“Privilege” Mostly Isn’t, It Is What Everyone Should Have

It’s a bit more complicated than that. I’ve come to the reluctant conclusion that there is no fully positive path to equality. The more privileged, in “identity” terms, must necessarily experience a psychological loss, and probably even a material loss in relative term, in order to eradicate the underlying substructure of privilege. The alternative is just a “surface”, fair-weather equality that does not endure when times are tough.

When someone tells you that what you have is a “privilege”, what they are really saying is that they want to take that thing away from you. Otherwise, they would call it a “right”.

This post is going to presage a COMMENTS EXPLOSION, probably.

You are manifestly, self-evidently correct, of course. The problem here is that SJWs (for lack of a better term) (as such), are disproportionately undergraduate college students. They appropriated the language of the classroom for the #resistance, and thus created a lot of tension that was superfluous — or not “superfluous,” exactly, but it allowed bigots to masquerade as truth-warriors fighting the Industrial Politically-Correct Vocabulary Complex. It permitted the bigots to class themselves with the people who think Huckleberry Finn is still a worthwhile work of literature despite its use of the word “n*gger,” when in reality the bigots just want to use the word (ideally to a “thug” who’s trying to steal their talking television set, right before they shoot him). When you hear these things discussed by actual black Americans, you don’t come across the word “privilege” as much as you do on Twitter. When women talk about the way we’re treated by men, few of us speak of “oppression” like they do on BuzzFeed. This is an injustice-based popular subculture, which only overlaps occasionally with the voiceless Others it tries so faithfully to represent.

This is actually one of the things that drives me out of my mind about leftists/liberals/whatever — their distancing instance on academicalizing everything. They even refer to de facto racist behaviors as “problematic,” which is how you describe a disputed source in a term paper. Jesus Christ.

Having said that, this story literally looks like the bigots’ worst nightmare — not just that they have to pretend to treat the subhumans as equals, but that they themselves will be demoted to subhuman status in the great leveling of the future. Probably the UK will Brexit twice as hard and fast, now. I don’t know how I feel about that, to be honest. If there were a way to protect the innocent from the consequences, I’d be all for letting the erstwhile conquerors founder on the immovable rock of their own stupidity.

If we commit to provide for each other the basics for a good and decent life: good food, shelter, healthcare, education, meaningful work at a living wage, and retirement, we would eliminate most of the rationales for privilege.

What privilege is about is the creation of a group which identifies its interests as the general good and then seeks to perpetuate and make hereditary its unequal claims on power and society’s resources and wealth on that basis.

This is why Jennifer Lawrence was paid less than her male counterparts for the Hunger Games movie series because without her the series would have been mediocre or a flop and her male costars could have been replaced by a hundred others. Oh wait…

Since literature, especially great literature, never conforms to what is politically correct, if you were really political correct, you would end up with no literature or unmitigated pap. Look at the wishy-washy women in Hamlet. Throw it out. Slavery, incest, murder, women treated as chattel all over the Bible. Dump it.

Agreed in principle, but the problem is most of these top salaries are set by headhunters and remuneration committees behind closed doors on a comparison merry-go-round. There is no reference to supply and demand. They should probably all earn less, but the viewers demand fame. It becomes self-perpetuating. Perhaps a rule requiring 50% new faces would help?

De Gaulle said the cemeteries are filled with indispensable people. That is lots of people think they are indispensable but aren’t. Most of the rich and powerful are evil people who lead absurd lives. Their lives are divorced from ours. They have no skin in our game. They treat us like we aren’t even the same species. We need to keep them close enough to us that their fate is tied to ours. You do that by a 100% estate tax on estates over a few million, wealth taxes on wealth above a million, and 95-100% marginal income tax rates on incomes above $1 million, plus regular rates 50-70% on income in the $500,000-$1,000,000 range. The idea is take a maximum wealth and maximum income target, as I said, to keep these people nearer to us while rewarding them for any contributions they make to our society, –and then adjust our tax structure to keep them there. If our elites have to use our healthcare, our schools, our pensions. If they have to live among us. If their children aren’t born with a silver spoon, or silver set, in their mouths, then maybe they will start wanting for the rest of us what they currently keep to themselves, because they will be the rest of us.

Bill H – the important question is “did you leave a tip?”

“Note that wage demands today are all based on what the worker wants, needs, or is entitled to”

Lying feudalist rubbish.

Everybody wants to make $15/hr, but nobody wants to deliver performance that is worth even half that.

WTF? Where the hell do you live?

In all probability the male wages needed to be slashed.

Elon, is that you?

I care about the magnitude of “star” salaries. The relative magnitude of “star” salaries is actually an important driver of increasing inequality and many of inequality’s onerous side-effects.

We live in an economic system dominated by hierarchical control (not “markets”). “Markets” establish (or suggest to mind) essentially horizontal relationships, but we live vertical relationships.

Competition in markets suggests choice, variety, etc, but competition in vertical relationships is likely to mean tournaments that favor ruthless opportunism and massively rewards small differences. Feeding the star and star power will often mean starving the little people, leading to risk taking and a general decline in resilience in an organization.

Willy

I get it, that the clan’s best hunters should have first dibs on the food, sleeping furs, and the women, because they’re bringing home the meat for everybody else.

Actually, hunter-gatherers are quite the opposite, which makes our elites grabbing everything in sight and pretense of adding value even more outrageous. A headman amongst hunter-gatherers leads by respect, not by force. A headman earns that respect because a) he has consistently shown he knows what he’s talking about; and b) he has a track record of always doing the right and ethical thing. The latter usually involves putting the welfare of everyone else above himself, which in turn means although he might be the best hunter, he just quips that he was lucky once again to kill the dinner and eats only after everyone else has eaten.

@willy, did you watch a lot of wild kingdom and disney as a kid or something?

“clan” power dynamics and survival generally involves more than non-stop killing of tasty animals and fighting off ones that consider you and yours tasty.

however i agree with your larger point:

“But today’s ‘best hunters’ aren’t tied to anything so tangible. Nothing limits the damage they can do to the rest of the tribe with any excessive greed, incompetency, or outright moral insanity.”

–

i wondered about the “male star” pay drop decision as apposed to raising the women’s pay. i suppose it’s a no brainer, why pay more money when you can save money? the guy employees aren’t in a position to publicly fuss much. not that i feel sorry for them or nuthin.

but i also wondered if there could be some political gain to be had in the sowing of resentment amongst one’s employees, and amongst the watching populace.

The authorities are also not very nice to outcasts, social misfits, or “social lepers” either.

@ Brian

Word.

But you better duck, anyway lol.

Brian

Black males commit more of the crime proportionally to their demographic representations. That’s a fact.

What’s a ‘fact’ is that black males get *arrested* and *convicted* and *jailed* for crimes at a higher proportion to their demographics. Whether or not they actually *commit* crimes at a higher proportion, especially when the data is corrected for income (and when one considers white collar crimes, maybe with not even that qualifier) is an unanswered question.

This is a case of “what you find is determined by where you look”.

But it is indeed a fact that the police do shoot black male suspects at disproportionately higher rates than they do whites:

https://www.snopes.com/do-police-kill-more-whites-than-black-people/

https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/xwvv3a/shot-by-cops

https://www.vox.com/cards/police-brutality-shootings-us/us-police-racism

Note that even in video game training exercises, police are more likely to shoot the black male.

And

The disparities appear to be even starker for unarmed suspects, according to an analysis of 2015 police killings by the Guardian. Racial minorities made up about 37.4 percent of the general population in the US and 46.6 percent of armed and unarmed victims, but they made up 62.7 percent of unarmed people killed by police.

Police kill unarmed minority suspects at higher rates (62.7 %) than they kill armed white suspects (44.5 %). How’s that for a fact for ya?

@willy, did you watch a lot of wild kingdom and disney as a kid or something?

Actually, I saw it in a cartoon once. I’m trying to better relate to the conservatives in this crowd.

It’s somewhat well known that in most corporations, those who advance are rarely the best performers. That’s naive wishful thinking. They’re usually political insiders who their immediate bosses have deemed are the best at helping their own careers. It’s the way DC works now. The same is true in smaller companies where the owners/bosses are able to directly observe who best fattens their wallets. Since I’d rather perform than kiss ass, I preferred the smaller company.

FBI website is best source for all the important facts. Even those well known ones. 🙂

Perhaps we can expand the discussion of “police racism against black people” to “police cop-ism against citizen people.”

Civilian Lives Matter.

We need a term akin to “greenwashing” or “pinkwashing” but for Social Justice (TM) generally.

@different clue
I like it!

@ dc

“Civilian Lives Matter”

Indeed, good sir.

As soon as I first heard Black Lives Matter used as a slogan, I immediately began speaking against it as being obviously divisive. Of course, I was called a racist, bigot, etc. for it, but I thought that result was an obvious one to predict, and I don’t think any sentient person could disagree today.

I think that women have similarly ‘jumped the shark’ with the metoo# movement, and will pay an increasingly obvious and costly price for the long-term divisiveness that will result. IMO, it’s not a great idea to position yourself in direct opposition to the concept of due process itself.

Bottom line: The Masters love it when we lesser folk use our energy to fight each other. Divide and conquer was never a more trenchant concept than it is today, when technology has made it so easy to segment the population for propaganda/talking point targeting.

The dumber the population gets, the more effective this tactic becomes. So, the future is not bright.

At the risk of doubling down on what is arguably a derailment from the main point of the post (which, again, I wholeheartedly agree with), here is a nicer, more temperate, and more detailed version of what I just said. And thank you to different clue and others for pointing out that \”All Lives Matter\” is actually a good saying, not a bad one.

Also, I apologize for the ill-tempered rant above. I am angry about a number of things in general, but no reason to go ahead and escalate the tone before anyone else does, past experience notwithstanding. Mea culpa.

MojaveWolf
July 17, 2016 at 1:50 pm

Peter Moskos is a left of center former cop who has been covering this issue extensively for a while. His most recent post on the subject is here:

http://www.copinthehood.com/2016/07/reducing-police-involved-shooting.html

The general gist of his coverage(which goes back years) is that there is a problem w/police shootings, but the truly egregious cases are spread around. Off the top of my head and from memory, there’s the guy shot for no reason while climbing out of a wrecked car (official reason: “trying to escape”), the woman shot in the side of the head while supposedly trying to run over over police, the 70 yr old guy whose cane was supposedly mistaken for a rifle, the man shot for twitching while being tased, the guy who got out of the car and lay on the ground at request of cops and was then shot for non compliance because they said he wasn’t showing his hands even tho you could clearly see his hands, the guy who was forced to crawl across the ground of a parking lot of a hotel on his belly and whose pants were coming off and was shot when he reached back to pull them up, the guy who was beaten to death because cops told him to put his hands in the air and on the steering wheel and he refused to comply with both sets of instruction at once, and the mentally ill homeless guy guilty of “illegal camping” in the New Mexico desert who was surrounded by what looked like a full on swat team w/dogs and was shot multiple times both while backing up and agreeing to leave and while on the ground and almost certainly after he was already dead (which was also when he was handcuffed, iirc) (of all the you tube videos I have seen, this is the one I have the most trouble getting out of my head and I am not wanting to watch it again to check for accuracy, tho you can make an argument that many of the others were as bad or worse).

Most of these are on YouTube.

There are a lot of good people who are cops and heaven knows, I don’t think anyone who’s really thought about it for very long really wants the cops to go away (and if you think you do, as many left/anarchists seem to, really, think about this a bit, for real). But. There’s clearly a problem w/training or hiring practices in many departments. And we are moving more and more toward a full on police state, if we’re not already there. But the problems really aren’t primarily race-based, and I’d say focusing only on that angle or trying to portray that as the only or overwhelmingly predominant angle plays into the same narrative as trying to say everything is just fine for all white people and the only ones who aren’t prospering are the lazy malcontents, and if we just had adequate diversity everything would be fine.

More poor people interact w/the cops and the cops are on higher alert around poor people. Black people are disproportionately likely to be poor, and thus you have a disproportionately high # of shootings of black people (tho you can be a well off white kid and die too, like the kid who saw the officer driving down the rd w/his lights on bright and did what people usually do in this situation and quickly flashed his brights to let the officer know; he was the 3rd or 4th person to do this and the officer had had enough and pulled the kid over. Sadly, the kid had accidentally left his license at home. He tried to get out of admitting this by refusing to show his ID because he had done nothing wrong. This did not work out well)

The idea that black people are being murdered willy nilly and other races are getting a free pass while they do awful stuff is just wrong. Doesn’t mean there aren’t problems, there are multiple and huge problems, but the dominant media narrative gets it wrong and perpetuates a false narrative that isn’t helping things get better.

” A rotten barrel spoils all the apples.”

Most police officers would not/ do not commit pleasure-torture and pleasure-murder of “civilians”. But if any do, in how many such cases does their entire department protect and shelter them for as long as possible? As with Pantaleone in State Island? Just how far does the Blue Wall of Silence . . . or “Bluemerta” or whatever we want to call it . . . go?

And how much of this is really due to the deliberate training that officers get? And how much of this is due to deliberate quotas set for numbers of countable arrests for this and that as set by higher command levels?

It begins to seem as though officers are given much looser rules of engagement ( shoot first and fastest if y0u feel scared) than soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Is that perception incorrect?

@DC (& anyone else interested in police training etc)– I STRONGLY recommend Peter Moskos’ Cop in the Hood blog and looking back through the old posts.

He’s been studying relative police shooting statistics for years now. One that that becomes clear is that training and culture do matter, and different departments vary wildly in this regard. I seem to recall that Albequerque and several Cali cities are among the places you don’t want to run afoul of the cops, and that Albequerque has a tendency to hire people who got kicked off of other forces (not able to look this up at the moment but feel fairly sure of my memory, wherever I read it).

And agreed that departments who protect the asshole contingent among them don’t deserve a pass. I wrote my original screed above when I was VERY cranky about the left’s increasing tendency toward groupthink on certain issues, and was pushing back against a tendency to see all cops as power mad racist monsters.

I do think it’s worth looking at what different places that get different outcomes do differently. And no argument at all against the idea that the US is becoming ever more excessively authoritarian and closer to a police state that will be bad for everyone of all ethnicities. That’s absolutely true.

I didn’t know that “Black Lives Matter” really means “White lives don’t matter.” Having thought about it for a few minutes, I’ve decided that it doesn’t really mean that, despite the assurances of commenters.

There’s a problem with militarized police. There’s a problem with governmental sanction being given to any person to use violence against others when that violence is misused. It’s official terrorism. The whole point of terrorism is that you don’t need to hurt many people. You hurt a few just to let everyone know that you can and will, so that they will stay in line.

As a result of the “Black Lives Matter” movement, more attention is being paid to police violence against civilians. The minimization response (“All lives matter” “Civilian lives matter” and the like) works to justify police behavior. Don’t get mad because Eric Garner was choked to death by a policeman; the same thing would have happened to a white guy.???

I agree with Ian that everyone should have what we usually refer to as privilege. Not being killed by the police is kind of minimal to me as not a privilege. So why are we getting hung up in “Well, a white woman reaching for her pocketbook to get her license would have gotten shot too, so there’s no privilege there, instead of demanding justice for police misbehavior and reform of police recruitment, oversight, and procedures?

Nihil shows how easily the SJW can hype the small number of police killings, usually involving armed and dangerous criminals, into an organized police state making war on a minority group. It’s telling thst they have to go back three years to dig up an example of this supposedly widespread behavior.

@ nihil

“I didn’t know that “Black Lives Matter” really means “White lives don’t matter.” Having thought about it for a few minutes, I’ve decided that it doesn’t really mean that, despite the assurances of commenters.”

Gee, did anybody really say that Black Lives Matter actually means White Lives Don’t Matter? I know I didn’t. I know I didn’t, because that would be pretty stupid, extra sloppy paraphrasing of saying that the slogan was easily predicted to be divisive in its effect.

QUERY: Do you think the slogan has NOT been divisive? (Sure hate to put you on the spot to be specific about anything, but we can’t always settle for snide and ambiguous negative insinuations, with zero accountability, can we?)

@Jib Halyard
I believe Mandos’s position as stated above is that Justice requires that people belonging to “privileged” identity categories should be not only materially deprived but intentionally psychologically damaged.

Let’s be fair, though, lest you think we’ve ventured into Pol Pot territory at this point, for Mandos has reached this view only “reluctantly.”

@StewartM–absolutely agreed. And to the extent I seemed not to get this, my bad for lack of clarity. All sorts of reform is needed. I do, otoh, still think that just as people on the right frequently are willing to excuse any amount of police misconduct, people on the left tend to forget that it’s not ALL misconduct, and that is part of what I was getting at in the things I copied and pasted (I was in a mad rush this morning and had no time to write something new). I live in a poor area myself, and when I was poor and walking/taking the bus, was EXTREMELY unhappy at being stopped and frisked because, well, I was poor and walking, and subject to driver’s license checks to make sure I wasn’t wanted for anything while sitting at the bus stop (twice). The cops were, at least, nice and polite about it, but stuff like that shouldn’t happen–whether it’s technically legal doesn’t even matter, since, if you protest at the bus stop on the way to work and refuse to show your ID, you miss work, and if you’re poor, that’s a REAL problem only slightly behind jail, and if you refuse the stop & frisk, ummmu, I have no idea how long that would take to get sorted out, but I’m pretty sure it’s several hours of life wasted that you will never get back, and those several hours trumped principle (tho in both base cases, after I turned up clean, the cop was nice enough to give me a ride part or all of the way home. Possibly only so they could have me in the back of the car while they ran my license to make really sure I wasn’t a criminal , but, hey, for my instant case, no blood, no foul. That said, in general, this should never, ever happen and doesn’t happen to people who aren’t poor. In all the years when I’ve been driving, this stuff? not happening. That’s a pure class distinction. I also recall hearing about a local case where stolen property was recovered after a house to house sweep for the stolen property. Yay that it was recovered, but seriously, house to house sweeps? This being a real thing scares me way more than theft. I may not have sounded like it up there, but I’m entirely with the rest of you on the civil liberties and anti-authoritarianism here.

@Nihil — This part I will agree with: There’s a problem with militarized police. There’s a problem with governmental sanction being given to any person to use violence against others when that violence is misused. It’s official terrorism. The whole point of terrorism is that you don’t need to hurt many people. You hurt a few just to let everyone know that you can and will, so that they will stay in line.

Otherwise, gotta disagree w/your take (other than the disingenuous bit about “white lives don’t matter”, as in, presumably, “don’t matter at all”–we can all agree that very few people are saying that). And I most definitely wasn’t trying to minimize anything–specifically said we had a real problem and were moving towards a police state, and listed a whole bunch of really horrible shootings. I’m actually genuinely angry that anyone could think that list was minimizing anything. That anyone COULD think this list was minimizing things simply because the people were white indicates a serious problem w/the entire paradigm (and would, in fact, indicate someone thinks white people don’t matter so much, now that I think on it).

And unlike you, I don’t think the BLM movement has accomplished anything positive, even though there are a ton of well-intentioned people involved in it (the majority, I’d say). Mostly, it has increased the toxic fetishization of race and obsession w/racial difference that the neolib crowd thrives on. It’s probably doing as much or more damage than Trump in this regard.

Also, there’s the whole thing about it generally being a good idea to base discourse and policy in truth and reality, while making crap up and acting as if it is real generally leads to bad outcomes (see: Iraq invasion, for a worst-case scenario, or, in an individual case, the poor cop who shot Mike Brown. We have a dude rob a store, walk down the middle of the the street, start a confrontration w/the cop who tells him to get out of the middle of the street, try to take the cops gun away, then refuse to stop while walking back towards the cop, gets shot. He basically did everything he could to get shot, for reasons unknown. This? Not an atrocity. Of all the stupid things for people to riot over and make a cause celebre, this is . . . up there. Meanwhile, cop, who, basically, did nothing at all wrong, unless you think he should have ran, or handed over his gun, or something. His life? Totally fucked.)

And truth generally has some intrinsic value, simply by virtue of being the truth, imo, so that one should generally try to promote it unless one has some compelling reason not to.

One can be anti-racist w/out having to jump on every anti-racist narrative, regardless of truth or falsehood. I would even argue that this would put your anti-racist activity on much firmer ground, thus accomplishing more.

@ nihil

Your devotion to straw man arguments is impressive, I guess, but it keeps leading you to wrong conclusions, so you might want to think about that a little bit. E.g., though white, I have been aggressively against police overreach in all its forms for a very long time. I have had cop guns pointed in my face several times for no good reason, and I know that every time I was ever in court for anything against a cop, the cop lied egregiously. And I did my legal internship with the co-founder of the Innocence Project. So, your effort to frame me as being pro-cop is totally off the mark.

I just won’t restrict myself to either/or absolutes the way you seem so determined to do. E.g., You say, “Do Black Lives matter? If yes, end of subject.”

You call that a sound reasoning process? I call it borderline retarded.

Mojave Wolf has a much more reasonable and reality-respecting approach laid out in his last comment, particularly, and I am pretty much exactly where he is. So, please adjust yourself, nihil. And stop indulging in these obvious exercises in being passive aggressive and disingenuous that you seem to be so fond of, if you can. They demean you. And I will call you out on them every time.

BLM. a joke. start with the resnick’s, taking more than their fair share of central valley water to fuel their kingdoms. hey, western capitalism. the idea of sharing the commons? who the hell ever heard of such. grab what one can, and don’t leave anything behind. greed, greed and more greed. lawyers, guns and money.

lets try to get to the bottom of this, …shoots down israeli drone…. for starters, who are the threators and who are the threatees? (one, i forgot. holo…. says it all.)

Strangely I agree with Nihil, RC and Mojave. Seen from the black perspective BLM is not meant to exclude everyone else – it is simply a statement that the black community feels the harshness of an increasingly militarized police and the extraordinary war waged on their community through the medium of the drug wars. As a white person I would have no problem joining with the black community in that even though factually it might be a little skewed particularly with respect to the police violence part. Nihil is arguing I think that the white community should be willing to share in this perspective, note the factual imbalance that Mojave points out and not join with the racist minority of the white community in taking umbrage at a close parsing of the name. Racists wouldn’t have liked BLMT any better than BLM even though it would have satisfied close parsers like RC. And no I am not passive aggressively accusing RC of being a racist. I don’t think he is.

MLK started by being a civil rights activist focused on equality for the black community but worked his way to an understanding that race was only a device in the deeper class wars at hand. I think we would do better to explain both to them and to the majority of the white community that BLM is not meant to be exclusionary but is a statement from a particular position of the greater class war, police militarization, drug war attack on all of our civil liberties truth.

I am going to agree entirely w/hvd, RC & Willy here.

And nihil, seriously, wtf? I don’t object (nor do I think anyone particularly objects) to the concept of black lives matter. I do object to the idea, which I think most people who are fond of this hashtag are promoting, that most non-blacks think black lives don’t matter, and I object to the promotion of a false narrative about police statistics which has thus far accomplished absolutely nothing except screwing up people’s sense of what is actually happening, and causing dumb ass arguments like this one instead of getting us all together to try to promote better policing policies (where we’d probably still be arguing but at least hopefully have common frames of reference and not be making up crap about the other people in the argument) . Instead you get crap like this, also from my twitter feed (actual website not listed coz half of you probably think this is a great idea and would want to sign up:
#confrontwhitewomanhood has an official website! Check us out and sign up for our next workshop to learn more about the ways that white women and constructions of white womanhood cause real harm and violence.”

You otoh clearly are fine with and in fact enthusiastically approve of lying and false narratives and don’t care about the consequences of these things no matter how negative, as long as they let you make the appropriate virtue signals, and likewise you clearly object to anyone who isn’t willing to lie for the sake of tribalism and virtue signalling.

See? I can do it too. That isn’t exactly what you said, and I’m pretty sure it isn’t what you meant to say, but I’d say it’s way closer to the mark than what you are trying to impute to me. And hell, it may even be true. I’m seriously starting to wonder at this point. (another option I can see, which you will probably find just as insulting, is that you simply don’t want to actually think about this subject because you’re happy w/the narrative and don’t really care if it’s true or false.)

I grew up in the south and am probably more aware of the history than you are. I used to go to a friggin bible study every Sunday back in Alabama where I was the only regular white attendee. I never said or implied anything like the garbage you are trying to put on me. There is no way you reasonably get victim blaming or making excuses for any of the bad cop activities from anything I said. You get on NC for just cussing people out, but this sort of crap is waaaay more insulting and malicious.

This reminds me, speaking of the South, back when I was in college, I was hanging out w/a black guy and this other white guy I’m friends with comes over, and, upon me introducing them, the white guy spends the next 20 minutes talking about how he’s not racist, on and on and on, while me and the black kid look at each other and roll our eyes. If this was in certain online nowadays, it would result in about 50 people yelling at the other kid for being insufficiently deferential and not adequately ashamed of himself for his various privileges. Which, again, not helping anything.

Which leads me to wonder, how do all of y’all who think racial differences must always be at the forefront of every discussion fucking talk to people of different ethnicities? I tried this one time w/a friend from Guyana, something like “Hello, my brave dark skinned immigrant female friend who I’m so proud of for being able to persevere in the face of massive oppression and constant microagressions. How are you?” After she quit laughing she said something like “I now identify as a 16 year old so according to Tumblr you’re a pedo for talking to me.” (she’s in here 30’s) & we talked about people w/no real problems inventing them so they’ll have something to go on about (her theory, no mine)(she is not a conservative; tho definitely deeply misguided in that she voted for Hillary).

The thing is though, there are lots of real problems, so why not address them instead of making up fake ones?

& @RC — totally off topic– did you go to Cardozo?

@ MW

Once again, I am good with letting you speak for me. 🙂

My attitude about race was fully formed by age 9, when I had the thought that
no white dog would be stupid enough to refuse to play with a black dog. Never had any reason to adjust my thinking after that moment lol.

Yes to Cardozo, 81-84.

Rc

I understand what you are saying tactically and don’t disagree however assuming that the BLM movement was not intending by the use of that term to exclude everyone else and that if asked would be as likely as MLK to join in common purpose with other class members equally victimized by the increasingly militarized police engaged in endless drug wars against undesirables of every shade and hue it seems wrong to adopt the reasoning that these are merely snowflakes whining about poor me to the exclusion of others. I join you in hating the victim culture of the left (and right) but I don’t think the movement qualifies as that.

Strangely there are echoes of Mandos in your position that a not clearly thought out choice of label is as meaningful as the broader intent and actions.

Better to join in common cause with those with whom you fundamentally agree error correcting along the way then adopting the frame of those who would find fault no matter what.

Okay, I must depart from complete agreement w/hvd, in that I have a much lower opinion of most BLM types in terms of their actual practice. Yah, I think most people supporting the hashtag absolutely believe the false narrative they are pushing, so it’s not like an auto “I think you suck for supporting this” (Nina Turner supports it and I would be stoked if she ran for President next time), but I really do think it is pushing a genuinely bad for everyone way of looking at things, based on a false precept. If if it was just what you’re saying, then yeah, I’m there. I sadly don’t see it that way at all.

The constructive part–I’m also a fan of Occupy, tho I think it went to hell and did fail. Maybe it laid the groundwork for something further down the road, maybe not. We’ll see.

The other part:

If you don’t deal in personal attacks, don’t make them. My inference was no more off base than yours and unlike you I specifically stated mine was purely retaliatory to make a point; I’d normally give people more benefit of the doubt than that (even if I thought you likely did think somesuch, I’d need more to go on before I said, except, well, you did it to me so why not?) Believe it or not, I had actually come back here to think, “maybe I was being too harsh and should give more benefit of the doubt” and say something to that effect. Never mind on that. At this point I’d say you are clearly a person who likes to make slams at other people and can’t handle it when they say something back. As far as being a liar? I have no idea if you’re a liar or just delusional about thoe quality of your own rhetoric. But you wanna do some sort of mutual ignore thing? Fine. My world will somehow go on.

All lives matter. Black and white and asian and however you want to break it down lives matter exactly the same. We are all brothers and sisters, of a sort (except for the individual people we don’t like and don’t want to claim, which has nothing to do w/ethnicity, and even then, can you unclaim a brother or sister? Well, yeah, sure.)

Attempting to deracialize police violence is essentially shutting your eyes to what motivated the establishment of mass police surveillance in the first place.

And yes, there is a zero-sum game of privilege. It’s about who gets priority when the chips are down.

Nobody’s skirts are totslly clean, anyone who pretends to have totslly clean skirts should just go away, for you are the liar. Those who stay, we can all do better if we want statues erected to our memories, OK?

Bernie got skunked. Somehow Trump overcame all odds and is the President. I think BLM gets some credit for that. I think “divisive” captures the dynamic. I’m done talking about it.

@nihil — on my phone,so can’t copy & paste, but see the first,v3rdv& 4th paragraphs of your first response to me. Especially those last two.

The idea that I would not care about what happened to Eric Garner had nothing whatsoever and was flatly contradicted by what I said and honestly that’s way more infuriating and insulting than if you’d called me a lying sack of s*** between those two I’d rather be called a lying sack of s*** any day.

Likewise the idea that I’m trying to minimize any of this by saying that it matters that it’s happening to freaking everybody and we can make more progress against it if we don’t focus on a completely false narrative that one group of people is getting targeted in a way that’s simply not happening. Yes it was happening in the past and yes those people are still being unfairly targeted but so is everybody else. There is no minimization whatsoever. All these things are freaking awful and I am again deeply insulted that you’re implying I said anything vaguely resembling if these things aren’t that bad. That is about a thousand times worse than anything I said to you.

I got no problem with people disagreeing with my actual views even though of course I am right and you are wrong but that’s fine I have friends who voted for Trump and for Hillary. My friend from Guyana actually voted for Hillary in the primary now I’m not joking when I say I’m right and she’s wrong. Obviously I got no problem disagreeing with people. I do have a huge problem with people implying that I don’t care about people getting choked to death when they did nothing wrong and in fact I believe they were actually trying to be a Good Samaritan and that’s what got him killed in this case by some asswipe who couldn’t stand anybody standing up to him.

Just to reiterate yes anytime anybody says that I don’t give a s*** about stuff like that I’m taking it as a deadly f****** personal insult. I actually like you most of the time and you’re usually one of my favorite posters here I’ve said that before and I will say it again but I’m not in the best of moods right now and even if I was in a great mood I would go off on you for saying that I I don’t care about either Eric Garner or the various things I listed. I was actually relatively restrained. I think there was some more stuff you said later on but I hope at least for that part that’s clear because that’s more than enough all by itself.

And if you don’t see how that’s a personal insult I don’t know what the hell is wrong with you. That was not a disagreement on an issue that was you putting words in my mouth and feelings in my head that didn’t vaguely resembling anything I said or thought or would ever think. Or has reality Checker (being the nice one this time) said it’s a straw man argument but it was a particularly insulting straw man argument which grossly distorted what I said and implied things to my thinking that again we’re about as insulting as you can get.

You also made some little snide insinuations that were kinda sorta implying that just maybe the people disagreeing with you were doing so on the basis of racism. Those weren’t quite upfront obvious enough for me to flat out say that you absolutely meant that but it certainly came across that way.

Now if you want to both own and back off those things I’m good with that as far as I’m concerned we’re totally good going forward and it was all a misunderstanding but if you don’t then f*** off.

Last but not least I will entirely agree with you that I prefer more high toned discussions but you’re the one that started this one. And if you don’t have any problem with what you said or I don’t see why I have a problem with it then we have no common ground to go forward and we can just ignore each other in the future. You do frquently say some good things otherwise and good on you on that but but don’t be saying I’m thinking and saying things I ain’t saying and thinking. And especially don’t do it and then complain when I do the same thing back at you and deny ever having done it in the first place. At least when I’m insulting somebody I own it.

(To the board as a whole sorry and do apologize if you find this unduly distracting. If anyone reading this far can recall me saying in the past that I was really the wrong person to be playing Peacemaker Now you kind of have an idea why)

I echo the apologies to other commenters who come hoping for good content and find our squabbling. My sincere sorrow over it will not, however, prevent me from a final squabble.

Mohave Wolf,

Have neo-liberals used race and gender to divide the working class and frustrate progressive policies? Yes, they have. When, in a discussion about race, I’m arguing that race does matter, do I feel personally insulted when someone else argues to me that it’s just a neo-liberal tactic to stop progress? No. I think the someone is wrong. If I understand what they’re doing, I’ll usually argue it at the time if I think it’s relevant. On the other hand, if someone calls me a “lying sack of shit”, I walk away. I can’t even say I’m insulted because what someone I’ve never met, will never meet, and know nothing about other than what they’ve written doesn’t matter that much to me. But I will usually withdraw from the conversation which is no longer meeting any of my goals of interest, enlightenment, spreading the word.

On this issue, I did not accuse you of not caring about Eric Garner. I used a particularly egregious example of police malfeasance specifically because I assumed you would care. The thought process was “I know MW will care about this, so perhaps he will understand why others form an organization of caring about these examples.” All of what you’re saying was an accusation against you was meant as a platform for understanding.

No one has yet explained to me why “Black Lives Matter” is a divisive statement. Some Black Lives Matter people have done some stupid things, the assault on Bernie Sanders being one of them. Condemn every organization when someone associated with it is stupid, and you won’t have many organizations. At the risk of being insulting, I’d say it would rule out any organizations that you belong to, but that’s just because I’m an arrogant so-and-so who knows that it would sure rule out any organization I belong to! But then I’ve been involved in lefty action for a long time, and the one sure thing we can always count on is lots of self-described lefties explaining why we’re doing it wrong.

I remember the police driving armored vehicles down Ferguson streets, wearing full-scale combat gear. I remember the police patrolling in camos — I was tempted at the gym one day when two cops on mats next to me had a long rant about people not waiting to get the facts to ask the cops when we’d learn if there was a rain forest in Ferguson to justify the camouflage. Yes, Ferguson was very divisive. But it wasn’t black residents driving down the streets in armored vehicles, wearing tear gas masks, and carrying sniper rifles. Nor were you, MW, in those vehicles or carrying sniper rifle. The divisiveness was created on the authorities’ side, and in my view is maintained on the authorities’ side.

Several years after the birth of Black Lives Matter, Donald Trump is President.

Some just can’t process the various aspects of that fact.

Eh?

@ hvd

I’m just giving my personal opinion/judgment on something that has not been and cannot be measured with precision by anybody.

If others don’t (yet?) see all the connections that I see, well, that’s par for my course. We’re all just doing the best we can, I would want to assume.

It’s not my job to either help or hurt the BLM movement. I wish only good to all people of good heart and good faith. My personal mission is to cut through all the bullshit that we are continually drowned in, and to try and see reality as clearly as possible. So that my ensuing decisions will be good ones. I share my thoughts in good faith and in the spirit of comradeship, but I am not on any political team.

I find it interesting to examine the areas that others work too hard too ignore, though. 🙂

@Nihil — see, I don’t even see that as a squabble. I’ll take you at your word that you meant this and the next statement about me trying to say “this stuff was no big deal just because it happened to white people too” in a completely different way than I took it, go w/the misunderstanding on that at least and let it drop (not happy w/a couple of other references but you made but not at the same level & those may also have been misunderstandings, so again, willing to let it drop).

As a general principle though, I will ALWAYS get ticked off if I think people are deliberately misrepresenting my or other’s arguments to make them something they weren’t, especially if it’s done to insult the other side rather than engage in argument about their actual point, which kinda was what I thought you were doing, and I think I got every right to get mad when I see that happening. That’s where civility goes bye bye & I really do consider that a personal attack. Again, since you normally *don’t* do that I’m happy to say this one was a misunderstanding and call it a day. We’re normally on the same side of things and honestly, I figured everyone but RC would disagree w/me on the cop stuff, but I do think it’s important to put the actual statistics out there and discuss them.

A black professor, I think from Harvard but it doesn’t really matter except for googling purposes, was doing a study NOT for the purpose of finding this out, found out something similar, and was generally pilloried on the left when he published his findings. It’s like a huge chunk of the left has become wedded to a narrative of horrible atrocities happening to their fave victim group of the week, and it’s much more important to them to validate this than whether or not such is actually happening in the way they think it is. I am frustrated w/this tendency in general, and it makes me despair of us ever finding real solutions, as it makes people ridiculously easy to propagandize and manipulate. (someone told me last night that a conservative writer named Heather McDonald published a book relating similar, and that people on the left universally condemned her research on the ground of her being an evil conservative who has bad opinions, rather than actually engaging her work. I haven’t read the work or seen the condemnation, but this would not surprise me. My fellow leftists have put me in the position of having to defend Jordan Peterson numerous times over the past year, which is really not something I want to do. I think he’s mostly pretty terrible. But the way he’s been attacked has generally not been fair critique of his arguments, but rather, “he is an evil bigot, and here’s a complete distortion of what he said for you to pillory him with, and meanwhile he should be no-platformed everywhere.” This is is not how you get anywhere. Likewise, I think acting as if we’re back in the pre-MLK era (or hell, even the era when I was growing up, which we have moved on from leaps and bounds as far as racial attitudes) rather than where we are today is not helpful, and I do perceive most of my fellow leftists as doing something like that.

(and, as an anecdote in case someone wishes to say I think racism no longer exists, I was in the position about a month ago of texting my wife and my best friend something like “I just did a very SJW thing today. It’s embarrassing.” What happened was this black guy and an old white guy were arguing at the gas pump about something, and I have no idea how it started or who was right or wrong, but as he drove off, the white guy yelled out the window “F— You N—-!” Everyone looked around at each other very uncomfortably for a minute, and I’m like awwwww crap I feel stupid doing this but just in case why not err on the side of opening my mouth. And I said something “I’m sorry man. I know this probably sounds stupid but in case you’re not from here, most of us are not like that and I really apologize for that idiot on behalf of the entire area.” I honestly felt like a moron saying it, but he just laughed and said “Don’t worry about it man. I’m half white anyway.” His girlfriend was laughing her head off, probably at me, but everyone relaxed and the world was an easier place after. So yeah, I get, we ain’t all the way there yet.)(if you’re wondering why I was embarassed, well, it should go w/out saying that other people are not that one dumbass, and I have no business representing the entire area in my apology, but, well, I winged it and it worked out okay so . . .)

@ MW

“I never really wanted to be a lawyer and wound up doing a whole bunch of completely different things, made a lot less money but probably much happier as a human being most of the time.”

Me too, I quit practicing when I moved to Atlanta in 1989. Couldn’t stand dealing with liars all the time lol.

Hope you’re doing OK, Wolf.

@ MW

I also was only interested in litigation–specifically, acting as a gladiator to fight for little guys against abusive big guys. But the system is flawed in every aspect, and everybody lies with impunity, so I knew I would turn into someone I did not like if I stuck with it. I’ve spent the last thirty years learning to do what used to be considered impossible, predicting the short term trading moves that used to be considered purely random.

We seem to have a lot in common lol.

Hang in there and remember that there are always good things available in life while we still breathe. You have a mind that can negotiate the nuanced areas between the polar absolutes–that is a very good, rare, and valuable thing. ((MW))

I know! I know! It’s A!!!

Both have lower than average life expectancy and for Deplorables it’s falling. And both are things we should do something about, but don’t. And both would benefit from universal programs, so we won’t.

@ dc

Do you really think nothing happens unless somebody famous says it happened lol? Don’t you have your own mind?

I think a lot of white folks who would have been happy to fight police violence side-by-side with the BLM activists saw the way they acted, from lying about Michael Brown and onward, and all the police ambush assassinations, and realized they had deliberately picked a slogan that excluded the interests of non-blacks, and they were just fed up with what they saw. They saw that the BLM people chose to ally themselves with Clinton and the Dems, and so they voted for Trump to show their displeasure.

All we keep hearing from the left since the election is that many different factors were big enough to be blamed for the Clinton loss. So, I don’t know how anyone can say with certainty that this BLM backlash dynamic was not equally responsible for the Clinton defeat. How anyone can say with certainty that the Russian $100,000 spent on Facebook ads made the difference, but simultaneously argue that white disgust with BLM could not possibly have made the difference, is really amusing to me.

Anyway, nobody can prove it either way. It’s just my opinion.

@reality checker,

Also, since your good opinion of my mind matters to me, I will offer further evidence of having had my own mind all along.

Michael Moore is just as famous while calling Trump “illegitimate” and agitating for his removal somehow from office as he was while correctly predicting the Trump election without mentioning BLM once in his analysis of the 4 Brexit states. And even though he is famous, my own mind leads me to reject his dismissal of Trump as “illegitimate” and to refuse his invitation to people to ” work for removing Trump”.

So there you go. Sufficient evidence of me having and having had my own mind all along.

Speaking of gout, I had an attack of it once. So I gave up shrimp.

@realitychecker,

Well! You should have told me about your before-the-fact prediction of Trump’s victory based on Kelly Anne Conway’s hiring into the Trump Campaign. (Unless you did post your prediction on the Internet and I missed it . . . which is certainly possible given my limited computer screen time and limited thoroughness of reading).

Therefore, your analytical framework has been proven at least as correct as fat fuck ex-Michael Moore’s framework, and perhaps at a deeper level given that yours far predated his. And if his prediction about the 4 Brexit states was “political weathervaning” rather than political analysis, still . . . he did tell us which way the wind was blowing and was going to blow in those 4 states. So if I hear any other Michael Moore predictions, I will watch to see if the events occur as predicted. And I will certainly watch your predictions with seriously respectful attention as well.

@dc

Well, many thanks for not calling me a liar, as so many others on the Internet would have found it easier to do lol.

Predicting is what I do, mostly about the markets, but that inevitably involves predicting specific events, outcomes, and effects of things that can affect markets. I do this by drawing on my background experiences in business, psychology, media, law, trading stock index futures for 30 years, and growing up streetwise in Brooklyn. 🙂

But not to claim too much credit, my call based on Conway was simply based on seeing the raw populist energy of Trump, and knowing that she was a very savvy political operative who would have a good chance of channeling and harnessing that energy into efficient campaign management.

The prediction was not based on BLM, nor was Moore’s, iirc. I would submit that the reasoning process you applied to Moore is not a sound one; to be sound, it would have needed more data on Moore’s thought and reasoning process, not just that he got the result right (broken clock thingy?).

But re BLM, I am puzzled to see how many fail to perceive that there was obviously a lot of white resentment against BLM for seeming to exclude whites in order to push blacks to the front of the squeaky wheel line, so to speak. Call it a bridge too far, jumping the shark, the straw that broke the camel’s back, whatever you prefer, but it was clear to me that the sentiment was as I perceived it. A united front would have been preferable IMO, what they did instead was inherently divisive, and I wonder at those who refuse to see that.

politics in this country has degen’ed to all spectacle. the playground of sociopaths. hollyworld. i get suicidal thinking about it.

but hey, the disproportion of elites to slaves is what fueled the growth of christianity in its infancy in rome. its magical thinking gave hope to the hopeless. when the 99% couldn’t afford the animal sacrifices of the many and various popular gods, christianity offered, “only believe.” the rest is free. free grace. pax judaica. onwards and upwards.

Mostly, this comment is not going to be about the election, but all I will say on that front:

(1) I absolutely think Russian influence had zero to do w/it. I can’t prove a negative, but I confess to automatically lowering my respect for anyone who thinks this (while admittedly still respecting quite a few, since they seem otherwise mostly sane).

(2) Single biggest reason for the Trump victory in the close states, imo (and totally unprovable): the failure of HRC and the non-Bernie wing of the Dems to admit that the economy wasn’t good and that a lot of people were suffering due to policies that had been perpetuated by the Dems as well as the Rs for a long time (which would not have mattered if the econ was really as good as the pundits keep saying it is, yet, strangely, the idiot American voter insisted on believing their personal experience over what the TV was telling them, thus calling into question whether Democracy is still a viable strategy)

This lack of focus on the economy (or, rather, delusion about the economy, or, collaboration in making up an imaginary economy to report on) is one of the three biggest reasons the Republicans are still a viable political party, even though most people really don’t like what they are advocating.

Another, going back sort of to what we are talking about, is the leftist obsession with divvying everyone up into competing identities. I think here’s where we get into some of the disagreements about BLM. To what extent are they a part of the whole nutjob SJW thing? (I’m talking about current arguments here in this thread between people who I think would agree w/my “nutjob SJW” reference, but clearly disagree on the utility of BLM) Certain parts of the left are doing identity politics (which doesn’t have to be a bad thing, and *can* be a good thing) in a way that alienates people who should be allies (see: me, if you want an example, and say whatever you want to about me, hate on me if you will, think I’m awful if you will, but honestly guys, if you’re pissing off me on this subject on multiple fronts, I’m pretty sure you’re doing it to a lot of other people a lot worse, just most of them aren’t going to speak up) (for examples, see the entire Evergreen college fiasco, the youtube of the girl at another Cali college trying to insist that the white guy wearing dreadlocks HAD to stop and listen to her berate him and HAD to agree w/her that he was doing something wrong, or the YouTube of the girl at another Cali college who stole this guy’s MAGA hat and then was genuinely perplexed that she was in trouble for taking his hat off his head and not giving it back rather than him being in trouble for wearing the hat, which in her mind was a call to genocide, or the prof at the New England college who said white people were responsible for every instance of slavery in history and in fact invented it, or, well, the mere existence of websites like “Everyday Feminism”, which I haven’t looked at in a very long time but is probably still there and probably just as hilarious as ever)(note: I consider myself a feminist; many other feminists mock everyday feminism, I actually thought it was a parody site making fun of certain types of lefties when I first followed a link there). There are about five million other examples of this sort of thing. Possibly five million on a daily basis. I’m not even sure I’m exaggerating, though probably a little with that last stat.

And lastly, the whole idea that various narratives on the left are beyond criticism, or discussion, or analysis, and anyone who attempts to question these narratives are evil genocidal and probably stupid bigots who should be either silenced or shunned because, ummm, I’m never quite clear on the “because” part, but I think it has something to do with bad words and thoughts being worse than actual physical violence if they are coming from unapproved people, or something like that. This will do a great job of shutting down arguments on blogs or in large groups where people don’t want to be shunned or mobbed, but it also does a great job of getting people to think they might be more at home on the other side. This, again, is an SJW thing, which used to be only in obscure circles but has become mainstreamed. So we are in a position where the right wing invites D candidates to Liberty College, and the left no platforms damn near everyone they don’t 100% agree with on college campuses.

(oh, wait, I forgot, fourth reason for keeping the Rs viable–that the Ds just plain suck, and cheated in the primary to make sure they kept sucking so they could suck up rich donor dollars, and have since continued to put more effort into backing Rs who just changed parties without changing policies, while actively funding candidates against anyone who might be progressive; I don’t agree w/Down with Tyranny on everything or many things and have mostly quit reading them cause they really pissed me off w/their utterly pointless and reprehensible “Melania is a whore” posts back in the day, but they’ve done a great job of covering who the D leadership chooses to back and still do, when I occasionally check back there. They also publish Gaius Publius’ posts on the environment and global warming, which are some of the best going; tho I usually read the Naked Capitalism reposts instead)

Anyway, while I personally think BLM is pushing a false narrative with (in most but far from all cases) the best of intentions (because they actually believe the false narrative, as do the people here who are defending them, who almost certainly think *I’m* the one who has the narrative wrong), all I’m going to say is check the facts and look at them honestly, if you have the time. If you come to a different conclusion than me, so be it. I personally think this false narrative is a part of the whole lefty groupthink tribalism that is most likely being pushed by a bunch of rich fucks to help keep the rest of us arguing with each other instead of addressing the actual problems and yeah, that sounds all conspiracy theory, as does pointing out no one shot Malcolm X when he was talking about the evil white people but he got shot when he wanted whites and blacks to work together, and likewise MLK didn’t get shot until he started really pushing for a unity of the white and black working class against the rich power structures. Narratives that keep pushing groups apart instead of bringing them together help keep Jeff Bezos and Dick Cheney and their fellows rolling. If you’re going to push one of those narratives, at least make sure it’s well grounded in reality (the issue of women’s bodily autonomy and reproductive freedom is one that certainly causes division, and I’m not backing down an inch on that one, so obviously, I’m not advocating backing down from a position just because it causes dissension; if you’re right, you’re right and some things are worth the fight).

In general, though, I’d say, as MLK did, that the working classes of all races have more in common with each other than any of us do with the corporate powers that be or the people who are comfy schmoozing each other up in their ladder climbing offices (I have made a number of career decisions that seem deranged to most people simply because I’m not comfy w/this, in fact I view most of these people rather like I view Logan in Westworld, who I think kind of was supposed to be a stand in for such), and we need to be looking for ways to appreciate that commonality and to work together to get people into power who will help all of us, instead of help almost no one while insisting to poor whites that ethnic others are taking your rights on one side while telling the ethnic others that evil whites are keeping you down. It’s more like a bunch of evil fucks are keeping us all down, and doing their very best to keep us all at odds w/everyone who doesn’t fit our particular group.

@ MW

Excellent next to last comment, I agree completely with your take.

Re your last comment-we should talk sometime. It would be interesting.