed. Dumb is the new smart.
Smart in this case would presumably refer to "being able to recognize what's required to win and being able to successfully adapt to that."
I think it is objectively the case. You recall the long period when Sanders was refusing to concede, and there were a series of debates between he and Clinton. They were about policy - you know, 'policy' - how funds should be dispersed for healthcare, public education, tax rates, and so on. They went for hours, over periods of months.
Meanwhile, what was Trump talking about? He was stirring up headlines by making statements that most politicians wouldn't - Mexicans being thieves, Muslims being terrorists, women being suitable targets for horny celebrities who can grope them with impunity because they're famous.
You think there's no difference between hate speech and policy debate? Is that distinction beyond your powers of discrimination?
You may be right, but I think Thorongil did a good job of pointing out that many within the Republican establishment - those primarily concerned with protecting large corporate interests - have been extremely hostile to Trump. If he's a typical Republican, why the discomfort? Not sure what this development portends, but it does seem to buttress Trump's self-portrayal as the anti-establishment candidate (along with Bernie Sanders) who will represent the neglected interests of working class Americans.
But sure, his vague mentions of preferred economic policy did not sound very populist to me, especially his plan to lower taxes on the wealthy even further, ostensibly as a means of getting them to set up shop and do business in the US once again. My main point was that IF he doesn't follow through with his promises to represent the economic interests of average people, then someone else will be there to rally this group that he (and Bernie) energized. If nothing else, I do see that wedge he's driven between normal people and the economic elites whom they used to support, and uncritically at that, to be a positive development. And while isolationism may not be a realistic possibility in this day and age, if it leads to less meddling in the internal affairs of foreign countries to protect American or MNC business interests, that could be a good thing as well.
I'll keep abreast of the latest developments and information as it arises and reassess my views accordingly. That's the good thing about not being an ideologue or party hack who interprets facts to fit an agenda and only sees what they want to see. I'll try my best to avoid the blatant hypocrisy I've seen from both sides and search instead for the truth, which is clearly not what motivates political partisans.
I don't believe that's true. You do not need to show that something is worse than something else, to prove that it is bad. You just need to describe the thing, and explain why the described thing is bad. That there may be other things which are worse, is not relevant.
Dumb may be the new smart but I'll stand by what I said. Redistricting is a critical process, because it enables the party in power to tailor districts to suit. This might not affect the vote on a Trump or a Clinton, but it makes a lot of difference for who will occupy the US Congress and the state houses. Trump would be less of threat IF the Senate was controlled by Democrats.
The thing is that we have hard data to look at and see the result of having Republican leadership at the helm and economic progress of the middle class. The data seems point out that the interests of the middle class are not aligned with the interest of special interest groups that practically dictate national economic policy.
Poorly functioning systems of government are all bad.
An efficiently run and relatively humane dictatorship beats a scatter-brained and cruel dictatorship. A failed democracy would not be better than a failed dictatorship.
Democracy in the US or UK is not failed. It is hobbled, at least in the US, by several factors: the way politics are financed, the way primaries are tallied (winner take all), the way the electoral college works, and so forth. Having money fed into the campaigns by a high pressure hose doesn't help either. All of these, and other factors, could and should be reformed.
I have done so. More than once. Here, for example.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Even if so, importantly, it's not [I]just[/I] about that. It's also about correctness. It's not 'anything goes'. Some interpretations are more correct than others.
Quoting Terrapin Station
I just told you: what you said about Jill Stein. And I only said that it [i]might[/I] be applicable. It was an educated guess. I'm not a mind reader.
Quoting Terrapin Station
I made no such assumption. I qualified with "might". But it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to think that you would likewise approve of policies which treat climate change as a priority, rather than seek to undermine it. And Trump, in stark contrast to Stein, has a poor track record in that regard.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Riiight. So, what does socialism mean to you? How do you justify using that term to form part of the position you identify with? Or is it just a hollow word for you? Little more than a label you kind of like the sound of?
No, that's claiming that there is a distinction. It's not specifying what the distinction is supposed to be--that is, what the specific properties of each are supposed to be that make the distinction.
It was as if the Clinton campaign had a horrible smugness to it - a lot of people voting democrat seemed CONVINCED of the moral righteousness of their choice. "Only a bigot would vote for Trump". It was crazy seeing not just how disappointed but utterly SHOCKED people were by the result. I mean the result was a little surprising given the polls showed a marginal Democratic lead right up until the vote, but it was as if people hadn't even thought it was possible Hillary might NOT become POTUS. I CANT EVEN HOW COULD THIS BE?!
You must be so completely out of touch with the desires of the ordinary American. It's as if people occupy this liberal bubble and can't even grasp there's a world beyond it!
No, it isn't. It's stating what the distinction is. The distinction has to do with necessity. There are two distinctions which can be made:
1. What a person likes or prefers need not be what is in that person's best interests.
2. What is in a person's best interests need not be what that person likes or prefers.
This can easily be illustrated with examples, as I have done, and as Michael has done, and as you yourself can probably do.
Quoting Terrapin Station
So now you want me to talk about properties? No. Not if that entails more than what I've already provided. That'd be moving the goal posts. I have explained why they're not equivalent, and have illustrated that with an example.
But here, I'll throw in another distinction for free, because I'm generous. Although it's really just another way of putting what I've already said:
What is in one's interests is what is beneficial to those interests, whereas what one likes is just what one likes, and need not be beneficial to those interests. [U]The former is necessarily, by definition, beneficial to those interests, whereas the latter is not.[/u]
one could easily cobble together a vid of alt-righters being dumb for example
So I don't think the criticism has to be on their terms, as saying 'no, I'm actually smarter than you.' The point is to take it away from a battle of intelligence, which is really not about intelligence anyway, but a surrogate for class, and ultimately to deny the premises on which they predicate their worldview, as a product that you're not interested in buying.
So, what are you suggesting? That the American public that elected him and with it the majority that the Republican party has in the House and Senate... are uneducated and misinformed?
That sadly seems to be my conclusion on the matter.
Is clickhole like The Onion? I was raised in a center-left household where that sort of humor (Onion, Funny Times, Daily Show) was what we grew up on, and while I think it has its place, there's a sense in which it can't be truly, gut-bustingly funny.
Here is a dose of the respect Clinton supporters have for women.
(I'll be honest, I didn't watch that vid because I can't stand the young turks and I don't need to watch it to know I won't like it.)
But the alt-right shitlord troll-memes aren't really that funny. They're 'edgy.' Who cares? They have shock value, and shock value is good, even necessary, to progress through your teenage years.You have to embrace it before you can authentically move beyond it. But if you still find shock-value shit deeply funny at 27 (my age) then something went horribly wrong. Yes, whoa, you're very edgy, mannn, wow, you make jokes about 9/11?? and Muslims?? & Jews too!!!
jeez, no one can hold you back!
whoa wait, feminists and SJWs too?
dammmn.
No, stoppp, you wouldn't dare, about blacks too? About MLK? mann soo good! no fucks given, lol, amirite?
How is "beneficial to interests" different from meeting one's preferences with respect to interests?
(And how are one's interests not just preferences?)
Also, aren't you conflating "best for one's interests" and "best interests"? And then within that, you're pretending that a preference for meeting interests isn't a preference.
& I also understand that the alt-right has grown out of that kind of IDGAF messageboard ethos.
But the ethos & sense of humor I could empathize with gets lost when ppl go hard-alt-right.
Because it gets less funny!
I believe that plenty of legitimately funny 4channers went hard-right. But I think they probably got less funny as a result of that in the same way other funny ppl got less funny when they started pulling hard for HRC
I used to think that the humor was an endless spiral, and that maybe there was a sort of ethical duty to remain committed to it, which precluded ever adopting a 'serious' ideology. The people who stick too hard to the alt-right have found their serious ideology, and so it can make the humor fade, because they won't suffer a joke to the thing that they now take seriously. I don't know if I feel that way anymore, and I think I would adopt an ideology if it was something worthwhile, even at the risk of not seeing the funny as clearly anymore.
Also, once something becomes mainstream, the population becomes composed of people who don't have the years of subtle in-group training baked into their experience. So when you see a 14 year old Canadian girl or whatever talk about how she's 'red pilled' and wants immigrants to leave it's not really anything but sad.
Yeah, this is where I'm at. I love the anarchic comedic spirit (I've mentioned him before but Donald Barthelme is my saint here and is far funnier (and more morally and politically serious) than any alt-righter who thinks he can transcend any category through sheer outrage (Nigger! Normie! blahhh)
(and, sure, saying 'anarchic comedic spirit' is already to lose it, but w/e)
At a certain point, you have to ask: Is a slightly more sophisticated version of a COD player calling everyone else a fag really where I want to stake my claim?
It might be. Some insults are clever because they cut so deep, toward subconscious inadequacies people have. There is no limit to how mad you can potentially make a complacent person.
With respect to Trump, here is the gist as I see it. There are roughly two sorts of people, who have different reactions to the following video:
One sort will becomes more sympathetic to Trump after seeing it, the other sort will be horrified. This was intended as a video critical of Trump – but it just doesn't work. Trump is funnier than the creator, and arranging why he is funny in artful sequence only emphasizes that.
You have to have some sense of humor to see Trump as worth a vote. People will respond and say that when it comes to their safety, etc. they can't afford to find things funny, because their lives are at risk. But then, I think this is grandstanding and crocodile tears. Because again, when complacent you lack a sense of humor.
I considered earlier today, that maybe all of the free publicity through criticism of Obama had a lot to do with his winning so well, and in this case may have had a lot to do with his winning.
And I agree with you, complacency kills a sense of humor. But not-being-complacent is necessary, not sufficient. You can be a radical or outside the mainstream and still be super fucking boring.
I'm very arrogant about my sense of humor. As arrogant as Trump is about other things, maybe. And the alt-right isn't all that funny. They're a little funny on a first pass. But they have one or two jokes and they beat them to death and then get serious about their real concerns.
Everyone knows a meme dies after a few cycles. But the alt-right will keep posting pepe the same way normies keep posting gene wilder looking smug or picard being bewildered.
I feel that this is an example of something on the verge of being too serious. But it's far more inventive than Pepe – although, to be fair, there was some amazingly creative Pepe stuff, especially around the time that Kek was first getting popular, and earlier in the poo-poo pee-pee and good boy points eras (look that stuff up if you want examples of the 'good' Pepe stuff).
That video is hilarious... but not because of Trump's politics or policy. It's funny because being right doesn't matter. He contradicts himself, speaks nonsense and doesn't say the right thing, but all of that has no bearing on anything. On he goes, no matter how ridiculous or outrageous. Nothing is held back to save face or follow somebody's rules. Comedy isn't made on politics, but, in a certain sense, an expression of power of being who you are.
I think you feel sympathy for the alt right (at least more than others) because they are the underdog, more so than because they're particularly funny in comparison to anyone else.
American Voters didn't do anything "resounding'. Clinton (seems to have) won the popular vote, and though she lost the Electoral College race, it was by 50 votes, not 200. She won a good share of what was needed, but close doesn't count, of course.
American voters were split down the middle. Trump didn't earn the mandate of a landslide and Clinton wasn't cast aside by a landslide.
Watching it, I thought it could work either as a sincere expression of white supremacy or a satire criticising it, which is probably a good sign. I think it's funny either way.
As a sincere love song between alt-righters, I think it works much better than you give it credit for. There's a level of disruption, between family, identity, culture and relationship to politics, which makes it much funnier and substantial than just re-purposing popular media. I think there is disruptive a story-- I was actually thinking "How nice for them. Their fascist white supremacy will be so beautiful" watching it.
I think it works as best as neither criticism nor sincere expression, but as just a kind of strange crossing of two realms that would never otherwise meet - disney, with all that carries, and alt right. (tho even to spell it out like that kinda ruins it) Maybe that's what you mean by a level of disruption.
"I was actually thinking "How nice for them. Their fascist white supremacy will be so beautiful" watching it."
Ha, yeah, I think that's why it works.
I disagree with this reading.
It's funny because it expresses the unspoken and unspeakable emotional undercurrents two powerful white ppl (say a news anchor(ess) and idk a senator) might feel, but would irl chalk up to something very different (just like a movie! a perfect romance! like a french novel!). lt's not funny bc it's about underdogs - it's because it presents that which is usually unspeakable due to repression and good manners , as spoken in naive, shame-free open disney-level musicals.
Nah, most rich successful white ppl are repressed as fuck. It's a psychological minefield, every day, of what's speakable and what's not.
Wealth I can agree on. Wealth works anywhere. But if you're really rich, there is a sense in which you can say whatever you want.
I'm not sure what you mean. I think by and large white people are in power, yeah, but there are important social/class things that come into play and make it impossible to talk it about it strictly as white/non-white thing.
What's the non-naive understanding of white people and power?
I think a non-naive understanding would be that white people have a unique relation with racial guilt and masochism that makes them self-hating and resentful of the idea of working toward their own interests, and that there are a host of words and ideologies that can be employed against them at any time not only by other white people but anyone non-white to enforce this. This is something that non-white people of any stripe simply do not have to deal with.
On the world stage, things get even more complicated -- white people there have a unique status, implicitly or explicitly, that they are the only large ethnic group not entitled to a homeland, IMO. This is one of the talking points of the alt-right, and I don't think it's crazy, I think it's quite plain. It's another fact what one is to make of it.
I know, but I think that's wrong. The significance is disruption, not in being the (political) underdog. (Political) underdogs make rote and unfunny statements all the time, no matter how shocking the might be to the elite or powerful. Simply offending and hurting the elite or powerful (or frequently, less powerful, since something like protection form hate speech is distinct from an individual power) is not enough to make something funny. Indeed, sometimes it is just a vile expression of power.
You are, I think, more interested in annoying, hurting or seeing proponents of doxa get a comeuppance than in what's funny.
This doesn't mean that the people we currently identify as "white" don't get to participate in their unique ethnicity, unlike everyone else. It just means that we stop treating people descended from a continent as belonging to one race, be it white, black or otherwise.
I think that's actually a super complicated question. Couldn't you flip this and say the taboo on racial slurs is an expression of white racial security? Don't need to put someone in their place, who knows their place, kinda thing. Imagine a subtly abusive husband who fucks with his wife in subtle ways but acts calm and in control while she launches insult after insult, and remains respectful especially when he's talking about her in public
I don't think it's as simple as the image, but it's also not as simple as whites under the heavy thumb of pc speech-policing.
Oh, I definitely agree, but I think we differ on why the unspeakable stuff in it is funny.
See... that's political, not comedy. Supposedly, there is this grave double standard in how racism is treated. How unjust you cry. What could be funnier than seeing those people ignorant of racism against white people ground into the dust?
No doubt, but that's to be expected here. "Comedy" is heavily tied into expressing political power. One laughs at the failure, stupidity, pain or inferiority of their opponents as rhetoric. You are (sometimes) laughing not because what you've seen is really funny, but because it hurts those who you disagree with. What could be better than taking down those ignorant students of Western hegemony?
Quoting csalisbury
Yes, and I would agree with that. I think that white people exert a feeling of superiority in thinking that they have transcended culture and have a duty to bring the other mud people, still tied down to base tribalist sentiment, to their level. Hence the self-deprecating white insistence that they 'have no culture,' which simultaneously harms and exalts white people, hence why they make a sport out of how much they hate other white people, etc.
Quoting csalisbury
Agreed. There is a tendency for white people, mostly liberal white people, to treat minorities as animals and pets of various sorts, and to show 'solidarity' with them in condescending ways, by showing how they can take an insult like an adult while a minority can't and must be protected (and 'can't help but violently protest' and so on). This is all common knowledge.
Quoting csalisbury
It isn't – but poor white people, for example, are actually under the thumb in significant ways, whereas wealthy and educated white people use the thumb to throw poorer white people under the bus for various ingratiation strategies. Yes, it's all very complicated.
It's not unjust. It's reality, and I'm commenting on it.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
I think that comedy is deeper than that, but okay.
So do we consider Persians to be white? They're not European, but they don't identify as Arabs. What about Aborigines? Are they black? South Asians with very dark skin, what are they?
Which I never said. I stated that being white or black (or Asian, etc) is a social construction.
Your arguments seemed to suggest that people are mistaken for arguing racism only applies to white people. You have sympathy for the alt-right because, on some level, you think they are unjustly treated. Supposedly, we don't let them claim their homeland like any other ethnic group.
A lot of the time (hopefully), it is. My point is that it's quite sometimes not. People laugh to assert hierarchy, to bask in a victory over an opponent. I'm saying that you seem to fall into this a lot-- where comedy is reduced to nothing more than upsetting the powerful.
Yes, but why lump them into one category called "white", "black" or "red"? The reason this happend is because of racism during the colonial era to justify the economics of slavery, and driving natives off their land.
I don't think it's just or unjust. Again, I think it's reality.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
Ultimately I think that comedy is not for upsetting the powerful because it gives the powerful too much center – the humor is for the one laughing as much as the object of laughter. If that object is 'the powerful,' then the powerful are the powers that be in a deeper cosmic sense, the archons or metaphorical rulers of the universe, given that humor is fundamentally disruptive of rule. But this disruption is far deeper than politics.
Yes... if we are talking in terms of understanding and categorisation. That we put people of a certain body in a particular category is always our discourse. It's constructed in how we understand people. The presence of a body doesn't put anyone within a category.
You mean like how Northern Europeans look different than Southern Europeans? What about red head, freckled Irish people with their light skin? Are they more white than someone from Romania?
Yes, Europeans are different from each other, but they are more different from Africans.
This is seriously not hard to understand.
Particularly with the Neanderthal genes, but at any rate, the history of being in the white or black race is one of slavery and then deep discrimination, so it's something a bit more than just noticing that people descendended from different geographic locations tending to look different. Also, it includes a history of which Europeans groups got to be considered white, and which weren't, depending on the time period.
Alright, I don't know why the topic went this direction, but I have to go to bed. Night.
That's what I said.
What we wouldn't have, if we didn't talk, think or understand it, is the ethnic category. If everyone looked at a white person and saw someone belonging to the category of "black person," there would be no white ethnic group identity in our culture. There would be black bodies and white bodies, yes, but no-one would be thought of as having an ethnic identity of "white person."
There was no such thing as being "white" or being "black" before a certain time. There were various ethnic groups competing and sometimes allying with one another. They didn't consider themselves to be all one race.
And anyway, unless you are an albino, nobody actually has white skin. So it's a false categorization to begin with.
Postmodernism alert!
*ducks*
Well, some things are "socially constructed". Maybe there is a better way of saying it. How about, people have considered themselves and others to belong to varying groups over time, and being white is no exception to this. In the European past, it could have been Roman, or Spartan, or Scottish, or Jewish (which isn't always accepted as white).
So Romans considered various non-Roman groups to be barbarians. Jews called the non-Jewish Gentile. Various Germanic tribes would have had their own naming for the other. The point is that all of this made up by culture. Who is part of a group and who is an outsider, and how you think about that outsider, whether they are to be feared or conquered, or treated as savages.
Or consider the long history of ethnic conflicts in Palestine which is even smaller and littler. Jews, Arabs, Palestinians, Samaritans, Judeans, Israelites, etc. Twelve tribes of tiny Israel?
Here we see the motte and bailey technique of the postmodernist on display. Make provocative claims when skirmishing at first, such as "being white is a social construction," and when challenged, retreat back into safety by making an utterly banal and unchallengeable point. People have considered themselves and others to belong to varying groups over time? Gee whiz, you don't say! Next you'll be telling me that people have dressed differently over time! But see, that wouldn't prove that cotton, silk, or wool are "social constructions."
You can't get away with making a prima facie absurd claim like "being white is socially constructed" as if it were self-evident. The "better way of saying it," as you put it, is in fact not a way of saying it at all. It's to say something completely different. So pick one and stick to it.
The point is that people in Europe didn't consider themselves to be white before a certain point. They considered themselves to be in other categories, usually associated with their homeland, culture, language and religion.
What is the counter argument to this obvious observation? That Europeans were white before they considered themselves to be white? Based on what? Their lighter skin color compared to certain populations in other parts of the world?
Let's ask a different question. What is the usefulness in calling an entire continent of people "white" or "black" or whatever? What role does it serve?
Nonsense. Are you honestly going to tell me that ancient Europeans failed to notice their own skin tone? If not, then by "white" you mean something other than "white," in which case you ought to use different vocabulary so as to avoid equivocating.
You mean like "pink" or "tan" or even light brown? I'm sure people have always noticed differences. A red headed, freckled person who burns easily in the sun can look significantly different from someone else of the same ethnicity. So can a tall skinny person compared to someone stocky. So how do we go about grouping regarding difference? Do you think the Vikings considered themselves kin with Italians?
You're assuming that all Europeans would have agreed that they belong in some common group based on relatively lighter skin color than people from different geographic locations, despite all the regional differences amongst various European groups throughout history.
What would make a Spaniard or Italian more white than an Arab to a Northern or Eastern European? Is it because the Arabs have to cross a sea?
Yes. You're catching on.
Quoting Marchesk
Not much. It's just a very generalized descriptive fact. I'm with Morgan Freeman:
Quoting Marchesk
No, but they would have noticed that the Italians had a similar complexion to themselves, one noticeably lighter than their Moorish friends, for example.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/race/#HisConRac
Or how about this. Leopold II's letter to missionaries:
http://www.fafich.ufmg.br/~luarnaut/Letter%20Leopold%20II%20to%20Colonial%20Missionaries.pdf
Is that like abstract expressionism?
Is it like we're discussing a Jackson Pollock?
How deep does the humour run in the dribbles of paint on canvas?
I was shocked to see you use this word. Are you from that part of the world, or did you know someone from those parts?
(I come from there and even I would never use that phrase)
There was a Simpsons episode with Homer saying he was going to avoid his comeuppance. May have been when he became a food critic.
Maybe, the word travelled back over the pond, because folk over here thought it was one of their words.
For me, it's the McChicken. The best fast food sandwich.
I have explained this multiple times now. I don't know why it isn't getting through to you. Let's be honest, you already know the difference, and behind all of this posturing, you know that I'm right.
For the last time, one's preferences obviously don't have to be beneficial to one's interests.
Now, stop this, because it is beginning to look like trolling.
Quoting Terrapin Station
You must enjoy me repeating myself. Because they're different. Those words mean different things, and they can, and do in fact, refer to different things in some cases, which aren't difficult to discover, and which you yourself can discover from thinking about your own experience. If you tell me that you've never experienced anything you like which wasn't in your best interests, then frankly you are full of crap.
Quoting Terrapin Station
No.
So I'm just being dishonest to aggravate you or something in your view?
I suspect you of willful ignorance. You are clinging to your position, even if it means accepting falsehoods, which, perhaps deep down, you know to be falsehoods.
So now you're positing unconscious beliefs too?
What do you think the motivation for "willful ignorance" would be?
okay, I am likely done
for today
maybe
(Y)
Sales of Rosary Prayer Beads and Mala Prayer beads are flying off the shelf! I may not have a free moment away from my jewelry bench for the next four years!
And the backtracking begins. I guess that quote of Trump saying he'd lie his way into the White House was accurate.
So much for Crooked Clinton. It's Dishonest Donald.
Note: criticising the lying, not the reversal.
As for the 'no one is really white' thing, give me a break, that has to be disingenuous.
No, I haven't read either of those books (could've, should've, would've). Why do you ask? Did I inadvertently step on a sore toe?
(I do know something about who the two people are, and I have read bits and pieces about them.)
I've been reading that "white" as a racial term has a short history for a couple of decades now, and hadn't checked any references.
I did a quick (separate) search of "white" and "racial" in the OED (on-line) and found that "white" as we apply it to race does indeed have a relatively short history. ("White" describing a color of course goes back to Old English and further.) "Racial" has a shorter history.
Google Ngram charts words by the frequency of their appearance in texts which are part of their corpus of printed books (it's big). Here is a result.
Note that in 1800, the incidence of the two terms (black race and white race) was extremely low. The term "black race" was used for 200 years at about the same, fairly low rate, while the term "white race" was much higher and fluctuating.
Of course, just because Chaucer, Spencer, or Shakespeare didn't describe any characters as "white" doesn't mean there wasn't an appreciation of differences that we would call "racial" prior to the 19th century. In the eponymous play, Othello (1604) is described as “the Moor” (I.i.57), “the thick-lips” (I.i.66), “an old black ram” (I.i.88), and “a Barbary horse” (I.i.113)."
Making racial distinctions doesn't make sense where there is little regular inter-racial contact. Americans are predictably indifferent to the ethnic (dis)similarities of central African or Siberian peoples, because we have no regular contact with peoples from these areas bearing differences. In reverse, the residents of Central Africa or Siberia would likely have little awareness of differences between the Ojibwa and Navaho Indian peoples, or Incas and Aztecs.
Scientific classification probably had a role in highlighting racial differences and similarities.
I never said people weren't aware of ethnic differences. I said people considered themselves and others to belong to different groups over time, depending on the criteria. And being white is relatively recent. It's origin is the justification of colonialism and slavery. The idea of being white is the idea that you're skin color determines your status in society, and if your skin color is dark enough, you deserve to be a slave, or have less rights.
This is true, but I would add especially in the context of radical change. The radical change in Anglo-American culture was the rise of abolition, the end of the slave trade, and the events preceding (and following) the American Civil War.
The English ended their participation in slave trading in 1807. They didn't do this because it was unprofitable. The Anglo-American Abolition Movements began within the Quaker and Evangelical Christian groups on the grounds that slavery was un-Christian. A concern for civil and human equality followed later - quite a bit later.
"Whiteness" and "Blackness" wouldn't be so intense a concern in a settled, enforced system of slavery. Racial difference would become a hot issue once the settled enforced system of slavery was blown open and former slaves suddenly were presented as equals. Racial distinctions would now be critical in establishing a new social order.
I would guess that many Europeans--who hadn't previously thought a lot about racial and ethnic differences--suddenly became sensitive to these differences with the sudden arrival of waves of refugees. People having difficulty making accommodating too much too fast change aren't necessarily racists.
There was an interesting lecture from the BBC Reith Lectures series on the radio -- something like 3:00 in the morning in the US. Don't remember who was speaking, but he was pointing out how "white people" pride themselves on having "European heritage" and being inheritors of "Western Civilization", while actually knowing almost nothing about it.
If my suspicion of what you mean is correct (upper-class narcissists), no. Otherwise, I'm not really familiar with its history or cultural usage.
My usage was deliberate though. I thought its self-important, sneering glee at the pain and suffering of others was a fitting description of thinking shallow annoyance or offence of an opponent was hilarious.
We aren't doing that. The "evilness" of white people is a description of how social relations have been expressed in our societies more or less since colonialismand after. It's not white skin that's a problem. Nor is it white enthic identity. The issue is a social advantage white people have had for a period of time, a description of a social power and dominance the white enthic group has had over others.
This is why some people say "white people can't be subject to racism" in the West. Not because people of the white ethnic group cannot be discriminated against, but because the don't live is a society which defines their ethnic identity as a second class citizen.
People who say white people can't suffer racism are (rightly) concerned that suggestioning otherwise will lead to an equivocation of the treatment of white people with those of other ethnic groups, leading to an invisibility to the latter.
We actually saw this in your post earlier. You treated racism as if it was merely a question of being unable to take pride in one's identity, as if not being able to say: "White people are the greatest people" belonged in the same catergoy as the dispossession, slavery and social inequality that constitutes our society for many people if other enthic groups.
You are right that (white)Western liberal culture views people without identity. The "free" everyman who's distinctions don't matter is the defining idea of the classical liberalism our culture has grown out of.
Part of the post-modern critique is this is a myth. Since people have their own identity, distinctions matter. In terms of our understanding and categories, the might only be a social construction, but that doesn't mean they are not real.
Earlier you pointed out that racial distinction is of great importance to the post-modern critic. This is absolutely true. They know that just saying the distinction doesn't matter does not reflect how people are treated.
Contrary to the classical liberal narrative, the post-modernist is saying that distinctions always matter, for each individual is distinct. If someone is living is a society, they need a place as a distinct person. Just saying the are "free" isn't enough. Distinction matters and we have to be careful of how our understanding of it impacts on people-- thus, the dominate group doesn't get go around proclaiming itself as the greatest, for it implies the exclusion of others from value.
It seems to me (provincial that I am) that actual races do exist side by side with race-used-as-a-vehicle-to-suppress-those-groups-and-elevate-these-groups. Blacks, after all, are black because of their recent place (last 25k years) of origin, and whites are white for the same reason. Aboriginals have been separated from other groups long enough to take on some unique characteristics. NONE of the characteristics that different groups feature are bad. The features are just different. NONE of the groups are superior in significant ways. Each group has some metabolic features (on the level of detail more than anything else) that are unique to that group -- just as males and females have metabolic differences.
Personally, I like the existence of people who look consistently different, who have characteristic skin tones, differences in hair, and so on. I think we are more interesting as different than if we were all coffee-with-cream colored with tightly curled hair.
One of the confusions that occur that make race much more problematic than it would otherwise be is that people link particular cultures to race. Black/violent; white/smart; blacks easy going; whites uptight; asians/smart; Indians/drunk, and so on. Of course these cultural stereotypes are harmful, because most blacks aren't violent. Blacks, whites, asians, and indians are all represented similarly on a distribution of basic intelligence and a long list of other variables.
It IS the case that many blacks in America do poorly in academics, from the get-go. We have good reason to think this has nothing to do with basic intelligence and everything to do with more cultural factors like the impoverished language culture of poor people (in this case, blacks). Poor people living in a culture of impoverishment do not express themselves the same way that better off people living in
a cultures of sufficiency or advantage. Poor American Black children arrive in kindergarten having heard perhaps 20-30 million fewer words spoken by parents or caregivers, and have heard far more negative and command language than children from cultures of sufficiency or advantage. These deficits appear to be lifelong -- not readily remediated after the age of 7 or 8.
Because language is formed early and is difficult to change, some people have assumed that differences in school performance was genetic. It isn't, of course. It's cultural.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
Various European groups did not colonize other peoples to prove that they were better than colored people. They colonized other people because it was economically, militarily, and politically advantageous to subjugate other peoples and extract their wealth from them.
Many of the elites that profited from a lot of the colonialism that occurred are still in place, still benefitting from their acts of exploitation, still exploiting fresh people. It is entirely possible for the rich, white, elite to discriminate against poor, white, people -- and to do so just as viciously as they would exploit colonialised brown people.
Exploitation, colonialism, subjugation, and so forth is primarily an economic process -- not a racist, sexist, white-run social operation.
No, it stems from the fact that people come from different places and look different ways based on where they come from. There would still be white, black, etc. people whether or not this were used to attribute superiority or inferiority.
Not quite. It views white people as without identity. Although the moderate right does evoke the 'colorblind' position.
It views everyone without identity. Everyone is invisible, which is how the myth functions. It doesn't matter if you are black, white, rich, poor, gay, straight, trans, etc., etc., any person is thought to be a free individual who can do anything. It is the "colourblind (and everything else too)" position. The are no issues or problems because everyone is considered a priori equal and the same to everyone else. An imagined freedom and equality, rather than a lived one.
No doubt this is not what people think in practice. They think about identity the time, including white identity ("European heritage" ), but it's not what registers in understanding of society.
For sure. Do you think that makes it any better? Are native americans meant to take solace that they were disposed of their lands, had their cultures destroyed and a genocide committed against because the powerful white Americans just want to get richer, rather than prove the superiority of the white race( though that happened too, as an excuse to exploit other ethnicities for resources)?
Let me put in terms you might understand. What do you think has a greater "racist" impact? A cabal sitting around talking about how they will "prove" white people are superior and plotting instances of deliberate hate crime to rally people to their cause? Or an economic vision of manifest destiny which sees entire cultures and its people wiped out? How can you say that the deliberate killing of someone for their ethnicity is "racist," but then turn around and say that the dispossession and genocide of entire ethnic groups is not "racist" just because it was done to make someone richer? I mean the latter is the former multiplied by the thousand if not million.
Racism isn't about intention. It's about effect.
But there wouldn't be white, black , etc racial categories. Those were invented during the colonial era. There is no scientific evidence for a "white" race, anymore than there is for a "red" or "yellow" one. In fact, it's absurd on the face of it.
Consider, who belongs to the "brown" race? Mexicans, Arabs, Indians? That's three very distinct groups from different geographical locations. Who all is "black"? Do you count Aborigenes? What color are Polynesians? Are Eskimos "redskins"? Are Siberians or Hindus "yellow"?
There are no such races. It's a complete myth.
What exactly do you think is absurd? That there are ethnic groups? I seriously don't know what you're trying to say here, nor how protesting that classifications of things can be made along different lines changes anything.
Quoting Marchesk
What are you even saying here? There is one race, but they vary along a ton of physical dimensions that has to do with where they come from. Okay, so how is that different from race? If you don't want to use the word 'race' for political reasons, whatever. But you're being incoherent right now. Would it make you feel more comfortable to say there are different ethnic groups? And that these vary in greater or lesser details roughly in correlation to their native homelands? But if you agree with that (and you would have to be delusional on an unbelievable scale not to), what exactly are you even arguing about?
A mystery regarding white people: if there's no such thing as them, how do they keep causing all the world's problems? How can everything be the fault of people who don't exist?
Or another riddle: if there are no white people, how is it possible for white people to hate themselves so much?
And now there is a republican majority in the house and senate.
The one thing that will probably happen is they will do both supply side and Keynesian economics at the same time.
They will cut taxes and increase government spending, Trump is already talking about infrastructure stimulus.
I wish republicans understood that doing both stimulus and tax cuts is what, in reality, bloats deficits.
You would think this should be obvious and of some concern to them considering how much they complain when democrats fail to fix their mistakes quickly enough.
Pick one or the other, but tax cuts and stimulus is wrong economics.
1) There are different groups of people who originated in different parts of the world.
2) These groups of people, due to breeding with those close to them, have differing physical features that are easily recognizable.
3) These groups are all different from each other, but they are more different from those who originated yet farther away from them.
4) One's belonging to one of these groups has serious implications for the sort of identity politics one can engage in, in the Western World.
I've never denied ethnicity. I've denied the concept of race based on skin color. The idea that an entire continent of people could be considered belonging to the same racial group, or that it's even meaningful to say that there are such racial groups, because their skin color is similar.
There part of many different groups, migrating in and out, fighting and conquering one another across an entire continent over thousands of years. You wouldn't claim that all Asians or Africans belong to a single racial group, would you?
If Europeans don't form a genetic group, how is it possible that genetic testing can trace your ancestry to its place of origin, including Europe?
Are you denying that people who originated from places closer on the globe have a greater genetic similarity to each other? If so, that's clearly absurd; but if not, I don't understand what you take yourself to be denying in distinguishing 'race' from 'ethnicity.'
Yes, by and large, European people have a common genetic ancestry in virtue of originating from the same continent. This does not mean that they are all the same, or that all Africans are the same, or anything like that.
1). They didn't originate there, unless it's sub-Saharan Africa, but okay, their ancestors lived there long enough to adapt.
2). To the extent it's passing genes on and not a common adaptation across multiple groups, sure. That said, do you believe that the entire continent interbred?
3). Does the science back this up? Are you sure that any given Scandinavia is more similar genetically to any Frenchman than a Korean?
4) The reason for identity politics is a reaction to the result of racial categorizations during Colonialism.
OK, I legitimately can't tell. Are you serious?
But you wouldn't say the same about Asia, right, considering that Hindus, Chinese, Siberians and natives of Paupa Guinea vary considerably? Just as you don't think of Arabs when mentioning blacks. So what makes Europe different? That it's too small to have large enough differences? That they're all closely enough related such that they can be lumped into one racial category? Because Portuguese and Ukrainians are so much alike?
And no I wouldn't say that about all Asians, because I never said there was a 'one ethnic group' or 'one race' per continent rule. It just so happens that a certain group of people were by and large established on a certain continent. That you would think that because there are other continents (the definition of 'continent' being arbitrary anyway) that have a larger ethnic diversity in them, whether because of size or whatever, this is somehow negated, this baffles me.
Also, it doesn't change the historical fact that Europeans didn't consider themselves belonging to a continent spanning racial category called white until rather recently (and there's always been a dispute over which ethnicities from Europe get to be called white).
I suspect not, at least in the sense you're thinking.
In terms of identity though, yes. Race and ethnicity are both categories or discourse, as opposed to the presence of either a cultural practice or a particular genome. We may say that, for example, that someone of Korean descent living in France has no less belonging to the category of Frenchman than either a Scandinavian or a Frenchman of European descent.
Genetics do not constitute our understanding of someone beginning to a particular category. It's just, to borrow from similar analysis on sex and gender, the body. The identity categories we use, they are our understanding, our sorting of people within our conceptual frameworks, no matter how many "factual" markers (e.g. skin color, genetics, genitals, chromosomes, etc.,etc.) we happen to use.
What does this even mean? Does it mean that we talk about them? Okay, yes we do. But that is a weird way of saying that.
Does it mean that ethnicity is literally somehow made out of words or constituted by discourse? Okay, it's obviously not. So why would you say it?
Yes, it does. Particular experiences, to be entirely accurate. Ethnic identity is only our thoughts and words. If people, for example, thought of black people as white people, then within our categories they would be "white."
Bodies remain what they are (e.g. white skin and black skin) obviously, but that runs on a different axis. It's a descriptive discourse of someone's bodily trait, which doesn't carry with it belonging to a particular discourse of identity. To say someone belongs within a category because of their skin (e.g. a white person has the identity of "white" and a black person has the identity of "black") is entirely a social construction, our moulding of the meaning of an individual within our community that is parasitic on states we have observed (and many then falsely proclaims that identity is defined by the existence of those bodily states).
It correlated with being of European descent, particularly from countries like England, Spain, France, Germany, etc. But what being white meant was being the group in power who gets to dominate the inferior people from other areas of the world.
They would be "white?" Well, they would be black ex hypothesi, as you just said. We could use the word "white" to mean what we now mean by "black," sure. But that wouldn't make black people white. This is a use-mention confusion.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
Not at all – there are different groups of people, and one of the outward signs of this is a different superficial experience, e.g. in skin tone.
White people aren't white, and black people aren't black, if you want to get technical about it. So obviously we can use colors to denote something other than the actual skin pigment.
Missing the point. I didn't say to would make black people white (i.e. change the colour of their skin). Nor did I say that "white" meant "black." I mean, literally, that black people might be considered part of the same identity category as white people, a category of "white."-- an instance where skin colour doesn't matter to belonging to the category of "white" or where it is thought someone of black skin ought to belong to the same category as someone of "white skin."
Not in terms of our understanding of others. Who belongs to a group depends on whether we categorise them as a part of it. We all have different bodies, yes, but that's not enough to define belonging to a different social identity. Differences might, for example, not be thought about by us, so we just think of everyone as "human" (as opposed to "male" or "female" or "black" or "white"). We need to group people before they register in this sense. It's our action, not a pre-existing fact defined by the differences between us.
Granted this seems to be what some people actually believe – but I'm just pointing out it's incoherent.
Not at all. Who belongs to a group depends on the qualities of the person and the qualities composing the group. We can change labels for groups, and categorize more or less broadly, and change which words we use to refer to which groups, or decide to focus on some groups to the exclusion of others as more salient or important for categorization, but that affects nothing about whether someone belongs to a particular group or not.
No... just the identity of "white" or "European heritage" (social identity category).
European descent (i.e. having ancestors who lived in Europe) is about the history of bodies and remains true.
There would be related groups of people from sub-Sarahan Africa, southern Asia, and Australia who had darker skin than everyone else. But they wouldn't be considered "black" in the sense of belonging to a racial category that is somehow inferior to groups of related lighter skinned people descended from elsewhere on the planet, particularly in Europe.
Yeah... that's the falsehood we are trying to get past here. Identity is not a constraint (e.g. tick these boxes and you count as X) but an expression (e.g. you are X if you express X). Who belongs to a group can change, it may expand or reduce, depending on who is understood to have that identity. All it takes is the right expression.
So by that you mean they are more closely related to one another and have darker skin? Do you think we would recognize an all-encompassing category based on skin pigment?
So in our accurate description of ethnic groups, do we consider Eskimos to be yellow or red?
But the point here is it doesn't. In the situation I was pointing out, "European heritage" or "white" is a social identity category. The one of the various European societies who came to dominate the globe in the last few centuries. It doesn't mean "my ancestors were European." It means: "I am of the ethic group which colonised the world between the 16th and 21st century."
That's not ethic identity. It a description of where your ancestors lived. It's not subject to any sort of doubt here. The point is not that expression makes your ancestors come from somewhere else, it is that it defines how people are understood to belong, the social groups of a particular time and how they relate to others.
If all we cared about was noting that people descend from certain geographic locations, why not just use European, African, Indian, North American, etc?
Yes it does. It may also be that being of European descent puts you in a historically privileged class. That does not mean that this is the meaning of the word, or that white people were 'invented' in the last several hundred years.
For instance, if you say someone in America is white, you mean they're of European descent. You may connote that they are racist or horrible slavers or whatever, but that's not what the word means, and it can be used connotation-neutrally as well.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
That's what ethnic identity is.
Are you asking me why people use words to group things into certain categories?
I already know the reason, and it's not to identify the geography of one's ancestors.
The definitions of "white" and "black" Marchesk is using appear to be specifically related to New World slavery or S. African apartheid. And yea.. All sorts of dark skinned people would qualify as black. S. Africans identified the Chinese as black and the Japanese as white. Go figure.
On the other hand, as we climb into the 21st Century and note that the Ottoman Empire favored European slaves, we may say: "Those slaves were white". Anyone who has difficulty understanding what that means has a rigid outlook which probably causes perpetual confusion.
Of course the reason this is so stupid is that you could tell the difference, because well...
It was a social construct that having light skin meant one was from a superior racial category that rightfully gets to dominate as a result. Or are you just going to overlook that part of history?
You don't have to go to university to understand that racism, even if it's the subtle kind, is still an issue. But don't believe me, go ask any American minority what it means to be a minority compared to being white.
No, but the idea of being white as a racially superior category was.
The idea of whiteness is, not the pinkish skin pigment, or relative relatedness on the European continent.
Quoting Marchesk
Yes it is. There's literally nothing else to being white.
I'd be interested to know what you think isn't delusional, since it seems you think everyone is delusional about the issue.
In such a world, how would we view dark and light skin?
See how that works?
So you then the racial issues around slavery and Jim Crow laws in the past ceased being a problem shortly after the Civil Rights movement, or perhaps a decade ago or something?
It's the different things people would think about dark people that is the entire issue of racism.
That doesn't change the fact that black people were considered property, then were denied various rights and targeted by hate groups for a long time.
Clearly not.
People would, as you say think differently about dark people. They would not have the ethnic identity of "black" they do now. A different set of social relations and would apply to them. You've literally pointed out that the idea of being "dark" (i.e. the social significance of a dark person to society and other people)would-be different.
Are you white btw?
Absolutely. It's tied up in our culture and desire for superiority. The principles of knowledge, technology and domination which drove the Enlightenment and colonisation, in a sense, drive our concern for identity politics. We will be the ones who overcome, through our "civilised" culture and society, to make people's lives better. It's, in a sense, a desire of empire building.
I mean it is a bit of an accident of being the world power, in that it they who are usually concerned with the maintenance and development of power in society, but it's still the same sort of focus on building a nation greater than any other. We aren't, you know, content to sit back and live out century old traditions. The world is ours to know and improve (or so we think).
It's irrelevant to this particular discussion on whether "whiteness" is a relatively recent invention.
I agree except I think that we are in a post-enlightenment epistemology, since a true enlightenment spirit emphasizes the common intellectual faculty of all people, whereas this has given way to identity-based intellectual faculties split across race, gender, etc., without a common sphere of reason (or rather, reason as a universal notion is seen as 'too white' and 'too male').
It's really not a pretty world, in any sense. We can only hope for something new soon, where no one is ashamed of who they are and everyone is strong and spiritually productive and wonderful.
We are "post-enlightment" in the sense we worked out the Enlightenment was telling us a great big lie with regards to "common intellectual faculty"; it effectively meant "rich white male." A spirit blind to how power is express on and by individuals ("colourblindness," the free everyman of classical liberalism), where there is only the stagnate facts of the world to investigate (e.g. someone has white ancestors), rather than a conflux of interacting people who each define the lives of the other (e.g. a white identity which defines how a person belongs to a social context.
In the last two or so centuries, the enlightenment spirit ate itself. Reason and concern for knowledge turned to describing out society power relationships, where upon we found the "common sphere of reason" was not common at all-- the poor are missing (Marxism), people of other ethnic identities are missing (Racism), women are missing (sexism), queer people were missing (LGBTIQA+ discrimination), etc., etc.
In a sense it is not a pretty world, no longer is there the illusion of common freedom, but then when there was, the ugliness was just hidden.
I have to say, I think it is this illusion you covet. The "post-enlightment" doesn't demand anyone be ashamed who who they are per se, at least not unless they are doing something wrong (which is, you know, par for ethics). It demands we be honest about the impact of our actions on other people or how, that we recognise when we have destroyed others or taking away their power, rather than passing it off as "nature" or just giving savages what the deserve. I think it's this conflict, the awareness of ugliness and/or wrong done, which irks you. You'd rather just hide it away so people could get on with their lives rather than spending their days worrying about power relationships.
Once again, the lack of melanin in the skin of Europeans was a fact about them before there was a society to allegedly construct it. There's nothing to discuss here. TGW has so thoroughly interred your stupid claim into the ground that you now appear a sucker for punishment.
My argument was never about the range of melanin in Europeans (notice how Northern Europeans tend to have less than Southern). TGW decided to make it about that. Anyway, history says different about the racial categories of white and black.
But then postmodernists conveniently claim that simply being white is to be in the wrong, the very point of dispute here. This is have one's cake and eat it too, so don't talk about the Enlightenment eating itself. It doesn't propose any such monstrous relativism.
Oh? So stop equivocating, then.
What the word white refers to.
Quoting Marchesk
:-O
I have to wonder though, considering your past posting history on metaphysics. Do you believe anything is objectively real?
But I haven't suffered any loss.
I haven't really given hard thought to metaphysics in a while. I have Gnostic sympathies.
No, they don't. They describe horrors and wrongs which "white (the ethnic identity of the last few hundred years, as opposed to someone skin color)" people have enacted upon the world. To simply be "white" isn't to do anything wrong. Sure, it means to have racial advantage in the West, but that's not any sort of (un)ethical act a person performs.
I talk about the Enlightenment eating itself becasue post-modernism isn't really "relativistic." Rather it is concerned with the objectivity of our relationships as subjects. The same concerns: knowledge, reason, social improvement, individual freedom, which drove the Enlightenment also drive post-modernism-- it was born in realising the narrative of the liberal enlightenment (the free everyman individual) was not happening for many people.
If we are to value reasons and knowledge above all else, the Enlightenment was always going to dissolve into post-modernism because the universal is an inadequate description. People are always distinct. The "Enlightenment spirit," the universal story, cannot be maintained unless we abandon knowledge and reason when it comes to describing the individual. Without this ignorance of distinction, the world dissolves into an array of objective subjectivities.
So would have Eurasia, which relates to the point of arbitrary categorizations, although I think land masses are a bit less arbitrary than super ethnic groups.
Now I'm curious if all ethnic groups of European descent are actually more closely related than obviously different ones in Asia (to one another).
Good. I have no further issue with you on this point.
It's not about being of European descent or a light skin pigment. It's about the concepts of whiteness, blackness, yellowness, etc that we inherited from a very discriminatory period of time.
Sure if it's just a word game and has no social implications, like who gets favored treatment in a society, and who gets looked down on, based on skin color.
Will we still consider Europeans to be white? What if the aliens want to call themselves white, and insist that Europeans are really pinkish? Furthermore, since the true white aliens are technologically superior, and get to lord it over us, all sorts of notions are attached to being truly white, as opposed to less nice notions of being pinkish.
Is that not a social construction by the aliens, forced on us?
This is an extremely tendentious usage. One has to go out of one's way to think that more than a handful of your friends use "white" in that way.
When I say "I am white" I definitely do not denote the meaning ""I am of the ethic group which colonised the world between the 16th and 21st century."" I mean that my ancestors came from Britain. The ruling class of Britain colonized the world, not the peasants of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, or England, for Christ's sake. My ancestors were not ruling class, either -- not in Britain and not in the US.
It is true that some non-ruling class subjects of the various colonizing crowns of Europe served in their majesties' armed forces (willingly or not) and were sent hither and thither to back up the colonial forces. Most of them didn't have much choice in that service. For the most part, the shat upon in Britain were not a lot better off than the shat upon in Nigeria or India.
Your usage of the word white (and the meaning you load into it) is as lazy and stereotypical as you think racist language is.
After weeks of learning that this essentializing was not based upon the 'objective' search for truth (there is no such thing) but was instead entirely in the service of power, I told the teacher that it seemed like Mr. Said was doing precisely what he accused others of doing: essentializing Europeans as greedy, self-serving, deceitful and just plain evil.
His response to my naïve comment/inquiry, after months of telling us how identities were not grounded in reality but were 100% social constructs: 'Well, aren't they?'
I wasn't satisfied with his response but didn't press further on whether he felt identities were drawn from actual facts (or at least interpretations of facts) or were complete fictions guided by nothing more than power interests. Seemed like he wanted it both ways for some reason; complaining incessantly about the injustice of European hierarchies and domination while simultaneously perpetuating his own sort of inverted hierarchy with its own type of essentializing. Reminds me of Nietzsche's take on the successful Christian inversion of Greco-Roman values in the world of antiquity.
Anyhow apologies for that irrelevancy. I'm finding this discussion very interesting too and don't have a settled opinion on the matter.
I am Han Chinese
I am North African
I am Native American
I am European
I am South American
I am Arabian
I am Russian
I am Norwegian
I am East African
I am yellow, black, white, red, brown, beige...
I am -- any number of geographically located adjectives -- they generally are identifying as something that is good in their experience.
We derive our meaning as persons from many layers of experience, including religion, language, race, ethnicity, diet, altitude (sea side to alpine), landscape, education, music, and a few dozen other factors. If people want to claim that one of their layers is race, I think they are entitled to that, and they are entitled to think positively about it.
I would not appreciate you, WOD, or anybody else telling me that my religion, diet, clothing (or lack thereof), sports, or anything else -- including race and ethnicity -- were actually negative factors that I should apologize for or remain silent about. I would be inclined to invite you to go fuck yourself in some politically incorrect way.
Some people say "I am Black and Proud" because they are or wish to be. Their ancestors may have been a slave, they may be the progeny of a white slave owner somewhere along the line. They may have been a poor sharecropper; they may have been in jail; they may have been screwed by every guy in the cell block; they may be illiterate; but they now claim Proud Black Man because that is how they think of themselves, and perhaps that pride came at a high price. Who are you to say "Well, that's not what black means!"
No, it doesn't.
Now if people want to make the case that all those negative connotations around race disappeared in the recent past, so that being white or black or red is no longer an issue, then go for it. And here I mean on a societal level, not whether a given individual is racist, or delusional about race.
So in that context, it is the idea of being white, black, etc. at a societal level, stemming from several centuries ago, that is being challenged as a negative social construct.
I tend to view things more in terms of class and culture, and the many assumptions that are made regarding these things. Perhaps that's just my 'white privilege' speaking, and I'm not being facetious in suggesting that possibility.
Black people get stopped by police more often because they (on average) commit far more crime than other races. They don't get stopped because there's some racial conspiracy involving black hating cops inconveniencing people with needless traffic stops.
"Black people are more likely to receive bad service at a restaurant than other races because they are black"
Even if it were true that black people are more likely to receive bad service, it's probably for a different reason than waiters not liking black people due to their race and 'punishing' them with bad service. Blacks are notorious among waiters for being bad tippers, for example.
I really don't buy this ''white privilege systemic racism microagression invisible toolkit'' bullshit. Universities are cancer.
It's just a different usage than a lot of people would use when referring to themselves of describing the skin colour of their ancestors. I'm not talking about that specific usage of "white."
You might use that just as a description of your skin colour rather than attempting to claim a history and superiority of the "white" identity, but that doesn't make any difference to my argument.
I'm talking about the expression of "white" identity as a dominating culture of the few hundred years, a culture we are a part of regardless of how we might otherwise use "white" as a description of our ancestors skin colour. It's neither lazy nor stereotypical. Just a description of a identity category expressed within our society and the West in the (relatively) recent history.
This is where the usage of "white" that I'm talking about frequently becomes muddled with the description of ancestors. Various aspects of religion, language, race, ethnicity, diet, altitude (sea side to alpine), landscape, education, music and the dozens of other factors become bound up with thinking about our ancestors. People don't just think of them being fine for their skin colour, but that all their ideas, actions, etc., etc. were fantastic. They refuse to admit their ancestors did harm to some people.
Since people treat identity "essentially," they can't make the distinction between having skin colour and worth of action, idea or tradition. You won't, for example, admit the economically driven manifest density of the American colonisation particularly racist and unethical action because you think it reflects badly on you. It as if, by having white skin, you were the one who committed the genocide and are in the wrong.
Do I need to point how nonsensical that line of thought is? Your identity is not your ancestors. Even if they belong to the same "ethnic group (whether spoken by you or someone else)," you are not the one who committed the acts in question. Your identity as someone who has white skin not theirs. To point out their failings, including those involving "white identity," is not to say that you fail in the same way.
No doubt you might to appreciate people talking about horrible things ancestors have done and their relationship to the culture you are connected to, but that is sort of beside the point. We don't sit back and let the rich heir say that his society's tradition of Capitalism never harmed anyone, just so they can think their ancestors have a "perfection" which they inherent. It's no different for any other issue (e.g. racism, sexism, gay rights, trans rights, etc.,etc.). We don't get to ignore the harm which has been caused to people becasue we don't like to look at it.
I don't. If I was using "black" to refer to the identity which was socially oppressed, it would be a different usage. One that was describing a social relationship, rather than an individual's expression of worth. Their usage of "black" means what it does just fine.
Well, he's sort of right to say that. The point of these social analysis is they are descriptive of a social relations between people. Does the West greedily exploit other countries? Absolutely, sometimes more, sometimes less (and perhaps sometimes they managed to avoid it). In this respect, they are, in a sense "evil" and self-serving. It's a descriptive fact of behaviour. Did the West treat other cultures equal, give a fair price in trade, respect the rights of individuals in other cultures? Not in the many situations we are talking about. One cannot accurately describe what has happened without mentioning this exploitation-- it's in a sense "essential," the logical expression of the part of the world we are talking about.
It's not essential to any identity though. Europeans aren't destined to always exploit. To have a European identity doesn't somehow mean your destiny is to exploit someone else. The exploitation identified is only the acts of some Europeans-- their behaviour towards other people and their understanding of themselves in relation to others. The only Europeans who "must be" "self-serving and evil" are those who have acted that way.
Identities are both. They are all socially constructed (a discourse we use), but they are also facts (a way people are understood and how this relates to others and the world around them).
The Aztecs conquered surrounding tribes before the Spaniards set foot in the New World. Ditto for the Incas. The Iroquois fought the Huron. The Lakota fought the Comanche. The Arabs conquered many lands and peoples during the rapid spread of Islam - including some in Europe - and before that fought amongst themselves until one group became dominant. The Ottomans did the same at a later stage, also spreading into Europe and subjecting the population to their interests. The Chinese fought amongst themselves until finally being consolidated by the strongest contending power, and then were conquered by the Mongols and later by the Manchus. The Japanese sought to expand into China and other parts of southeast Asia. The Persians attempted to subject the Greeks (amongst others). I'm not too familiar with sub-Saharan African history, but in modern times we've seen a large amount of intertribal warfare. The list goes on and on.
So it would be something like Nietzsche's understanding that what is being attributed strictly to Europeans may be an essential fact of life more generally - life as 'essentially' appropriation, exploitation, excretion, aggression, etc. - rather than a particular feature of any one region or race or ethnicity. I would stop short of his view, as I understand it, that IF this behavior is congruent with life as honestly assessed (instead of the way we'd like it to be), then it should be seen as 'good', or, at the very least, 'beyond good and evil'. I have my reasons for disagreeing with his tacit metaphysics and perspective, but that may be a topic better handled at another time.
I am, however, very much open to the idea that there's something peculiar about the modern European drive to dominate and oppress. It's a topic that intrigues me a great deal in fact and I'm curious to hear your opinion on the matter.
As far as I understand it, the actual electoral college votes around December 13th or something. The popular vote of Nov 8th determines electoral college votes based on the assumption that the electors will carry out the will of their state based on only a pledge.
The vote is anonymous for at least some states, and while some states have laws designed to circumvent the possibility of a faithless elector, this can in fact happen and in theory could change the results of an election...
So I'm wondering... What are the chances of the "protesting" that is going on right now challenging the faith of enough electors? Wouldn't that beat all?
It would have to be a hell of a lot more protest for this to have any chance. But let's say the electors could be motivated to vote Hillary in instead. How do you suppose the Trump supports would respond to that? What would the Republican Party do? What of all the red states? How would their governments respond?
Their would no longer be any smooth transition of power, of that I can guarantee you. There's a reason why the losing party is gracious in defeat and talks of working together, even if that doesn't actually happen. There's a reason why none of the Democratic leaders are joining in the protests, or encouraging them, or asking the electors to vote other than who their state chose.
So let's say the electoral college does this, and the country doesn't go down in flames. What happens the next presidential election? Now a precedent has been set. The electors can defy the states and vote in someone else. How will people feel about voting then?
I don't know. I would probably feel angry personally if I was American, as if hoodwinked, but some people would be happy surely. It could lead to some crazy shit, for better or for worse.
Quoting Marchesk
Yea I do get that, but I would not put it beyond either party to try and make a move if enough unrest was there to help it fly.
Quoting Marchesk
Well the electors would be committing party suicide I reckon. I'm not exactly sure where they all come from but I do know that they are in part chosen for their loyalty and reliability in voting for who they're told to vote for; their career as an elector would be over for certain being replaced by new electors. A new degree of precedent would be there for sure, but to be honest it could also lead to some serious reform down the road (the electoral college is certainly a peculiar beast to say the least).
Since the fall of Sanders I've been morbidly hoping for Trump to win as a kind of last ditch way of throwing a spanner into works of the current political establishment in hopes of somehow enabling electoral and other forms of political reform. Now that he's elected I find myself speculating about how such reform could come about.
One way would be for Trump to get impeached in a year or two. The willingness might be there by then, and conceivably congress could try to take action against any executive orders contravening or obfuscating their role in the political process. If pence then takes over he would pretty much be in janitor mode (congress having flexed it's arm) and the following election would be approached with such apprehension and resentment that serious reform or even independent reform candidates would have more of a shot than ever before. If Trump were to be usurped via faithless electors though, admittedly I could not even guess at what the short or long term ramifications might be. I know I would have even less faith in the system that I do now... I still like to wonder what else could be changed as a result...
A constitutional change to the election process. The President is elected by popular vote. Then one needn't worry about faithless electors as there won't be an electoral college.
Notice that he did not frame the debate in terms of how white people have historically been seen, or something like that. That would have made what he said true rather than false, but it would have been totally uninteresting from the perspective of what he was trying to claim, which was that being white was itself a social construct, and this is why he didn't say it.
I think the alt-right is another example of how the relativism of their worldview comes back around to bite them in the ass. You can't enthrone victimhood and identity politics and not expect white men to start playing the game at some point. And because of the postmodernist's commitment to cultural, moral, and epistemological relativism, there's not a damn thing they can do about it; except, of course, to contradict themselves by making the essentializing claim that white men can't be victims, which they often do. Rational consistency does not matter to these people.
Because the Clinton campaign and the rules of the Democratic Party (like the use of super delegates) prevented him from winning.
May I join you in a howl of lamentation that Sanders is NOT the President-elect?
He's still Senator and has two years left. He's 75; he might be willing to run again as Senator -- I don't think 79 year olds make good presidents because the job is so demanding. The Senate is important but it's demands are much less grueling for it's members.
My guess is that he will not run for President again.
Another "Bernie Sanders" is probably not on the assembly line. His history isn't solitary and unique, but there are a limited number of people who would be like him. That said, he wasn't the last energetic, clear-headed progressive in the country. There are probably a couple of hundred idealistic clear-headed ambitious very progressive people who could run for President on the Democratic ticket. (No, I do not have a list.) A few of them might have a chance to win.
The problem is keeping out the ambitious, energetic, opportunistic pragmatists who would, if elected, deliver more of the same. The two Parties are always prepared to deliver more of the same. Democrats and Republicans institutionally embody "more of the same".
The kind of sweeping political changes that could call forth high-quality leftist-progressive politicians might be constructed in the next 4 years. It depends on how intense the reaction to Trump is, and how soon it jells into an effective movement. Demonstrations of the sort we have had for the last 2 or 3 days are a good start, but that would have to turn into an mass organized campaign within a few months if it were to have a political chance in the next biannual and quadrennial election. If it's BS as usual for the next three years, and then somebody pops out of the woodwork in 2020 to run on a reform platform, nothing much will change.
:(
What we have is not a relativism biting anyone in the arse, but an ideology reacting in an attempt to avoid it's subjugation and destruction. The alt right wants to oppress women in ways the feminists rightly argue are objectivity immoral.
Men have always played the game, proclaimed and thought themselves superior. The alt right rhetoric about women can be found all over commentary about women's nature and place prior to the rise of feminism. It's not new.
Calling someone black who's 95% european and 5% african - this goes way beyond simple description doesn't it?
So when you say "[white] as is actually used it means people of European descent," this certainly hasn't been exactly true in the past (and really still isn't, the one-drop thing still operates on a subconscious level and you can see it everywhere) ). People primarily of european descent were/are often still considered black first.
Again, this isn't necessarily an arcane or archaic understanding of whiteness - just look at how people agree on the race of celebrities of mixed descent. If there's any ambiguity, people tend to err on the side of black (or 'foreign' or something.)
Two, I agree that there's a notion of white as the absence of ethnicity rather than an ethnicity, which plays into a host of complicated mythologies surrounding white exceptionalism on both sides – that you can't be racist against whites, that there is a such thing as 'people of color' (white not being a color, but the absence of color, in this mythology), that white people have 'no culture,' that to be white is to be a colonizer, that cultural appropriation can only flow from whites to other people, that white people are the only ones with no right to a homeland, that there are no 'indigenous' white people anywhere in the world, that Nat Geo feels that showing white breasts is for some reason less okay than showing non-white breasts (white people having transcended animality or physicality that comes with gross ethnic ties), that white people are not 'allowed' to get angry or identitarian in quite the same way as non-white people, because they are expected to be adult and above that, white virtue including self-abasement and lack of in-group loyalty, and whiteness as a moral/spiritual/social and not physical category, primarily focused on evil in a narrative of crime and redemption.
All of this is out there, and all of it is nonsense, but I think it's mostly liberals that play this sort of stuff up, and it comes out of academia, not the way people organically think. Liberalism is not the way people naturally think, and requires politically-charged educational institutions to keep it in place. On the conservative side, the notion that being mixed spoils your blood, this is just obviously not a notion particular to being white. Obama was half white, and for political reasons that had to be suppressed in the popular imagination. But in the hood, well, you tell me how black he could have stayed.
Well, it's certainly liberals who elaborate whiteness in the ways you point out. But I think that same academic bubble you decry may, despite your best intents, may be operative in how you're approaching and thinking about this. None of this stuff is born in academia, it's just a foreseeable articulation of something already brewing from beneath.
Like, I have academic interests and skew liberal, but that's not the world I live in. I spend half of my work hours talking to tow truck drivers. People do organically think this way. That's what I was getting at with the none-too-academic past-time of deciding the ethnicity of a celebrity. It's a good litmus test for the way people spontaneously understand race. Maybe it's not 95-5, but you can bet 66-33 will score 'black' for white people watching tv. And, I think, many black people as well.
Yes, but that's the point. If Obama is black as America's president, yet white as just another guy in the hood, then things are very complicated here - it's not as simple as european vs african descent (though obviously it's tightly woven with real genotypic & phenotypic differences.)
Obama as a black president is a media creation, and I'm skeptical about that as a litmus test because the media can claim whatever it wants with virtually no basis in fact – they could have called him Asian on grounds he was from Hawaii, if that was what the narrative needed. So that doesn't speak to me about racial attitudes so much as media virtual reality.
My point was just that, the pop view of ethnicity sees mixed people as, well, mixed. And it's a universal tendency among people to favor their ethnic in-group and to dislike mixing with others. If it were true that whiteness had a special role here, then it would make no sense for half white-black and half asian-white kids to feel an identity crisis on either side, which they often do. They can feel between worlds, not firmly of the non-white one.
Quoting csalisbury
Do you think that black people disavow mixed white-black children as non-black?
Quoting csalisbury
I think the self-reproach is caluclated and manufactured in academic institutions. Not to say academic institutions aren't themselves real, but they like the media exist in a kind of hyper- or virtual reality, and you have to specifically indoctrinate young white people to be self-effacing, which is what such institutions do. In other words, it's a real phenomenon, and organic in the sense that all real things are organic, but it has no natural inertia behind it. If you destroyed the institutions, you would destroy the sentiment, whereas destroying the more grounded ethnic sentiments I've alluded to would require destroying far deeper (maybe even biological) institutions. Which, to be fair, seems to be part of what constitutes leftism as an ideology independent of any particular political position: the upheaval of older, more grounded institutions by newer, less grounded ones in order to impose a priori reorderings of the universe according to rationalistically determined lines of the way things ought to be.
stopped watching lol
First, the idea that racial attitudes can be neatly separated from media virtual reality doesn't make sense to me. Second, I was introduced to Obama by a political nerd long before his campaign and I immediately saw his picture and thought of him as black. Maybe I'm not representative. Maybe other white people would have seen him as asian. But I doubt it. What are your intuitions here?
I agree, and admitted as much in my first post on the 'one-drop' thing. That's why those in power tend to install their own ethnicity as an absolute and create a 'one-drop' rule. This is the social-construct piece. It takes a an actual irl set of physical characteristics and makes of them this metaphysical and pure center, any deviation from which immediately casts you outside the center. I don't think this is a uniquely european thing. But in America History, white people have tended to have the power.
I honestly don't know. I live in Maine and don't have much irl experience with this. My 'many black people as well' comment is based entirely on things I've read (You'll love this - one main source is Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye). And I may be entirely wrong.
Certainly white people spontaneously, reflexively view mixed white-black children as black.
I'm assuming, based on your comment about Obama in the hood that you think it cuts both ways?
Yes, and no? It's certainly manufactured there, but no one coldly, rationally built the blueprint. I think it's probably more an emergent phenomenon. It comes from somewhere.
He looks both white and black to me. It shows in his accent and mannerisms as well. He can affect both white and black English, and he affects either depending on the audience he's talking to, very naturally, suggesting native competence with both dialects. He can never go into full AAVE because that's just not allowed, but he does slip in some 'ain't nobody's' when talking to a majority black audience, and drawls his vowels appropriately.
Worth watching:
(Note the preacher's use of the word 'negro' as well)
Quoting csalisbury
OK, then we're in agreement. Desire for racial purity and mythology situating one's own ethnic group at the metaphysical center of everything are way older than history, history is a wee baby by comparison.
Quoting csalisbury
I don't really either, because I think southern California where I grew up is desensitized to certain kinds of ethnic admixture, especially white-Mexican. So all I can go off of is what people say online, and I've seen some Eurasian and white-black people report these sorts of things, and I have no reason to disbelieve them.
More recently I've lived for a couple years in a black neighborhood and then a Hispanic one in Chicago, and people generally seem to be more racist and aware of racial divides, though I'm not sure how it affects mixed people.
Quoting csalisbury
I disagree that it's not done rationally. Maybe not coldly, because I think emotions – even hysteria – are mixed in. But curricula are not quite the same as spontaneous cultural lore. And part of keeping it in place is actively suppressing people's natural repulsed reaction to it.
My wake-up moment with the whole classic self-flagellating white guilt thing was William T Vollman's Argall. It's the Pocahontas story told by an author who has no clear sympathies and seems to have read every source there is to read (it's a novel, but the book is littered with quotes from all sorts of contemporary texts, and the authorial voice is constantly changing.)
In it, both sides are violent and self-serving and dazed by their own myths, sometimes ( tho rarely ) noble, and both are consumed by in-fighting, often using the interracial conflict as leverage for their own intramural grabs for power.
To Vollman, the actions of the Europeans were neither noble nor deeply evil (well, there is a bit of cosmic pessimism to the book, but that's a broader evil.) They just had better technology, is all.
But the thing is the book just seemed super fucking respectful. To both sides. Like felt respectful. You can usually feel the bullshit, but I got none of that.
Could you briefly explain what you mean by "liberalism"? I'm putting you on the spot, but not uncharitably. You said "adulthood" and "liberalism" aren't compatible. How so? Why?
(A lot of people dislike liberals: radical leftists, conservatives, people who don't know what else to accuse somebody of being, and so on.
I see the basic impetus behind leftism roughly as a kind of hyper-rationalism. The leftist has an a priori idea of how the world ought to be, and is outraged that it is not that way. The leftist proposes that the world ought to be changed to be that way, preferably as swiftly and with as little compromise as possible. So leftism is a radicalism in that, insofar as the world is imperfect, it seeks to perfect it, and since it cannot be perfected, it will perpetually be calling for immediate radical change and the dismantling of deep institutions, in favor of new institutions with no historical roots that better match reality as it ought to be.
This means that leftism fundamentally privileges representation over reality in a certain systematic way. I read this cheesy fantasy story that had a great line, where the keeper of the observatory told a visitor that the model of the universe was not perfectly representative of the universe, and when the guest asked, 'so it is imperfect?' the observatory keeper responded 'the universe is imperfect. One day it will be remedied, to fit the observatory.' This is essentially what I see as the guiding impetus of leftism. It is representations that determine reality rather than vice-versa. In this it is fundamentally rationalist in the sense that it believes humanity imposes itself on the world, rather than the world imposing itself on humanity, which is the empiricist bent. The world is as people make it to be, and conforms, and will conform, to the categories constructed for it and placed upon it. This is of course the deep metaphysical source of social constructionism in its various forms, and of the perpetual leftist call to radical political action and revision.
Wherever the leftist sees something that isn't perfect, where the empiricst of conservative impulse is to change oneself to match the world, the leftist impulse is to change the world to match oneself. Rather than meeting a pre-existent standard, like the conservative, the leftist protests that the standard is wrong, and ought to be place elsewhere. Hence the leftist generally does not seek to be beautiful, but to redefine the ugly as beautiful (and even to problematize and hate beauty if it proves too recalcitrant), because he believes, at bottom, that there is no substance to the world other than what he places on it (notice that nihilism of some sort is considered self-apparent to many leftists, or more softly the belief that 'the world has the meaning you give to it'), and so there is a kind of delusion or fantasy of power and control, reflected in the desire for central planning in government and statism generally. This further leads to a conflation between intentions and ends: the leftist thinks that because all reality is malleable to representations, what one needs to do in order to achieve some effect is simply to intend to change the world in a certain way and marshal enough money or power to do so. Hence why the leftist believes that if something is bad, the best thing to do is illegalize it, and so on. There is a kind of naive believe that intentions generate realities. This, in my opinion, is why leftism is grounded on a deep denial of reality, not just as an after-effect (all of us deny unpleasant truths), but as a matter of principle. There is a sense in which the leftist believes that he ultimately cannot be wrong, and where the world bumps against him, the world must move. It also may in turn mean that there are certain things that, while true, cannot or should not be believed, because that would cause one to represent reality in an evil way, making one evil, and so unpleasant truths have systematic reasons to be denied or at least suspended in various forms of doublethink.
This is the reason that the leftist critiques tertiary social phenomena in the media, because they think the media has the power to control thought and behavior rather than vice-versa, and why they put so much emphasis on 'representation' in media and how the media can be used as a tool to change the way people think. This is also why it is utterly obsessed with policing language – it thinks, in a way, you can speak truths into being. Leftism is a top-down ideology, while empiricism and conservatism are, if you like, bottom-up in believing that there are organic features of reality that naturally arise and that one has to accept and conform to if one wants to live. The leftist is in deep denial about the way representations interact with the world, and holds out a secret hope that he can control these representations, and so control all of reality. But this will never work, and so the moral hysteria surrounding trying to perpetually doctor these representations is ongoing and perpetually radical / destructive. Leftism in a way saps adulthood, which is why it makes sense for a university to provide Play-Doh to upset leftist students to calm them after a troubling experience, while doing such a thing is confusing or absurd for conservative students.
All of these, I believe, are features of childhood. The confusion of representation and reality (lack of object permanence), the belief in the malleability of the world to one's desires, the refusal to face unpleasant truths, the insistence that everything ultimately be molded to one's wishes. This creates a desire for childlike narratives and a liking for comic books, superheroes, and so on, along with simplistic moral axes of oppressor-oppressed that create a sort of identity-based template for knowing who is in the wrong when, to emphatically and uncompromisingly support the side that is being hurt by the ones in the wrong. This in turn leads to the basic oppressor/oppressed distinction, which has no fundamental way of being questioned, but only multiplied and complicated by infinitely expanding axes of oppression based on increasingly minutely defined representational categories. And the desire to use this distinction for political gain in enforcing the privilege of one's own representation (and hence reality, since representations determine reality) leads to a weaponization of the notion of oppression, and the glorification of victimhood, weakness, emotional instability, infantilization, and so on. It also leads to the co-opting of natural human emotions, such as grief and anger, into deliberately evoked stratagems employed for specific political reforms. All of this is an endless, destructive spiral that can never be satisfied (since reality will always defeat the representations, while the leftist insists on the opposite), and makes everyone miserable insofar as nothing works insofar as it systematically denies reality.
But this is the behavior of a child – the first thing a child learns to do with its emotions is to artificially invoke them for instant gain, to make its desires a reality. Along with resentment and strategies for revenge against reality when one's desires aren't fulfilled.
––––
OK, scattershot, but that about covers it.
This I agree with entirely, buut....
I don't agree with this. I think both conservatives and liberals can take up the comic-book vision, and I think both conservatives and liberals can rise above it. This actually seems self-apparent to me, and I'd question how seriously you think that manichean good v evil narratives are more characteristic of liberal thought.
And then the resigned wisdom of the realistic, pessimistic conservative can very easily become the twisted humanism of the plantation owner who wishes the world wasn't structured like this, but that's how it is, and always has been, and there have always been slaves and always will be, so the best one can do is make slavery as humane as possible. A kind of Ecclesiastes argument.
Edit: posted this as you were posting your response to BC which may or may not have rendered this post moot. Reading it now.
Haven't read the book so I can neither praise nor criticize it. But perhaps your source of knowledge about self-flagellating white guilt should come from experience and first hand observation rather than from Vollman's (or anybody else's) book.
In your life experiences, do you find white people who flagellate themselves about their white guilt? Have you witnessed ordinary white people engaging in behavior toward blacks, asians -- whoever -- that would merit self-flagellation?
Quoting csalisbury
Maine you say. I grew up in a rural 99.9% white county in Minnesota. I knew 1 black person by the time I graduated from high school, and he was from Uganda (exchange student). There weren't many blacks at the state college I graduated from, either. In 1968-69 I spent two years living and working in the black community of Boston. Shock immersion moving from Winona, MN to Roxbury, MA. I found that the black people I lived and worked among were not different than the white people I had grown up with. Oh sure, different food, different accent. Perhaps I was too stupid and naive to notice actual differences, but over the 40 years since then as I have worked with other black people, had black and white lovers, and so on, I haven't found significant cultural differences related to race.
Biased? Sure: my bias is that people are pretty much all alike. (in a 99.9% NW European descendent rural community, they would be.) Yes, trivial differences, especially comparing one individual to another. In the mass, no. The same things make people tick. Love, sex, desires, wishes, fears, the importance of their parents, and so on. People all seem nourished by the same thing: good work, enough income, decent environment, social connections, rich cultural life, all that. And people are starved by the same thing: bad jobs, poverty, crappy surroundings, isolation, impoverished cultural life, and so on.
The older I get, the more suspicious I am of other people's writings, whether it's books, NYT columnists, New Yorker authors, leftish magazine writers, etc. It isn't that I'm getting anti-intellectual in my old age, it's just that so many writers seem wrapped up in a package of such very narrow and specific ideas. They are tendentious, pretentious, etc.
I find that books published quite a few years ago (like 40 or more) have better balance and reflect a clearer understanding. It isn't that people thought better 40 years ago; it's just that if the book survived, it was probably pretty good to start with. Though a current book that I think is quite good is Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States (it's a good review for a lot of history that I have forgotten if I ever knew). White Trash: The 400 year Untold History of Class in America is good too.
Isn't this almost tautologically false? The conservative, by definition, does not change. After all, the world doesn't change - the sun rises and the sun sets. But while he doesn't believe anything essential changes, he does concede that the world is in flux. So he reacts, meeting this or that irruption with force, in order to restore things to the way they were. He may not try to change the world to serve the observatory, but he's endlessly vigilant against the weeds that threaten his well-manicured garden. The conservative changes, a bit, but he changes to stay the same.
But what does the conservative do about stuff he believes is bad? He defends the laws already in place. Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man. A resigned, even ironic, acceptance. But still acceptance.
Do you consider strict guidelines about how one may or may not depict God leftist by virtue of their focus on representation?
You said a lot of interesting things, some of which I would agree with or ring more or less true, but this part is troubling. Institutions do change over time, and the results on society can be large. If one were to take your critique of liberalism fully, then the various movements for equal rights in the US and elsewhere would be seen as a waste of time. But the result of those movements was more rights granted to those lacking and changes to various institutions, sooner or later.
A criticism of conservative views toward deep institutions is that it does not admit to progress. It doesn't allow for the possibility that old institutions can be flawed in ways that could be amended. It doesn't allow for the possibility that things may have been different prior to the setting up of such institutions, and they can be different after.
As if deep institutions reflect a kind of permanent social structure which can only be made worse by trying to change it. I don't think humans are like that. Human organizations vary a lot over time and place. Humans are adaptable, and our values vary. So things can be changed. Things have changed. Massively.
Compare the modern world in Europe today to what it was 500 years ago. It's night and day different.
That's most unfortunate. Different views need to be heard, especially ones challenging the official doctrine. That's what academia should be about. Or am I preferencing representation (my ideal academia) over how humans actually behave in academia?
Also, I'm skeptical generally of the notion of progress. I agree some situations are better than others, and you should try to better yourself. But 'progress' is politicized.
What I mean was that it was a wake-up-call about how narcissistic and useless white self-flagellation is for understanding and interacting with non-white people. I more or less agree with TGW that this kind of self-flagellation is the default in middle class, liberal circles. Flagellation is a way of keeping the focus on oneself, often at the expense of reducing other people to mere occasions for one's pious penitence.
But yes, in my experience I do find white people flagellating themselves. And I have certainly witnessed atrocious behaviors by whites toward non-whites. We're mostly white, up here, but there are quite a few Somalian refugees in Portland.
Regarding the rest of what you've written, I agree that people are mostly the same. But I don't think that means they're mostly good.
What I meant was simply that white people literally see a half-white half-black person as black. That's the reflexive reaction. I certainly didn't mean to suggest that they don't see them as devoid of desires and fears.
I see the hatred of representation of the divine to be an affirmation that reality is above representation, God being held to be reality par excellence. A distrust of idolatry is a call to never mistake the image for the real thing, or love it more. A leftist dismantles the possibility of idolatry in a principled way by disavowing that there are any realities.
Quoting csalisbury
Maybe so, but reactive law is incredible. Again, it's what built England. You wait for a problem to arise, then judge when you have to on what ought to be done. Over the years an intricate, deeply woven house of natural institutions is built. The leftist by contrast is Cartesian, and demands (notice, the leftist always demands) that an entire constitution be written up from scratch, on the spot, and immediately enshrined, not in response to the organic problems the world rises and solving them, but from an a priori conception of the way the world ought to be.
There's a difference between ethnicity and race. An ethnicity can contain multiple races. And a race can contain multiple ethnicities.
For the former: Hispanic is an ethnicity. It includes people who are brown, black, mestizo.
For the latter: White is a race. It includes people of Jewish, Scottish, and Scandinavian ethnicities.
Ethnicities have to do with culture, heritage, country, origins. Race is a mark which designates certain character traits which then assign you a relative position within a social group.
Obviously both of these definitions aren't accepted by everyone, and I wouldn't even say they are the best on offer. But there's certainly a difference between the two.
Ok, you have a liberal/leftist picnic basket full of sour tomatoes, bitter melon, rancid olives, spoiled meat, and other delicacies. Some of it I recognize, some of it is a bit too chewed up to identify with.
I won't, but my liberal/leftist picnic basket would have some unappetizing items in it too.
The leftism I was first exposed to was, merciful god, old-fashioned. It focused on Marx and some early 19th/20th century American socialists like DeLeon. It was not flavored by the University marxism of the 1980s-present which frankly doesn't smell at all like the Marxism I like.
Quoting The Great Whatever
This strikes me as the phony marxism of POMO. Quoting The Great Whatever
Quoting The Great Whatever
It seems to me that Marx (who I use as the anchor of "leftist") was pretty well historically informed and viewed history as a process involving contending forces and interests. Yes, in the end he saw a world in which Man came into his own, no longer a wage slave, no longer a master, but in a classless society (a nice big thick hunk of shining glittering idealism for you). My belief is that Marx and Engels can not be the source of quick-perfection schemes. Historical processes take their time, and their time is not our time. Sure, I'd like to see a socialist approach to health care, to full employment, to basic income, to the diet farm for the 1%, and so on, but being in a hurry is a recipe for leftist despair.
Quoting The Great Whatever
Don't get carried away here; it's not good for your blood pressure.
The currently victorious conservatives are finding plenty that isn't "perfect" and do not seem poised to fit into the world they see. Rather, they seem poised to do some major league changing.
there is no substance to the world other than what he places on it Right. Well people who think there is no substance other than what they place on it, whatever their political views, are chock full of shit. If they are leftists, then they need to be taken away and drummed out of the leftist movement.
Quoting The Great Whatever
I agree that these are characteristics of childhood persisting into adulthood (sometimes into senescence, even). I don't think this has anything to do with left-center-conservative politics; it has to do with delayed personal intellectual and social maturation. You know, a lot of the stuff you are talking about is spouted by college students. If neuroscience is correct, and the brain isn't fully developed until around 25, that means even graduate students are still spouting immature texts. In the case of severe developmental delays one may find some tenured professors babbling this way. (In fact, one does.)
I get where you are coming from. Thank you for the thorough response. I appreciate it. Reading is hard work, and I don't want to tire anyone's brains out too much here, so... that's that.
If one faces a forced choice, then I suppose--yes, a half & half black-white person would be sorted into the black group. But people are not always in forced choice situations. The people that I grew up among were concerned about a lot less than 50% black, even though there weren't any actual blacks around for them to worry about -- mostly just television screens.
But the times are changing. White working class and middle class people (whatever the terms mean) are becoming much more accepting of mixed-race couples and mixed-race children, right here in 83% white Minnesota, even. "More accepting" isn't color blind, of course, nor (IMHO) should people be color blind. That's a kind of erasure of one of one's and others' real characteristics.
The times are changing, but progress isn't as swift, sure, and final as we would like. Patience, patience. We'll get there.
But there's one really big problem with this view. The conservative is wise enough to confront the problems that arise as they are and then determine what ought to be done. The leftist on the other hand demands that things be built from scratch based on ideals. But so how does one confront the leftist? Because one problem that arises, among many, is a bunch of people demanding that things be built from scratch and based on ideals ( this is not new, or particularly cartesian - it goes back to the prophets, and further)
And which one would consider abolishing slavery? Would that occur to the conservative? Or would the conservative just argue that is the way God intended institutions to be set up? What problem would the conservative confront to convince them to abolish slavery?
As I've said, I think it can't survive without academia, and there's a sense in which academia is a sick place, that often harbors people whose ideas in society at large would be otherwise unrespectable, and leftism and apologia for totalitarianism of various sorts often go hand in hand. Cf. Thorongil's comments on the professor who would prefer Islamic theocracy to living in America: I take it he's telling the truth about that, anyway!
But how do you stop academia from breeding this sort of stuff? I don't know. Academia is in a sense inherently divorced from reality, and so there are no real checks on it from developing fantasies.
I can't consistently advocate for sweeping changes that eliminate the rise of leftism as a possibility, nor would I want to. The most you can do is take responsibility for yourself – to be tired of what leftism offers you as a person, and to be frank with other people about this, and not to let them feel ashamed for disagreeing with obviously false things.
How would a conservative end slavery, if not with the death of hundreds of thousands of people? Well, I'm not a miracle-worker, but here is a suggestion: buy out the slave owners' trade and release the slaves. It'd be a lot less expensive than a war, too. Then destroy the infrastructure that makes holding slaves economically viable, and once the whole institution has atrophied, sneak legislation in that outlaws it.
Another way to look at this is that societies aren't sustainable and inevitably collapse themselves. I guess this is my view. And I guess I'm not a firm leftist. Maybe a meta-conservative with a tragic outlook? I think plugging the dam is as doomed as revolution, so I don't see any especial merit in either. Or I do see the virtues in both. They're both necessary (inevitable?) so I can't really come down one way or the other. I think Marchesky is right that we'd still have slavery without leftists. But then we wouldn't have the civil war (and but also there's the conservatism of northern factory owners, and it's very complicated.)
Would we better off with ancien regime France and no revolution? idk.
But again, this has been going on since the beginning of time and will probably never stop. Many of the OT prophets fit your leftist diagnosis to a T.
EDIT: posted this before I saw you'd already posted on the civil war.
I don't feel like one really needs an answer to this question, because I'm not committed to the preservation of a single society in the abstract, or even of humanity as a whole – we're all gong to die too, of course, and humanity itself isn't something to be eternally enshrined, but will pass away. What is important is to disavow atrocity when it's in front of you, and go step by step. The wheel turns. This is, incidentally, something that I think rationalist philosophies generally are less capable of understanding.
survive the encounter - i know it has a very specific meaning here - but survive the encounter sounds about right.
Of course you've said that your beliefs about the left are confirmed by experience too, and I'm more than willing to concede that experience is far from all encompassing or representative.
But when he listed those skills -- I was like, well, yes! (and it's actually very very hard to organize politically along those skills)
However, I tend to think of race, and the politics of race, as a different issue from left/right too. Leftists care about race, for sure, but I'd say it's a bit odd to frame the issues of race as strictly leftist issues. There's the dialogue of race within leftist circles, there's a dialogue of race within other circles, and there's a dialogue on race within different racial groups and within their own racial groups. The biggest lack of dialogue on race, by my lights, is actually between groups.
There are both liberal and conservative political proposals and beliefs about race, and at the end of the day black people organize regardless of party or political ideology in order to obtain power and pursue self-interest. I don't mean that in a negative way -- I tend to think that this is what politics not only is about but should be about (not always, but tend to). This is only to say that the politics of race, as I view them, are not strictly leftist, though race is certainly a part of leftist concerns in general (however that happens to manifest in a particular setting or group).
Just restricting myself to the characterization of leftism, then: Even metaphorically -- this is what I mean by I think our experiences are just different. I can say I have seen what you describe. I can say I've participated in it, and will probably do so again.
But, in my experience, there's more than that, too.
Let's take capitalism. Do communists dream big dreams? Yes. Why not, after all? But do they recognize them as dreams? Well, depends on the communist. And, after all, an American communist is of course trained to live within a capitalist society, they just believe that communism -- whatever that happens to be -- is better than capitalism.
But how could that be unless they had some notion of how it functions and why? And wouldn't a self-critical communist also come to realize, at some point, they are very much part and parcel to the system of capitalism and they don't know how to survive in a communist system?
On that latter point, especially -- I mean, in my experience, leftists are poignantly aware of that fact.
Hence why I agree with Mike -- he's bringing his analysis of society back to the level of survival, which is in fact the sorts of things you would have to think about in any society. It doesn't have to be hunting, as you note, but just know-how to live in that society. And sometimes the better choice in the moment is to have "more lawyers" and fewer "revolutionaries", just to keep with the communist drift. (that wouldn't mean they are political revolutionaries if they are lawyers -- but they may still harbor communist sentiments, at least).
But, I'm willing to say that these are merely what I've seen, and isn't necessarily representative of the left. But I see leftists in not just idealist terms, but much more pragmatic and earthly terms too, just going off of what I have experienced.
It seems to me that Kurt Vonnegut wrote a story satirizing this. (OK, here I did a Google: it was "Harrison Bergeron", published in a sci fi magazine in 1961.) Vonnegut wrote...
There is a sub-culture of resentment out there, no doubt--self-centered people whining and nattering about the various impositions they have to suffer under.
You are quite right that this posture is not compatible with self-respect or maturity.
Is this leftist? I suppose it is, if you call the reformers who wrote the Americans with Disabilities Act leftists. By extension, I suppose, you could arrive at the view that the whole business of being handicapped, deficient, victimized as a way of life is "leftist". "Leftist" serves you as a bucket into which you are tossing a lot of unpleasant stuff. I'd prefer you get a different bucket to collect all this stuff in, because my "leftist" bucket has different stuff and it gets confusing to me as to which garbage we are talking about.
We real leftists do complain a lot, that is true, but mostly it's about the deep institutions of the economy and politics.
Like we could end the world drug trade by buying out cannabis, opium, and cocaine farmers, and closing down all the factories that make the precursors to methamphetamine? Supposing that this could be done, we can't overlook the fact that there is a demand market that pulls these substances in. How does a conservative solve that side of the problem?
Slavery couldn't be 'bought out' like one railroad could buy out a competitor and thereby get rid of it because...
The value of slaves was the largest asset in the pre-civil war country. There wasn't enough cash in the US to carry out such a maneuver.
The production of a high volume of raw cotton at a low price depended on slavery (at the time, in the US south).
The economics of slave production were deeply entangled in England's textile industry, and northern banking, shipping, and wholesale interests.
Slave states (the Confederacy) were not only pro-slave, they were also against centralized government, any kind of governmental regulation, industrialism, and social mobility. (For instance, southern states didn't want to cooperate with each other even on railroads; each state built short, non-connecting lines.)
The Civil War was not just about ending slavery; it was also about denying states the prerogative of leaving the union (California secessionists, take note).
War is preferable to a financial solution IF you have a lot of disposable men (the North had more than the South), and if war will be profitable to manufacturers, bankers, financiers, etc. (it was very profitable).
The North intended to pursue a Hamiltonian future of strong central government, large infrastructure investment, industrialism, and social development. The South liked it's Jeffersonian agrarian, conservative values, ideas about chivalry, personal honor, personal independence, and so on. The secessionists departure was a watershed, make-or-break moment.
I am, I assure you. My fellow grad students who took the class can confirm it, as it's a running joke between us.
I doubt the professor reads this forum, so I can give a bit more detail. We were talking about one of the caliphates one day in relation to Foucault. According to Foucault, power in liberal democracies is highly diffuse and invisible, meaning that it infects all aspects of life without one necessarily realizing it, instead of being concentrated at the top or seen in the form of visible institutions. This makes the people in such societies more oppressed, dominated, surveilled, and punished than in other societies. So the professor concluded, based on this line of reasoning, and with a smile at first, that he would prefer to live in said caliphate than in modern day America. When pressed, he doubled down on his assertion.
Is there a little too much surveillance and commercialism? Yeah, but it seems mostly aimed at creating more effective ads than denying me any rights. Would I feel more free in an Amish community? I doubt it. Have there been plenty of other societies which were less free? Absolutely. Could the political situation be reformed to make our votes count more? Most likely. But is it better than most political situations in the history of the world? Most likely.
Hummmmmmmmm.
Quoting Marchesk
Which means you can't go wherever you want...
Quoting Marchesk
Money permitting...
Quoting Marchesk
Holler 'fire!' in a crowded space and see then if you can indeed say whatever you please.
Quoting Marchesk
If they're peaceful.
Quoting Marchesk
I do love me some lemonade.
Quoting Marchesk
Terrorists wouldn't like you very much.
Quoting Marchesk
Unless you slander.
Quoting Marchesk
But win? Hmm.
Quoting Marchesk
A big fat nope to bodily movement. If I tried to "freely move" across some farmer's land around here I'd be shot, tits up dead.
- excerpts from What are the Iranians Dreaming About? - 1978
The closest thing to spirituality mainstream America has is Game of Thrones, which is like, okay, man can't live on Mountain Dew alone.
Personally, I would not elect to live in any sort of Islamic state, and would consider fleeing if the Muslim population got too large. I just think it's not safe to be a non-Muslim anywhere, with a Muslim majority, ever.
They would not end it at all. Such a conservative free their slaves and... everyone else's would keep doing what tradition and power dictated.
Now there are many alternatives than a "magic" and immediate cure to slavery, to getting up and saying: "It's wrong. Cast it out with violence tomorrow," but any of the alternatives end in making a disruptive ethical proclamation in public.
If I just talk about freeing my slave with my close friends, they're going to ask why I did it, and if I answer honestly and without burying my own ethical concerns, I will raise the problem with the given tradition. Now, if they do the same as me, our limited ideas will grow into a movement. We will become public and the established tradition will react.
We'll either have repression of our idea or, if we have a will and power to survive, war. Unless, we've built up a culture which accepts changes without jumping to war to defend tradition, culture or an idea.
Your reading of the Left is, well, ignorant. The idea it views images as a solution is an illusion created by only looking at wide-eyed advocates. For most of the Left, the question of oppression is descriptive, not utopian. We walk in the hall of mirrors which show us all the horrors. From our ivory towers, we watch and see all the different instances of oppression. And what use is it to avoiding them? Frequently none. A lot of the time we don't even pose a solution to and oppression we identify, but them I don't think that was really ever the point. Many of us know there isn't one, at least within the time frame people usually think in. Our project is a knowledge, for a limited impact on some oppressions.
What "progressivism" really does is disrupt our image of survival. Under it, our survival is no longer sacred. We destroy our myths that we, or our way of life, must always continue. It doesn't mean we must die, but it does mean we are not above death. The next generation may live utterly differently to how we do. There may even be no next generation at all. It's not really "nihilistic" or "tabla rasa" at all. What it cuts downs is the idea we are made by something other than ourselves (including our instincts and traditions), so we have no guarantee of survival. We may always by wiped out. The image of our own necessity is lost.
Descriptively, it's right. In the secular liberal democracy, who is more "oppressed" (here this means "has their values, ideas rejected and organisation of power rejected" ) then the spiritual theocrat who wants religion to be an integral part of politics and everyone's lives? Just about no-one.
Power is also diffuse (many different values respected, rather than everyone having to follow God) and "hidden" in a sense (everyone thinks even else is free to be the individual who they are-- the theocrat will be insulted with: "You aren't "oppressed. You are free to practice your individual religion").
I doubt that he has.
Indeed, I think it's the critical mind that saw him make the argument. A description of secular democracy's "oppression" of a society where power is defined by religious belief, and how that might make the Iranian Revolution attractive to some, even if it did offer a warped image of those traditions and values. He's not thinking wishfully. He's describing relations and motivations of power.
That's an angle I hadn't considered, and it does make sense.
@Thorongil Is it possible he was trolling?
For sure, the point is to describe what is lost for a point of view "oppressed" with secular liberal democracies. If he were "neutral" (whatever that supposed to mean), he would be hiding what was lost. He would not be honest about our rejection of the value and power structure in question. We would not understand that, in our values and power structure, we were putting down another and their values.
In the sense of power, the Iranian Revolution is similar to any other movement for change within our history. Those who's values and beliefs aren't respected within the power structure (theocracy in this case), imagine a world in which they are (often the "utopia" ) and rise up to change it.
The "oppressive" power structures in question is replaced by one that respects the values or beliefs in question, at least in some way (revelations differ in their degree of success).
This is all descriptive though. In saying this, he not making the argument the Iranian revolution is ethical, just that it driven by developing a society which respects a value or belief rather than repressing it.
I know... but that's not going to happen if everyone else behaves if they ought to own slaves. Even if you start privately and small, if it going to have an effect, it will become a movement that grows a public profile, one which is arguing people ought to give-up their slaves.
No doubt a buy-out would offer a way to avoid conflict in some circumstances, but would it have worked in the US? I mean would the government had the funds to buy out the many slaves? What happens when people say no to the buyout (and likely they would, given the social and economic place of slaves in the US)? And if the buyout isn't mandated, what does one do when the tradition of slavery continue to be passed down? Given the context of the US at the time, we end-up with a situation where any method of effective change is going to lock horns with the deeply embedded tradition. Does it mean war? Not necessary (that would be up to how people handle challenge to tradition), but the change will not occur with the presence of behaviour that slavery is a problem.
White, non-religious leftist academics in the humanities and social "sciences" in particular are infatuated with Islam, but their research always has an apologetic tone to it. Contrast this with most academics who study Christianity. There's no desire to understand how the Quran was written, who wrote it, Muhammad's place in history, etc. No, just endless books and articles being created on how queer black Muslims in Belgium negotiate relations of power. Blegh. My professor is merely typical in this regard.
I also get the vague impression that leftists closer to the source, especially those fleeing Muslim countries for persecution, have far less patience for it. It's easier to tint it with roses when you don't have to deal with it. And it's of course the oppressive Christian countries in which you're free to be openly critical of the 'reigning' religious values.
It would be, but are other people going to agree with it? To open with a policy of: "I'll pay you to free your slaves" is a great, but will people agree to it? Some will, no doubt, if you offer enough. But what of those people who's identity is tied-up in being owners of slaves? They'll read the buyout as a betrayal of how people need to live and recognise it as a existential threat to their way of life. We could well have war anyway.
England's Emancipation Act of 1834 was essentially a mass buyout of all slaves in the British Empire – they paid off the slave owners with recompense to have it pass.
I read about this in some book, but I can't remember the details, and don't have good citations.
this:
is a dumb thing to say.
There are tons of books on these subjects. I took a middle east studies 101 course by a suuuper liberal professor and we covered - tho in a brief 101 way - precisely these topics. They were an integral part of the course.
There are some points you make I agree with, but stuff like this makes it seems like either have no idea what you're talking about or just like the sound of your own rhetoric. You're poisoning your own well.
It's more to do with recognising the "oppressive" impact the West has on other cultures. Not so much a question of creating monolithic enemy, but being careful of putting down another culture and its people, pretty much regardless of the exact ethical worth of their practices. I mean does Saudi Arabia needs us in their country spreading our "enlightened" values to their ignorant people? Or are they their own people, with their own values, who a worth enough to practice the culture the believe in?
The point is there is a racism in our insistence that we must know better. If we are to say, for example, that Islam is a tradition of war that has no just place in our world, as is the standard of many critics, we are really calling for a genocide of the tradition in a favour of our own.
"Islam" becomes a scapegoat. In our denouncing of Islam, we create an image that we are addressing a problem (Islamic terrorism, local oppression within Islamic countries, tensions between Islamic immigrants and our culture, etc., etc.) which makes us feel safer. But does nothing of the sort. All the problems we are so worried about continue, only we now dump derision upon the way of life of many respectful and peaceful people within our own communities too.
Or we support a situation and policy which have deeply damaging effects on Muslim communities around the world (e.g. the war in Iraq, Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, etc.,etc.), where our political interests (e.g. oil, rallying our community around an enemy, the safety of Israel) are more important than Muslim lives and communities.
Fear and intimidation are also things to take into consideration.
As far as I understand it, the succession from the union was indeed first and foremost about preventing central - or northern - authority from being exercised on the lower states given that the north had been growing much faster, and with the addition of Minnesota and Oregon in 58 and 59, basically had tipped the balance of power in congress.
In a letter to Horace Greeley in the midst of the civil war, before the emancipation proclamation, (although he would have been working on it) Lincoln wrote the following:
Kinda reminiscent of modern political maneuvering if you ask me. The north wanted to keep the south in the fold, freeing the slaves was just something that helped to achieve that.
Yes.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
White people can be Muslims too, Islam is not a race.
And we DO know better. Homosexuality can be punished by death in Saudi Arabia. Surely you can't excuse this with an appeal to cultural relativism?
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
Yes!
In terms of how it usually manifests within the West, yes. Islam is the "The Other," a people with a history and culture considered outside anything worthwhile, something understood to be so savage that it ought to be wiped off the face of the Earth. I would go as far to say a lot of us think of Muslims as "savages" who we must enlighten.
To disapprove of a religion is certainly discrimination. Whether it is racist will depend on how deeply a religious tradition is embedded and tied to a racial or ethic group. Given the place of most major religions in their culture, I would say that most disapprovals of religion would be racist, if they are suggesting the religion is entirely Other to culture and civilisation.
Religions teach many unethical things. Most, if not all, have I would say. Islam is no exception to that (whether it be "textually supported" or merely "cultural" ). As such I'd say they are all worthy of disapproval in some way or another.
The point is our criticisms don't usually talk about these issues effectively. We don't name a particular issue and how to build a just society from the point of view of the religious tradition (i.e. we-the religious tradition- were wrong). Rather, we call for the tradition to be wiped out, acting like it gave nothing of value or provided nothing to a community, turning entire populations of people into "savages" who never had a civilisation (unlike us enlightened liberal Westerners).
So no, @csalisbury I don't think I'm being dumb. I was making a comparison of the amount and level of critical scholarship on Islam and Christianity, concluding that the latter is greater than the former, which I don't see how you can dispute. As such, it was intended to be a very general statement, so your anecdote is quite irrelevant. Plus, I would love to have sat in your class to confirm your impression.
I wasn't saying white people couldn't be muslims.
My point was that many muslims aren't "white," and so acting like Islam is just savagery amounts to equating their way of life, and so them (the non-white muslim), with nothing but a heinous harm to the world.
In terms of ethic identity, it may even end-up getting white muslims-- what do you think would be the reaction of many to white muslim who defined Islam? Accusations they had betrayed all that was good for a savage way of life.
Do we know better? What of all the muslims in Saudi Arabia who find that punishment abhorrent? Us Westerners aren't the only ones capable of recognising the worth of gay people. People from Islamic cultures and traditions can do so too. Just as we, from a Christian culture and tradition that despised gay people, did (at least to some degree).
This is pure insanity. A belief system and a person are two different things. Criticizing the former doesn't harm anyone. For your claim to get off the ground, you would have to expand the notion of harm to near meaninglessness.
What it also says about you is that you don't value free speech, which is good to know, if only to know that I will have people like you to thank for putting me in jail in the future for speaking ill of a particular religion.
should have been charitably understood as this:
" I was making a comparison of the amount and level of critical scholarship on Islam and Christianity, concluding that the latter is greater than the former"
then, yeah, you're being dumb (ok, ok, disingenuous.)
Do you think the West in the las 50 or so years has had a unique and unprecedented relationship with homosexuality? This is something I don't know the answer to, but looking at the world stage as it is now, it can certainly feel that way. There seems to be exactly one culture on this planet that's even pretending to give a shit about you if you're south of straight. When I want to fuck men, I'm going to go to the whitest, most Western place possible, ASAP. And I'm going to stay the hell away from Muslim nations (and Muslim neighborhoods).
That was never the point though. You are only speaking of the (classical) liberal utopian myth, where every person gets whatever they want, whenever the want it.-- "everyone equal no matter what"
At some point, whether at home or abroad, someone's doesn't get their values and beliefs respect. They are discriminated against and it is just--e.g. those who want to own slaves don't get what they want. The question is when such discrimination applies.
The "universal" application isn't needed at all. In some cases it may make sense for the discrimination to apply in one place (e.g. one's home) but not in another (e.g. another culture which has slavery enshrined). Slavery in the US, for example, can be addressed by us (whether it results in war or occurs by some better means). Deeply embedded prejudice against gay people within Islamic culture in other countries? We can't really touch that. It needs to be addressed from the inside.
Consistency isn't what makes ethics. That's the old myth that ethical significant comes from an image. Difference is what makes ethics, an expression of a particular time and place, which means some actions are preferable to others. Sometimes this means living with people and actions you disagree with.
OK, but I just don't believe this. Being from somewhere else on the planet doesn't give you free reign to do whatever you want to gay people. And they matter more than the feelings of Muslims whose religion gets criticized.
And if the 'disagreement' is between wether you get to live or die because of your sexual proclivities, then no, I don't have to live with people who disagree with me on that, and I won't be cowed into 'respecting' that opinion. I'm not interested in the relativist slant.
- ISLAMIC STUDIES
ARAB-351-352 Introduction to Arabic Culture (3, 3)
ARAB-373 Women in the Qur’an (3)
ARAB-444 Introduction to Islamic Civilization
ARAB-525 Qur’anic Exegesis (3)
ARAB-535-536 The Qur’an (3,3)
ARAB-555 Introduction to Arabic and Islamic Studies
ARAB-609 The Qur’an in History (3)
ARAB-610 Science in the Islamic World
ARAB-611 Islamic Thought on the Eve of Modernity
ARAB-627 Intro to the Hadith (3)
ARAB-760 Arab Historiography (3)
THEO-350 Readings in Sufism (3)
For sure. We, a society and culture previously prejudiced against gay people, changed to one that was not (or at least so much).
A question of our behaviour, not anything necessarily unique to our heritage. Islamic culture could alter in a similar way. It would take a lot of change, perhaps even within the major tenets of the religion itself (the notion of God as an authority above challenge is a bit of a barrier here, but then culture of our history thought much the same at some point).
Neither do I. I don't know anyone who agrees with the argument: "Yes, killing gay people is good. They ought to be doing it." The point is our reaction ( "Islam is savagery which has no place in civilised society" ) isn't about that sort of issue. It's just us lashing out at a present problem which we can't fix more or less immediately-- well, unless you're into genocide.
Clearly not. Let's give you an example. If I say: "Radical Islam is the greatest philosophy ever. All other beliefs are nonsense and we ought to abandon them." is this statement harmless? Would you accept me saying it all over the place and it garnering respect from all corners of society?
Words, understanding, lives and belief systems are all bound up together. What we say and think about others matters.
Criticising someone's beliefs, actions and values is to attack their place in society. It is to say they are too heinous or savage to belong. And that's the problem with the West's discourse surrounding the problems of Islam. They don't attack the belief and actions in terms of Islam (e.g. it's wrong, under Islam, to think gay people ought to die or for tradition to be beyond criticism, etc., etc.), but in terms of people with a history within Islamic culture of being unable to participate in civilised society. We scapegoat people to feel like we are making an impact on problems we recognise.
Nah. This is crazy sauce. Yikes.
Both candidates "mentioned the word." (Probably because the question they were responding to was literally something like: What's your stance on the interpretation of the constitution?") Do you mean that that the job of justices is to take an originalist stance toward interpretation and to have no truck with 'living document' talk? Because I could maybe see where you're coming from with that - it's just not what you said at all.
Yikes indeed-- but it's true.
I mean there are different levels. If follow you about repeating what you are saying back to you, you'll find me annoying and criticise me. You'll think me annoying and unsuitable company until I stop-- until I behave differently, I will not belong around you. But that's about as far as it will go. You won't think of me as an living embodiment of a culture and history which cannot fit with a civilised society.
The point about Islam is our reaction is frequently the latter. And we mistake this prejudice for being serious about injustices within Islamic cultures.
Yep.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
Yep.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
Nope.
You do realize that to be consistent, you have to also extend your radical moral largesse to the KKK and neo-nazis, right?
Unless, I'm utterly misreading you and you're arguing for these kinds of attacks?
But, yeah, we can drop it. Your statement was a throwaway one from the beginning ( the same kind of thing as "all men hate women", or "all white people are racist ") so I'm not sure why I'm getting so involved. It just bugged me, I guess?
In the sense that a neo-nazi or KKK member might change their culture, sure. Like a muslims (or anyone else), they are no less capable of devloping an ethical position on particular people or issues.
The problem is, at that point, what is left of neo-nazi or KKK identity? Neither of those groups a historical tradition bound-up with the everyday life and functioning of a society that extends beyond racial (and other unjust forms of discrimination). It make senses to speak, for example, a pro-gay muslim. A neo-nazi or KKK member in favour of multicultural society? Not at all.
It also makes sense, I think, to speak of a pro-bacon Muslim, or an atheist Muslim. To want Muslims to be this that and the other, antithetical to the standard Islamic position on all of these issues, seems to me to be just a way of saying that you just want Muslims to be Westerners, except they wear hijab or something. Which is just a roundabout way of saying that Islam is incompatible with whatever you imagine polite society to be. It gets tricky, for example, if you ask people what they think about the relative authority of Sharia versus a Western constitution.
Absolutely. Muslims being "westerners" is effectively where the argument ends up: we are demanding changes to Islam which make it, in practice, more or less indistinguishable from the culture in Western democracies. It's saying practices of Islamic culture are unethical and they ought to change.
The point is that it is done with Islamic identity, as our society changed with history of Christian tradition, rather than viewing Islam and its people as an identity that needs to be wiped off the Earth (no doubt traditional Islam being abandoned, but that was the point all along).
(And yeah, Christianity was destroyed form the inside and is in the process of dying off).
Critical scholarship? I'm curious.. what sorts of writings are you thinking of there? Just religion studies?
Parts of Islam as it's currently practiced? For sure.
Islamic identity and history? No. Muslims can disavow those parts (even if they are big) of Islam without saying that everything about how the lived, their past and where they think of themselves as belonging, is savage.
If it's something more current you're looking for, we're too close to it for a full-bodies analysis. I think that's true going back at least 100 years. Too much has happened to Islam for scholars to do much digestion. But there's plenty of info out there.
All that said, my opinion is that Christianity is the most ideologically complex of the global religions. That's kind of like saying cheetahs are the fastest cats, though. So what?
The (perhaps cartoonish) understanding I have of Foucault is that it's only in his later work that individual agency, and all the positive stuff takes off (the technologies of the self etc.) Is that fair?
If there is a rupture between early and late Foucault - and the rupture is something like how I've characterized it (and I'm open to criticism here, I may have totally botched it) - isn't his whole Iranian flirtation contemporaneous with the shift?
Yes!
Cultural relativism is cancer. These people ARE savages.
Clinton's only reference to the Constitution was in her complaint that the Senate had failed to vote on Obama's appointment.
If there's one guy that can reign in Trump, it could be retired Marine general Mattis. A tough-talk Marine with a nick-name like 'Mad Dog' is something that Trump obviously listens. Yet the important quotes (actually hopefully) don't come to the ears of the alt-right and other Trumpists, because Mattis has critisized Trump quite heavily:
- Regarding Trump’s contention that U.S. allies are not paying their “fair share” of costs to support the alliance, Mattis called the claim “about as kooky as [if] a president were to call our allies freeloaders.”
- On Trump’s call for a ban on Muslim immigrants, Mattis — who rarely gives media interviews — was also sharply critical, saying that such talk prompts U.S. allies to think “we have lost faith in reason.”
- Asked about the reaction in the Middle East to Trump’s suggestion, Mattis said, “They think we’ve completely lost it. This kind of thing is causing us great damage right now, and it’s sending shock waves through this international system.“(See article Ex-military leaders at Hoover Institution say Trump statements threaten America's interests)
Perhaps the best quote comes from President elect Trump himself, describing in a recorded session with NY Times his meeting with general Mattis:
Trump:
Any real soldier knowd that intel with torture is bad, but Trump seems to be really surprised. After this Trump actually tells about himself (and about his supporters much) of how much they know about fighting insurgencies (or terrorism)... and their ignorance and naive thinking. From the talk you can notice this is a real transcript of Trump btw.
That kind of grasp of reality is what the Trump cabinet needs.
If Hillary would have won, the Republicans would have started to talk immediately about impeachment. With Trump, that impeachment might be a reality. Not only have the children and son-in-law have had a huge impact during the campaign (like starting from picking Pence as a running mate) If Trump is saying that his children will take care of his business ventures (which isn't at all a blind trust), what does it tell that he meets the Japanese Prime Minister with his daughter and son-in-law? Nobody would have minded if it would they would have posed for a picture with Melania, but with Ivanka sitting there through the meeting? I suspect that picture people will get the correct message.
It's a similar move like that his Washington DC hotel are targetting diplomats... if they in the Capitol. To put it simply: the corruption goes to a totally different level with Trump that it would ever be with the Clintons, who basically played the game as it's intended (with corporations giving money to the right charities etc.) What happens when Ivanka starts the next multi-million hotel Project? Likely those foreign entities who give the loans can have other agenda's than just to make money.
And Twitter wars? Nevermind the Trump's whimsical theatre tweeting, It's telling that Trump got the UK government officially responding that they have an able embassador in the US already (Trump tweeted that Farage would be a great UK ambassador to the States). Trump unlikely will not get it that he's not just tweeting with similar celebs as he used to do.
Yet why I bring the example of Mattis here is that the worst thing Trump can do if there is absolutely nobody in his cabinet speaking reason to him. The damage can simply be phenomenal. Trump's Russia connection is actually alarming as it's extremely naive to think that a "reboot" in relations would be a great thing.
Well, he's not POTUS yet. But yeah, he needs to take a four year break from those kind of shenanigans.