by wj
Our discussions of politics tend (perhaps understandably) to be rather US-focused. So here’s something a little different.
With the election of Jeremy Corbyn as party leader, Britain’s Labour Party seems to be emulating the US’ Republican Party in stepping away from the center. How much difference will it make in the results that it’s a Parliamentary system, rather than a Congressional/Presidential one?
And does it matter that part of Corbyn’s electoral win seems to be due to getting a whole lot of people** who were not previously Labour Party members to pony up the £3 (roughly US$4.60) required to become a member and vote?
** “A whole lot” meaning the number of Labour Party members roughly tripled as a result of Corbyn’s push to get new people to sign up and vote for him.
A blog post in the Economist features quotes like “Team Corbyn insiders concede that the greatest threat to him could come from the left, which will cry betrayal at the first compromise (it is only a matter of time until one former supporter calls him a “Tory”, the epithet applied throughout the just-finished leadership contest to those suspected of ideological impurity).”
Substitute “right” for “left” and “RINO” for “Tory” in that statement. Who does that sound like — to the point that it could actually be a direct quote?
This post sounds a little too David Brooks for me. Mere distance from the center tells me nothing either good or bad. Corbin is apparently the British equivalent of Sanders–lefties, or some of them, still get excited at the prospect of voting for someone who doesn’t seem like a neoliberal sellout. I used to get excited by such things myself and am happy that others still do, though in this country I don’t expect a President Sanders has any great chance of happening. I don’t know enough about British politics to comment about Corbyn’s chances, but am only objecting to the equation of Corbyn with the American far right.
Stupid iPad corrected my correct spelling of Corbyn.
I have only a passing familiarity with UK politics, but it seems like Labor has basically elected a party leader who is right in line with what have, traditionally, been Labor policies and positions in the UK.
What I wonder is whether the election of Corbyn in the UK and the emergence of Sanders in the US indicate an end to “triangulation” in the Clinton sense.
Compared to Corbyn, Bernie Sanders is a raging capitalist. He only seems similar due to his having the whimsey of labeling himself (quite inaccurately, from what I have seen of his positions on the issues) as a “socialist.”
Compared to Corbyn, Bernie Sanders is a raging capitalist.
I can totally believe that.
Different countries, different definitions of socialism. Ours needs scare quotes.
Sanders is, by non-USian definitions, a social democrat. He would be perfectly at home in the SPD, the PSOE, the PSF etc., etc.- all parties which were once committed to reordering society but not for a long time – but he would stand on the centre right within them. Corbyn probably regards himself these days as a democratic socialist, who is still in favour of reordering society but is pragmatic about what can be realistically achieved. Anywhere outside the Anglosphere, he would stand on the left of the socialist/social democratic party, but not to an extreme. In office, I suspect they would have more in common than not.
I’ve been following the Corbyn discussion, but don’t enough to comment, a disqualification I rarely succumb to regarding other subjects, ha ha.
But this might be interesting:
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-corbyn-supremacy?intcid=mod-most-popular
The last bit about joining the Queen’s Privy Counsel sounds like it could be as entertaining as John Lennon asking the assembled royalty to rattle their jewelry 50 some years ago, without the mock shyness.
Sanders would have a decent shot at winning were he to get the nomination…
I out the odds for a Corbyn led victory at around 5%. Not impossible, but extremely unlikely.
If he retains McDonnell as shadow chancellor, then make that about 2.5%.
I like Mr. Sanders, and I’m glad he’s running.
Sanders would have a decent shot at winning
Presupposes that the Democratic Party national apparatus would place its weight and money behind him.
OK, I’ll buy that.
Presupposes that he has an organization that can assume power in the national party, and money to fund that organization.
I don’t see it. Sorry.
Allowing for a mild degree of skepticism about the source…
http://news.sky.com/story/1552307/corbyns-cabinet-chaos-the-inside-story
…. “We offered Lucy DECC (Department of Energy and Climate Change) but she said, she wasn’t ready, she wanted something to do with childcare.”
How the shadow Education Secretary was chosen.
This is not going to end well.
I find it interesting that the U.S. media is portraying Corbyn as leading his party in the spirit of divisiveness akin to the GOP in the States, casting him as a polarizing figure. But all that shows is how hermetically sealed the media in the States is.
For all that those decry him for being, Corbyn is actually returning Labour to where it used to be – soft- to medium-hard socialism – whereas the GOP is in a space that is unprecedented for it – reactionary radicalism, though with what on the face of it is an incongruous and goofy pro-Israel semitism. (For the cynically-minded not so goofy, given how the one end of the Mediterranean sees the GOP and how the Eastern Seaboard sees Israel, but that’s a whole thread in itself right there that this one doesn’t have the scope for.)
I don’t know how good any of this really is for Labour. I wish the left in the U.S. would take the stands that Corbyn does at what seems to be his most vigorous and inspired, but points such as nationalization of key industries are too unrealistic (and quite unworkable in this economic climate). And re Nigel, they have to wire their heads and arses together to make it a plausible opposition, with a shadow cabinet that doesn’t act as if it’s lurking in the shadows, and strangle any Fabian nostalgia at birth.
So far, it doesn’t seem to be leaping out of the gates with abandon. Ed Miliband’s face in the Guardian pledging his support for the new regime was not one inspiring optimism – rather, more one that was attached to a body badly under slept, in need of hibernation.
I haven’t actually been reading about Corbyn in the US media. My impressions of him actually come from the British media — specifically, the Economist. Of course, they have their own perspective on economics and politics….
Sanders would have a decent shot at winning
I also like Mr. Sanders, and am also glad he’s running.
My question about him is whether he has the skill set to be an effective executive.
To some degree, I’m not sure there is way to prepare for the job. I’m mostly curious to see how he handles the process of running for it. Especially, given the somewhat surprising (to many folks) level of support he’s received, how he handles the phenomena of being the American left’s new darling.
It could go to your head.
I wish the left in the U.S. would take the stands that Corbyn does
I wish we could get Glass-Steagall, or something remotely like it, re-instated.
Baby steps, I guess.
Wouldn’t Glass-Steagall be the baby step?
(At least parts of it which would have a chance of getting passed, like reseperating retail and investment banking. Nobody is going to go back to restricting banks to a single state.)
Corbyn Envy on the British Right: And some Sanders envy here in the U.S.
There’s always a Hitchens kvetching from the wings.
This sentence, regarding one area of agreement between the conservative Hitchens and Corbyn stood out:
“and he (Hitchens) agrees with him (Corbyn) about renationalizing the railroads—but he certainly isn’t a socialist.”
I challenge Hitchens to stand up at any (un)American Republican Party fete in this country and state that view and, baby, watch the stifling begin.
These terms we use here denote different levels of absolutism than they do in England, I gather.
Stifle, Edith! What are you, a pinko, Meathead? Nationalize the railroads?
Hey, look, some civilized behavior:
http://www.cnn.com/2015/09/14/politics/bernie-sanders-liberty-university-speech/
Hitchen is dead.
His brother, Peter, lives.
Wouldn’t Glass-Steagall be the baby step?
Yes, that was what I was getting at.
I.e., the left is not only not taking stands like Corbyn’s (for good or ill), we’re hard pressed to re-instate Glass-Seagall.
(At least parts of it which would have a chance of getting passed, like reseperating retail and investment banking. Nobody is going to go back to restricting banks to a single state.)
A guy can dream…
What do you see as the upside of restricting banks to a single state? (Especially in places where the state are kinda small.)
You may want to put in place some kind of restrictions to avoid “too big to fail” banks. But single-state banks aren’t really the optimum way to achieve that — especially considering that some of the big states would have the same problem of being “too big to fail.”
What do you see as the upside of restricting banks to a single state? (Especially in places where the state are kinda small.)
None, really. It was just kind of a joke, I forgot add the smiley.
Way, way, way back when corps of all kinds were often limited in the political or geographic scope that they could operate in, but I don’t see that as being either practical or useful nowadays.
I’d be really happy to see the separation of commercial and retail banking re-instated.
I don’t expect anything resembling a roll-back of the privileges currently given to corps, and especially not to financial corps. Certainly not in my lifetime, not ever.
IMO it would take a more or less complete cratering of the US financial system for anything close to that to happen. I wouldn’t look forward to that, so I’ll live with what we have.
In the run up to and during the Great Depression, a great many banks failed in the US. None failed in Canada.
Branch banking wasn’t allowed in the US. Canada had multiple branch and regional banks.
Well, ok then.
McKT,Christopher and Peter were at opposite poles politically, and the opposite of close personally, but in the period after Christopher was diagnosed Peter offered stem cells, or any other donation that would help, and they ended on good terms.Christopher Hitchens was,IMO, irreplaceable (despite my complete disagreement with his late-life pro Iraq war stance etc), but it can send shivers up your spine sometimes to hear Peter, with such a similar voice and similar fluency and command of language.
This is a nice article about Corbyn from Jacobin
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/09/jeremy-corbyn-labour-benn-kendall-blair-leadership/
it can send shivers up your spine sometimes to hear Peter, with such a similar voice and similar fluency and command of language…
And some of the thoughts he expresses can send shivers down your spine….
True enough Nigel
Thx, GNC. Will look Peter up.
Even wj, mired as he is in deep High Broderism denial (/snark), might be inspired to great thoughts by this article.
hat tip to Crooked Timber.
Bobby, pardon me if I have overstepped, but I edited your comment so the link will work.
I don’t actually embrace Broderism. I just think that it is a good thing if, on most things, the members of Congress could manage to work together to keep the wheels from coming off.
Will there be disagreement on some things? Of course — and a good thing, too. But from what I can see, we currently have in the American Congress is disagreement for its own sake. Combine that with rampant tribalism (you can not disagree with your party on anything, especially if that leaves you in agreement with the other party, lest Bad Things Happen to you), and you have a mess.
Now some rampant libertarians may be delighted if it means the government cannot function. But the rest of us would prefer that it do so.
As for Corbyn, it isn’t too far a stretch to say that he is at the far liberal end of the Labour Party. Maybe not at the far liberal end of everybody left of center — but Labor is a center-left party, not a far left party. Or was.
What we saw here was a putsch. And I don’t know what else you could call it, when one candidate brings in a sudden influx of “members” that triples the voting membership. Maybe he will refashion Labour as something new. Or maybe he will drive out more voters than he brings in. We shall see.
wj,
You did not overstep. Thanks. I was kidding about the Broderism.
But somehow (please correct me if I err in this regard), I do not think you read the article? It has some interesting things to say.
But from what I can see, we currently have in the American Congress is disagreement for its own sake.
If politics is the collision and resolution of competing interests, then your observation is woefully wide of the mark.
Actually, I did read the article. (OK, skimmed.) It is interesting, but I’m not sure it substantially alters my perception.
Sure, the Labour Party elites (i.e. those who have spent a lot of their working lives working for the party) don’t agree with him. And may well work to oppose him . . . just as he has worked to oppose them. And, as the article notes, it will be interesting to see whether the new members that he has brought in stay and work, or whether they go back to whatever they were doing.
In the current Congress, I can certainly see collision of competing interests. But where do you see any resolution of those competing interests?
I’ve come to believe that the rampant tribalism is inherent. Gridlock in Congress is just the symptom.
It’s a big country, maybe too big. People believe different things, think different things are good, and want different things.
I know I keep saying that, but it’s because it keeps appearing to be so.
The folks in Congress are there because people voted for them. Nobody made them do that, and it’s kind of dismissive to say that it’s just because they were hoodwinked into it by propaganda.
We have tribalism because we have tribes.
But that rather begs the question:Why do we have tribes and this level of tribalism not? The country has been big for a long time. People have had different interests and desires for a long time.
So what changed? Anybody have something other than wild speculation — which is about the most I’ve got?
So what changed?
In that regard, not much really.
The difference is that the accepted hierarchy is getting shaken up. The whole notion of whites becoming a minority, coupled with the ability to harness the internet to disseminate information, along with perceived changes in gender and gender relations makes tribalism a lot more salient, especially when people are trying to hold on to advantages, real and perceived. If this were happening in the context of an economic boom, a la post WWII, it might be different, but happening in our uncertain economic times means that it is easier to play on fears and concerns. ymmv of course.
Interesting that several members of Corbyn’s shadow cabinet are publicly contradicting him on policy.
Predictably the conservative press are in full on derisive mode:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/labour/11866541/How-can-any-Labour-MP-defend-Jeremy-Corbyns-incoherent-nonsense.html
While I’m inclined to agree with some of the derision, there is an alternate perspective.
In a speech to the unions yesterday (also derided), he seemed to suggest outsourcing policy development to the party membership. This has been interpreted as weakness/dithering – but it seems equally likely that this is a deliberate strategy to get his own way on policy, using the backing of enthusiastic activists to impose decisions on a largely reluctant parliamentary party.
Whichever interpretation is correct, it’s going to be interesting to watch.
Lj, succinct and true I think. Added to which, the world outside got weirder, enemies got harder to deal with (e.g.Isis) so the urge to circle the wagons and/or huddle round the campfire with your own kind got stronger.
Thanks, being told I’m succinct is a rare event…
This from the Guardian about Tony Abbott’s departure has a bit more poetry, but is saying the same thing.
Every last joule of Tony Abbott’s political energy, every last howl of his most committed supporters, was derived from what philosopher Lauren Berlant once called “the scandal of ex-privilege”, including “rage at the stereotyped peoples who have appeared to change the political rules of social membership, and, with it, a desperate desire to return to an order of things deemed normal”.
The “normality” which has been lost in Australia and other western democracies is the unquestioned social and political primacy of white men. Recent decades have seen new kinds of political claims emerge, and a plurality of values, cultures and lifestyles. The rules of the game have, after long struggles, shifted.
The rest is quite good.
Off topic? No; open thread.
Chris Christie privatization
The “normality” which has been lost in Australia and other western democracies is the unquestioned social and political primacy of white men. Recent decades have seen new kinds of political claims emerge, and a plurality of values, cultures and lifestyles. The rules of the game have, after long struggles, shifted.
Yes, this is how the left sees it. And this is why the left sees it wrong. The initial premise, i.e. way back when, it was white guys running the show, is correct. That premise has since morphed, against the evidence, into several sub-premises: (1) white guys want to hang on to their ill-gotten gains and (2) other cultures, skin colors and gender orientations will make the white male-only West a better place.
I dispute both sub-premises. First, the entire world was and for the most part is, dominated by men and more specifically by men in the dominant ethnic group in a particular location. Nothing unique to the West about this. Second, unlike anywhere else in the world, the West, beginning 600 or so yeas ago, slowly developed a shift away from the rigid, feudal order to what, first in the US, and then spreading to Europe first and then elsewhere, was the concept of democracy, borrowed from the ancient Greeks. No other Asian or African culture has a similar history.
It was precisely the liberalization of the US, followed by Europe, that led to female suffrage and, too late, but still ahead of most cultures and countries, ethnic/racial equality under the law if not in outcome.
The ‘rule of law’ is a creature of Western liberal democracy. Again, not independently replicated–copied maybe–but not developed from a standing start or through the evolution over time of internal mores, anywhere else in the world.
Yet, it is widely believed on the left that bringing people of different cultures–with no cultural heritage of sexual or ethnic equality, no cultural heritage of the rule or law or a pluralistic society, will somehow make America better. Because, you know, white male privilege and all that.
The left’s premises run counter to common sense. Bringing people to the US with no concept of how our society functions and who come from failed states, or dictatorships or oligarchies and thus have no concept of what is basic to most reasonably well educated Americans is just ridiculous.
It is almost as ridiculous as positing that skin pigmentation, cultural heritage, genitalia or sexual orientation somehow imbues an individual with special insight.
It was the evolving liberalizing trend, over centuries that brought white males to the point where being confronted with the injustice of slavery, racial and sexual inequality and so on, consented/acquiesced more or less peacefully (can’t ignore the Civil War) to change. Again, unique to America and followed in time first in Europe, then Japan (sort of), South Korea, and to one degree or another, various countries around the world.
Sure, it began with white guys on the outside kicking in the door and making the white guys at the top liberalize the program for white guys. However, over time (quite a bit of it), the more liberalized white guys got, the harder it got to say “women, Blacks, etc, you don’t count”.
So, I guess this would be another difference between liberals and some conservatives.
In anticipation of someone pointing out that some tribe somewhere, five hundred years ago let women vote or had a written constitution, so what. Show me a country today, outside of the Western Liberal democracy where women and ethnic/religous minorities have the same or more rights under the law as the US, and demonstrate how that country developed such a regime independent of the US as an example.
Similarly, I know were aren’t completely there yet. I get that. Perfection is the enemy of good. Very few people leave the US to find a better life, millions come here for precisely that. There is a reason for that and it isn’t white male privilege.
So what changed?
LJ’s 11:10 is, I think, quite a good summary of a number of aspects.
My own, somewhat more pessimistic, opinion is that I’m not sure how much change there has been.
In some ways, things have changed for the better. We no longer express our reactionary tendencies in the form of home-grown terrorism a la the KKK, we no longer sort out class issues via literal open warfare a la the labor struggles of the early 20th C, etc etc etc.
All good.
There are a lot more of us now, it’s easier to get around to other parts of the country, various media channels make our presence and our opinions more visible to others, all of which makes us bump up against each other a lot more than maybe used to be the case. So, maybe differences are in higher contrast.
As far as Congress goes, I think the issue is that none of the points of view represented there have a sufficiently overwhelming majority to consistently and overwhelmingly prevail.
So, gridlock.
(2) other cultures, skin colors and gender orientations will make the white male-only West a better place.
it will make the West a better place for people who aren’t white men. that’s the goal. quite simply: equality.
However, over time (quite a bit of it), the more liberalized white guys got, the harder it got to say “women, Blacks, etc, you don’t count”.
it’s still not hard enough.
Bringing people to the US with no concept of how our society functions and who come from failed states, or dictatorships or oligarchies and thus have no concept of what is basic to most reasonably well educated Americans is just ridiculous.
“ridiculous”??? And yet that is what the US has done for a couple of centuries. And we have proceeded to integrate them (and especially their children) into our culture quite successfully. Even those who have not integrated completely have still managed, in the vast majority of cases, to interact with the rest of us successfully and without negative consequences.
To pick just a couple of examples. Our Irish immigrants came out of a culture which was still almost feudal; a couple of generations later, their descendants were indistinguishable from the rest. Our Japanese immigrants came from a wildly different culture; their children formed the 442 Regimental Combat Team.
We can deal with, and integrate, immigrants from other backgrounds. We know this (or at least should know this) because we have been doing so for a couple of centuries. Unfortunately, we seem to have a recurring case of “this time is different, and things will be awful.” And, every time, it isn’t different and things work out fine.
No other Asian or African culture has a similar history.
FWIW, self-government, whether mediated through representatives or not, is a not-uncommon human phenomenon, both geographically and historically.
It wasn’t invented here, or in Europe.
What we saw here was a putsch. And I don’t know what else you could call it, when one candidate brings in a sudden influx of “members” that triples the voting membership.
For what it’s worth, the two people I know personally who paid their £3 and voted for Corbyn were once paid up members of Old Labour, but left in 1995 when they abolished Clause 4 of their constitution, specifically the part committing to the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange.
First, the entire world was and for the most part is, dominated by men and more specifically by men in the dominant ethnic group in a particular location. Nothing unique to the West about this.
No one denies this, as far as I know. It’s just that the West is what’s under discussion, and that’s where white men are in the dominant ethnic group. And the West includes places where the original inhabitants weren’t white, as you noted.
It was precisely the liberalization of the US, followed by Europe, that led to female suffrage and, too late, but still ahead of most cultures and countries, ethnic/racial equality under the law if not in outcome.
I don’t dispute this. I also don’t know how that should inform my views on the extent, in the West, to which non-white, non-male, non-Christian or non-straight people are at a disadvantage or how the extent that such disadvantage diminishing bothers some people in traditionally advantaged groups.
It is almost as ridiculous as positing that skin pigmentation, cultural heritage, genitalia or sexual orientation somehow imbues an individual with special insight.
Well, it certainly imbues people with a special insight as to what it’s like to be someone of their own skin pigmentation, cultural heritage, genitalia or sexual orientation.
Perfection is the enemy of good. Very few people leave the US to find a better life, millions come here for precisely that. There is a reason for that and it isn’t white male privilege.
What good is perfection the enemy of where it concerns recognizing that our society doesn’t treat different kinds of people equally? Yes, we do much better than the vast majority of places. I’m not really sure what you mean about white male privilege not being the reason, but I think I’d agree.
“The left’s premises run counter to common sense. Bringing people to the US with no concept of how our society functions and who come from failed states, or dictatorships or oligarchies and thus have no concept of what is basic to most reasonably well educated Americans is just ridiculous.”
McTX, reasonable conservatives and liberals in Congress worked for years to successfully craft bipartisan and comprehensive immigration reform legislation in 2012, and the President would have signed it.
It was within our collective grasp.
Marco Rubio, a Cuban immigrant, apparently possessing no concept of how a civil society functions and who came from a failed state and a dictatorship and has no concept of what is basic to most reasonable well-educated Americans, ridiculously was one of many chicken-sh*t conservatives who backed away from the Bill and scuttled it.
Now, we have the likes of Trump, Carson, et al, native-born, demagogic and plutocratic fellow Americans I’m ashamed to admit, demonizing yet another large group of human beings for the benefit of a rabble base with no better natures at their disposal, many of whom, by the way, are aggrieved with pent-up anger even by the 200 years of rule-of-law gradualism in the area of civil rights progress you so eloquently present here.
Here’s what I want. I want charges against this American kid dropped, and I want the anti-American Mayor of his town, Beth Van Duyne, deported back to Belgium, or the Netherlands, or RidiculousLand, (could it have been South Africa) or back to where ever she smuggled in her dictatorial skin pigmentation, cultural heritage, and she can take her genitalia with her too, though I’m happy to keep those in country to be placed in the wing of the Smithsonian Museum that collects biological specimens no sane person has a use for:
http://www.balloon-juice.com/2015/09/16/an-interesting-coincidence/
Further, I want the next try at immigration legislation to mandate the immediate deportation of the guys in the pick-up in this incident.
Kenya seems a good destination for their birth certificates and other curriculum vitae:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/09/15/1421522/-Men-shout-the-N-word-at-Mizzou-student-president-sparks-awesome-campus-wide-challenge
Now that Cuba is opening up, Marco Rubio can head back there to take bribes from Sheldon Adelson to grease the wheels for opening up the latter’s corrupt casinos in Havana with no labor rules and no safety regulations, except for the taster that will need to be hired to take the first sip of Adelson’s alcoholic beverages, so he doesn’t suffer from a fatal tummy ache.
I’m willing to forgive the Scots/Irish for establishing the Confederacy and hosting Civil War I, not only because of the statute of limitations, but also because of their contributions to poetry, heavy drinking, and if you need a tenor to belt a song out, where else are you going to go.
Our Irish immigrants came out of a culture which was still almost feudal
Not for nothing, but to the degree that 19th C Ireland was ‘feudal’, it was because they were ruled by the Brits, who were utter pricks. As regards their rule of Ireland, anyway.
The idea that self-government and polities based on the rule of law is the unique and unprecedented invention of the US, or the West, or any individual people, geographical area, or culture, is false.
And not for nothing, but by my lights McK’s “way back when” is about 50 years ago.
McTx: The ‘rule of law’ is a creature of Western liberal democracy.
The Code of Hammurabi is 3000 years older than western liberal democracy, as McKinney surely knows. So I’d like to figure out what McKinney means by ‘rule of law’.
McKinney probably also knows that fncking Pakistan got around to electing a woman prime minister before the US ever elected a woman president.
Every step toward “liberal democracy” in the history of the universe has been opposed by people who called themselves “conservative”, but I get the feeling McKinney wants us libruls to be grateful for the gifts conservatives have given to the world.
–TP
In further response to:
It is almost as ridiculous as positing that skin pigmentation, cultural heritage, genitalia or sexual orientation somehow imbues an individual with special insight.
From the Count’s link:
Well, Pakistan also got around to several military coup ed’tats against her and a couple of unsuccessful assassination attempts before killing their former female prime minister.
All carried out by their brand of reactionary conservatives, I’ll wager.
We haven’t had our female President yet but if it’s Clinton, the rhetoric against her by our brand of radical conservatives/reactionaries/jagoffs may lead them to play catch up with Pakistan in more ways than one.
Count, do you really think someone would manage to mount a coup d’etat against a President Hilary Clinton? Assasination attempts? Sure, lots of Presidents have had to cope with those — and not always for ideological/privilege reasons. But a coup?
(I’ll grant that some tiny group of middle to low level officers might try such a thing. But they would get smashed by the rest of the military before they ever got off the ground.)
First, the entire world was and for the most part is, dominated by men and more specifically by men in the dominant ethnic group in a particular location. Nothing unique to the West about this.
Yet imperialism happened. This is not to claim that other nations or regions wouldn’t have done it, but the fact is that the West did it, so it (and we) have to deal with the consequences.
Bringing people to the US with no concept of how our society functions and who come from failed states, or dictatorships or oligarchies and thus have no concept of what is basic to most reasonably well educated Americans is just ridiculous.
Yet it has worked out for the entire history of the US. What is the problem now? Or as Obama said
“This whole anti-immigrant sentiment that’s out there in our politics right now is contrary to who we are. Because unless you are a Native American, your family came from someplace else,” Mr. Obama said. “Don’t pretend that somehow 100 years ago the immigration process was all smooth and strict. That’s not how it worked.” The grandparents and great-grandparents of politicians taking a hard line on immigration, he said, were also “somehow considered unworthy or uneducated or unwashed.
When I hear folks talking as if somehow these kids are different from my kids or less worthy in the eyes of God, that somehow they are less worthy of our respect and consideration and care, I think that’s un-American,” Mr. Obama said.
On the other hand, you think it is completely American.
As I said, it is a different problem when you are facing this sort of thing in an economic boom. When the economy is not running as well, it is a tendency of people, not just white guys, to pull up the drawbridge. I don’t suggest otherwise. But just because others would have done the same thing doesn’t mean that it is somehow correct.
It was the evolving liberalizing trend, over centuries that brought white males to the point where being confronted with the injustice of slavery, racial and sexual inequality and so on…
So being liberal is a good thing. Except when it is not. Kind of confusing.
Yet, it is widely believed on the left that bringing people of different cultures–with no cultural heritage of sexual or ethnic equality, no cultural heritage of the rule or law or a pluralistic society, will somehow make America better.
That ‘bringing’ does a lot of heavy lifting in that paragraph. Who is doing this ‘bringing’? You’ve got a capitalistic society that wants to sell the world a coke (and the iWatch app to go with it) and then, when there is a differential in living standards, you are baffled why people would end up trying to relocate here or in other places where, mysteriously, white men hold sway. I know, if my grandmother had balls she would be my grandfather, so just because of some accident of birth in terms of gender, race and location, it somehow absolves the “unquestioned social and political primacy of white men”.
It seems to me like ‘the Left’ (whatever that may be) sees that things are changing and it can’t be avoided. If you start from there, you might not employ those strawman arguments. I don’t think anyone here has advocated ‘bringing’ people into the US to increase diversity. I don’t think anyone has claimed that if it just not have been white men, we wouldn’t be in all this shit. I’m sure you could find some people making the arguments you attribute to the left, but I have a feeling that you might take umbrage if I linked you to some of the more extreme on that side.
But if you want to make sure that you want to go out of your way to NOT welcome them, it seems to me that when they have a chance to do the same to “us”, be they tourists minding their own business, or businessmen wanting just to do business. Of course, it is ‘the Left’ that wants to somehow ‘bring them’, and the Right never has anything to do with any of that. Quelle surprise…
That premise has since morphed, against the evidence, into several sub-premises: (1) white guys want to hang on to their ill-gotten gains and (2) other cultures, skin colors and gender orientations will make the white male-only West a better place.
I dispute both sub-premises.
Leaving aside the “premise of the left” stuff, I guess I find this confusing.
Are you arguing that straight white men haven’t, and don’t, hold any position of advantage here, or broadly in modern Western democracies? Or that they don’t resist giving that up, or sharing it with other kinds of folks?
Do you think there aren’t cultural and other advantages to be had by folks from other places moving here?
Ok, WJ first. IF you are going to quote me, don’t cherry pick and change the context. Here is what I said:
Yet, it is widely believed on the left that bringing people of different cultures–with no cultural heritage of sexual or ethnic equality, no cultural heritage of the rule or law or a pluralistic society, will somehow make America better. Because, you know, white male privilege and all that.
Cleek says,
it will make the West a better place for people who aren’t white men. that’s the goal. quite simply: equality.
What?? The US has, compared to any other country as much or more equality across the board. Adding more diversity isn’t going to alter the equality equation. If the idea is to dispossess or replace white people, just say so. But don’t act like white privilege is a big problem that diversity will solve when not another, non-white, non-western country has our level of equality.
It’s just that the West is what’s under discussion, and that’s where white men are in the dominant ethnic group. And the West includes places where the original inhabitants weren’t white, as you noted.
So, is there black male privilege in Africa, Asian male privilege in Asia, and so on? How does bringing diverse males into the US change that paradigm? The obsession on the left is *white, male*. Well, historically, “white, male” is why we are even able to have this discussion because, for all of their faults, they are the one’s who got this whole rule of law, equality under the law thing going.
The idea that self-government and polities based on the rule of law is the unique and unprecedented invention of the US, or the West, or any individual people, geographical area, or culture, is false.
Western liberalism was well underway in the 19th century, so Ireland isn’t an example of something developing independent of the west. Please show me a modern country or culture that developed, independent of the west, a democratic, rule of law-type society. I’d like to see it.
The Code of Hammurabi is 3000 years older than western liberal democracy, as McKinney surely knows. So I’d like to figure out what McKinney means by ‘rule of law’.
Well, “rule of law”, in modern terms doesn’t mean, for example, the Dooms of Canute or the Magna Carta or the Legacy of Tokugawa, if identifying some ancient, defunct, nonoperational legal system somehow illuminates the discussion. It means “due process”, it means “equality under the law”, it intends (it’s imperfect) that the law means and applies the same way, in a consistent and reasonably fair manner. Among other things. And, it means the that law operates independent of kings, presidents, prime ministers, religious leaders or what have you.
TP, this is the kind of digression that makes a conversation difficult. PRC, no rule of law. US, rule of law. Cuba, no rule of law. Mexico, ditto. Iran, ditto. UK, not ditto.
In further response to:
It is almost as ridiculous as positing that skin pigmentation, cultural heritage, genitalia or sexual orientation somehow imbues an individual with special insight.
From the Count’s link:
Ok, I have a gay friend who, from his earliest youth on a farm in rural OK was obviously different. I asked him recently, did he ever have a problem with someone giving him a hard time because he was gay. He was quite emphatic: “Never, not once.” Ok, so, he’s gay but doesn’t have a story about that being hard for him. A black person well might have a particularly poignant experience in which the *experience* gives weight to a particular topic. But, that is not LJ’s point or the white male privilege point, which is that pigmentation, gender, etc in and of themselves make for special insight.
Yet imperialism happened. This is not to claim that other nations or regions wouldn’t have done it, but the fact is that the West did it, so it (and we) have to deal with the consequences.
Really, no other imperialism? Hmmm. Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Imperial Japan, China (historically has colonized/occupied most of its neighbors).
I’m addressing your extract on white male privilege. You are side-stepping the point, e.g. but for white male privilege and western liberal democracy, we would not be having this discussion and women would be chattel.
As I said, it is a different problem when you are facing this sort of thing in an economic boom. When the economy is not running as well, it is a tendency of people, not just white guys, to pull up the drawbridge. I don’t suggest otherwise. But just because others would have done the same thing doesn’t mean that it is somehow correct.
It is tiresome, really, to be reminded that we are a nation of immigrants. You live in a country that is not big on immigration or big on diversity. I live in a city where we spend millions of dollars every year teaching (poorly) children enough English to make them better service level workers. I employ their parents and grandparents. We all do. My wife is a naturalized citizen. As a resident of a border state, I see everyday what immigration is and is not. One thing it is not is relevant to the WMP discussion unless you are arguing (and, I think you are, but are not willing so say so at this point, and this is my mind-reading, so I’m putting it parenthesis) that immigrating more people of color is advantageous because it servers to dilute WMP.
The point I’m addressing is the notion that WMP and its subsidiary ‘white people running the show’ has been a bad thing and we need to fix it. That is BS. Show me another place in the world where women and minorities are better off than they are in any western liberal democracy.
Good luck with that.
Second basic point: the reason that women and minorities have it better in the liberal west is because the white men in the liberal west, and no where else, changed and allowed that to happen.
Prove me wrong.
And, on the immigration front, we are running out of room, and money, and jobs. Ok? Sure, if we could lift another 50 or 100 million people out of the depths of poverty, educate them and integrate them into our general societal mores, great. But, we can’t. We are out of bullets.
McKinney, I’m not really clear on how the context you add changes anything. Unless you were trying to say that it is widely believed on the left that “Bringing people to the US with no concept of how our society functions and who come from failed states, or dictatorships or oligarchies and thus have no concept of what is basic to most reasonably well educated Americans is just ridiculous.”
If that was your intent, I apologize. But it appeared to me you were giving the line that I quoted as your retort to the folks on the left saying “Yet, it is widely believed on the left that bringing people of different cultures–with no cultural heritage of sexual or ethnic equality, no cultural heritage of the rule or law or a pluralistic society, will somehow make America better. Because, you know, white male privilege and all that.”
The US has, compared to any other country as much or more equality across the board.
surely you’re aware of the difference between “most” and “enough” ? shirley ?
Adding more diversity isn’t going to alter the equality equation.
i said nothing about wanting to add more diversity for the sake of adding diversity.
diversity is going to happen, always has. that’s kinda the point of the USA.
But don’t act like white privilege is a big problem that diversity will solve when not another, non-white, non-western country has our level of equality.
i’m not sure where you got that argument from. but it’s not one i’ve ever made.
“Count, do you really think someone would manage to mount a coup d’etat against a President Hilary Clinton?”
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/sep/11/military-coup-some-americans-would-vote-yes
Jeff, I don’t doubt that there are those US civilians who would support a coup. I just don’t think that the vast majority of the military would do so. They tend to take their oath to support and defend the Constitution very seriously.
I just have to wonder how much of that 43% of Republicans coup support correlates with TRUMPS 40% support.
“Rule of law” means that whoever the people are who constitute whatever the government is, are subject to the law and are not above it.
That is what the rule of law means.
It’s not something the was invented by John freaking Locke.
Likewise “democracy” refers to polities where sovereignty resides with those governed.
Both are not-uncommon phenomena, both historically and geographically.
Lots of modern democracies were established using either the US or one of the European states as a model. To no small degree, that’s because the US and the European states have been political, economic, and social hegemons for a few hundred years.
Citing that as proof that we invented either concept is historically fatuous.
Human polities have organized themselves in a variety of ways over the last 10,000 years. Many of them have done so based on self-government and the rule of law.
We didn’t freaking invent it.
As far as extending civil liberties to people who aren’t white men, I submit that that was driven more by the folks who didn’t have them and wanted them, and less by the folks who already had them.
Women did not get the vote through the imagination and benevolence of men. They got it because they wanted it and they fought for it. There were also economic and technological drivers. But a bunch of white guys didn’t sit around one day and decide that it was time to extend civil liberties to women.
Ditto for most other extensions of civil liberties.
this is an excellent article IMHO
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176044/
Also, these questions are still on the table. A reply will be appreciated.
Are you arguing that straight white men haven’t, and don’t, hold any position of advantage here, or broadly in modern Western democracies? Or that they don’t resist giving that up, or sharing it with other kinds of folks?
Do you think there aren’t cultural and other advantages to be had by folks from other places moving here?
This is a reload of an earlier comment that didn’t make it in.
Are you arguing that straight white men haven’t, and don’t, hold any position of advantage here, or broadly in modern Western democracies?
Russell, didn’t I concede that white guys ran the show? Didn’t I make that point more than once?
MEN run the fncking show–EVERYWHERE. Always have. Except, in the US and the liberal west. Why? The western liberal tradition. White men used to hold full sway in the US and UK and France, etc. Now, much, much less. Over time, even less.
Is it an advantage to be white and male and straight? Sure. But, to reason from that that all of us straight white guys are conspiring to shaft our daughters, mothers, sisters, friends and relatives of color is BS.
Or that they don’t resist giving that up, or sharing it with other kinds of folks?
Absolutely I dispute this. First, read what I’ve said already; find someplace where non-white men running the show have done for women and minorities what white men in the US and the West have done; and show me a decent example of WM doing something to hang on to something. Is this some kind of conspiracy theory?
Do you think there aren’t cultural and other advantages to be had by folks from other places moving here?
In what numbers and from what countries and with what level of education? Do we need more Hispanics to grow culturally? As opposed to Macedonians? Or Nigerians? No country comes close to the US in terms of diversity. We are out of room, money and jobs. Uneducated, non-English speaking people cannot contribute meaningfully, particularly when they arrive in the 10’s, 100’s and millions. When we were screwing the Native Americans out of their land, we had room for more immigrants. Now, we are out of room.
First, let’s see if I can turn off my stupid italics.
(Fixed at the source. wj)
Head note: the various clergy I brought in were unable to exorcise the rampant, Satan-spawned italics. Giving the devil his/her due, I’ve used asterisks to denote Russell’s comments to which I am responding.
*Human polities have organized themselves in a variety of ways over the last 10,000 years. Many of them have done so based on self-government and the rule of law.
We didn’t freaking invent it.*
Ok, you asked that I respond to your questions, and I’ve asked you some of my own: show me one modern country that is democratic and has equality under the law and the rule of law that did not derive those practices from the US or western liberal democracy.
*As far as extending civil liberties to people who aren’t white men, I submit that that was driven more by the folks who didn’t have them and wanted them, and less by the folks who already had them.*
However, suspicions aside, factually, slavery ended with a war fought by white men against other white men. The 13-15th amendments were written and passed by white men. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, all white men. Imperfect, slave-holding white men in many instances, but white men. Without those docs, you don’t get to the next steps. The DoI and the Const are at the core of pretty much any non-parliamentary democracy extant today. Paralleling democracy’s growth in the US was the extension, by privileged white men in England, of the franchise first to all men and then to women. The parliamentary model is extant in the commonwealth countries.
Sure, there was resistance. It was overcome because the principles of equality under the law, fairness etc are the superior argument to “we are white men and we get to make the rules”.
*Women did not get the vote through the imagination and benevolence of men. They got it because they wanted it and they fought for it. There were also economic and technological drivers. But a bunch of white guys didn’t sit around one day and decide that it was time to extend civil liberties to women.*
As I acknowledged here and in earlier comments, nothing came without a fight of some kind, including one civil war. What makes “western white man country” different from the rest of eastern European and non-white world is that change DID happen, by consensus, and over time.
*Ditto for most other extensions of civil liberties.*
Slavery, women’s suffrage and civil rights–all upset the prior order. All done internally. All done because it was the right thing to do. Not WM hanging on to privilegel, but WM conceding equality because it was demonstrated to be the right thing to do.
F’king italics. Shit. Just saw the previous, load of devilment.
First, let’s see if I can turn off my stupid italics.
It may not be you. It may be the devil.
wj, highly unlikely that our military would mount a coup e’tat against the President but mostly because they don’t understand French and therefore wouldn’t be able to follow the orders (No, NOT “Coupe Deville!”, Colonel Branestem, I said Commence the Freedom Fries Restoration at zero eight hundred hours!), any better than would the 27% base who elected four or five dozen Republican House members or the 40-some percent who back Donald Trump now.
They wouldn’t take out a President Trump either because he read that it said so in TIME magazine and some talk show he watched in 2006. Also, a dream he had involving a dozen large blondes named Ivanka wielding scissors and chasing him into the arms of a Five-Star General when he was her date at her senior prom.
McTX, (none of us are very much far apart, but for the sake of argument) the white male majority, with exceptions, firmly ensconced by the rule of law in this country, only relented (“Now, Abigail, don’t be a confounded silly goose”, John Adams said, as he begged fruitlessly for carnal relations with his wife after ignoring her demand for equality under the law.) because the Founders, much to their individual surprise, put into place a constitutional system and a system of telltale words, rules, and procedures that permitted women, blacks, and gays to petition and lawfully gain their Rights.
As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, the signal and overlooked fact of American history is the stupendous, oceanic degree of patience and forbearance those groups exercised for hundreds of years as we cooled our heels considering the matter, with amazingly few instances of violence, not counting the Civil War, and given the violent founding of the country by white males (who flew off the handle because a King wanted to tax tea to replenish his Treasury of the money it had spent for colonial security) by the denial of their perceived rights at the hands of other white males in different, but cooler uniforms.
It’s true that the Perfect can be the enemy of the Good, but there are some who need reminding in no uncertain terms from time to time that the Good can turn around and be the enemy of in any way returning to the not-so-Good demands rearing their heads at the moment.
Added to which, the world outside got weirder, enemies got harder to deal with (e.g.Isis) so the urge to circle the wagons and/or huddle round the campfire with your own kind got stronger.
They didn’t, though. Ubiquitous information distribution and cameras just made things more evident.
(Emphasis emphatically added.)
Seriously, McK? Really?
show me one modern country that is democratic and has equality under the law and the rule of law that did not derive those practices from the US or western liberal democracy.
From my limited knowledge of the relevant history, it appears that Iran was such a country. At least with respect to democracy.
It installed a democratically elected legislature in the late 1800s — in part in opposition to British meddling. Which doesn’t sound to me like a derevation from Europe. At least not a conscious one.
Granted it’s current semi-democracy may be a different story. But it’s worth noting that the current institutions derive from opposition to a monarchy/dictatorship installed by the US.
Show me a country today, outside of the Western Liberal democracy where women and ethnic/religous minorities have the same or more rights under the law as the US, and demonstrate how that country developed such a regime independent of the US as an example.
Do we get to point out how most of the non-Western world got pushed back centuries by the benevolent civilizing influence of the US and other Western empires, and the local anti-liberal-democratic strongmen they installed, propped up, and replaced local leaders – to include democratically elected ones – with?
Do we immediately discount any sign of democracy outside the ancient Greeks as being US derived because, naturally, post hoc ergo proptor hoc?
Seriously, McK? Really?
Exactly my reaction.
But I do think that our Constitutional system is pretty great, and although not original, quite rare. Of course, not perfect. But that’s our job.
WM conceding equality because it was demonstrated to be the right thing to do
southern WM most certainly did not concede equality because it was the right thing to do. they did it because they got their bigoted asses kicked by the north and ended up with no choice in the matter – though they resisted for another 100+ years.
*that does not predate the US by centuries, and that you chose to deem worthy of counting, so the Swiss or First Nations don’t count since they did not have liberal democracies granting minority rights on par with the US centuries before the US existed, let alone granted said minority rights
“All done because it was the right thing to do. Not WM hanging on to privilege, but WM conceding equality because it was demonstrated to be the right thing to do.”
“We hold these truths to be self-evident.”
Well, there was a good deal of hanging on and foot dragging before the we pale faced males conceded what had already been declared self-evident, even the truths declared to be so were far greater than Jefferson et al let on at the time.
And, yes, it’s not quite fair to judge the cultural norms and standards of THAT time by our own more enlightened sensibilities.
Still, I don’t like it when Thomas, Alito, and Scalia judge our standards according to some of the moldy ones of the Founders’ times.
show me one modern country that is democratic and has equality under the law and the rule of law that did not derive those practices from the US or western liberal democracy.
See, this is why it sucks to try to discuss anything with lawyers. They undergo years of professional training and experience focused on framing questions to elicit the answer they want.
I am not claiming that modern democratic states do not largely model themselves after either the US or one of the European parliamentary democracies.
As noted by me upthread, it should not be a surprise if they do, because we are currently at the end of something like 400 or 500 years of near-global hegemony by precisely those nations.
Charlemagne thought he was reconstituting the Roman Empire. That was his frame of reference.
What I am arguing against is that democratic self-government and the rule of law are the unique invention of the European enlightenment and its disobedient child, the US.
Because they are not. Both concepts are found throughout human history.
The statement of yours that I am disputing is this:
Second, unlike anywhere else in the world, the West, beginning 600 or so yeas ago, slowly developed a shift away from the rigid, feudal order to what, first in the US, and then spreading to Europe first and then elsewhere, was the concept of democracy, borrowed from the ancient Greeks. No other Asian or African culture has a similar history.
That statement is not true.
As far as the Civil War etc., citing the Civil War as an example of white men extending civil liberties to others because white men fought the war seems, to me, to miss a fairly important point.
Likewise, describing white men “conceding equality”.
Basically, both statements seem to make a point other than the one you appear to want to make.
I’m not demonizing white men. I am one.
I am saying that white men are no better or worse than anyone else when it comes to their willingness to relinquish or share power with other people.
show me one modern country that is democratic and has equality under the law and the rule of law that did not derive those practices from the US or western liberal democracy.
See, this is why it sucks to try to discuss anything with lawyers. They undergo years of professional training and experience focused on framing questions to elicit the answer they want.
I am not claiming that modern democratic states do not largely model themselves after either the US or one of the European parliamentary democracies.
As noted by me upthread, it should not be a surprise if they do, because we are currently at the end of something like 400 or 500 years of near-global hegemony by precisely those nations.
Charlemagne thought he was reconstituting the Roman Empire. That was his frame of reference.
What I am arguing against is that democratic self-government and the rule of law are the unique invention of the European enlightenment and its disobedient child, the US.
Because they are not. Both concepts are found throughout human history.
The statement of yours that I am disputing is this:
Second, unlike anywhere else in the world, the West, beginning 600 or so yeas ago, slowly developed a shift away from the rigid, feudal order to what, first in the US, and then spreading to Europe first and then elsewhere, was the concept of democracy, borrowed from the ancient Greeks. No other Asian or African culture has a similar history.
That statement is not true.
As far as the Civil War etc., citing the Civil War as an example of white men extending civil liberties to others because white men fought the war seems, to me, to miss a fairly important point.
Likewise, describing white men “conceding equality”.
Basically, both statements seem to make a point other than the one you appear to want to make.
I’m not demonizing white men. I am one.
I am saying that white men are no better or worse than anyone else when it comes to their willingness to relinquish or share power with other people.
stupid computers.
I’m sure there are plenty of white guys commenting on this thread who are not part of the conspiracy they supposedly believe in – you know, the one all white men are in on. (HUH???)
I also don’t know who is recruiting all these undemocratic people from all over the globe to come here to increase diversity. I’ve never heard of such a thing.
And what’s already been said about more recent liberalization being the work primarily of benevolent white men. Yes, some number of white men participated in and supported such efforts. But, then again, the people who fought against them were predominantly white men.
I don’t know if this counts as mind-reading, but these weird arguments seem to be born of some kind of white defensiveness.
What we’re talking about are circumstances, past and present, in this country, and possibly the West in general, not some inherent evilness that is unique to white men.
But I do think that our Constitutional system is pretty great, and although not original, quite rare.
IMO what is rare historically is a nation of our size and ambition persisting as a self-governing polity under the rule of law.
We’ve only been at it for a couple of hundred years, and really only about one hundred with the size and reach that we currently have.
We’ll see how long it lasts.
Not for nothing, but to the degree that 19th C Ireland was ‘feudal’, it was because they were ruled by the Brits, who were utter pricks. As regards their rule of Ireland, anyway.
Not just as regards Ireland, pretty much anywhere where the wogs were viewed as subhuman. The millions who died during the Victorian genocides, be it from artificial famine. working to death in labor camps, or the old stand-by of just plain being killed for sport, certainly saw the British’s utterly savage side. But we must not criticize them, because “morals were different then”, although because “morals were different then” we must simultaneously praise them for being a shining light and virtuous exemplar, bringing liberty and prosperity to a benighted world…
I’m sure there are plenty of white guys commenting on this thread who are not part of the conspiracy they supposedly believe in – you know, the one all white men are in on.
Perhaps it is a matter of
Granted, that isn’t what those getting hysterical actually say. But it might reflect something more like reality. (Assuming, for the sake of discussion, that there actually is a conspiracy. Rather than just a bunch of people who have it good for historical reasons and are independently reluctant to share the power.)
What makes “western white man country” different from the rest of eastern European and non-white world is that change DID happen, by consensus, and over time.
and the changes are still happening. and the same class of people are resisting them, exactly as they always have, and for exactly the same reason : they don’t want to give up what they have.
speaking of American colonialism…
suck it UK thread! this is about America now!
I wouldn’t put a whole lot of effort into understanding the conspiracy thing, though it does make me wonder how one might characterize, say, the Confederacy coming into being, given who made that happen and why.
I’m not obsessed with white males. I’m also not obsessed with defending white males against attacking straw men.
So we should start talking about Polish plumbers and Muslims…?
Despite all of our sins, Constitutional [liberal] democracy is a very thrilling concept (to me), and as far as I know it did develop from something similar in Athens. And there were some experiments in other places along the way, such as Kiev Rus, which ended in the 12th century, and certainly limited instances of self-governance in other places, but the democracies beginning in the Enlightenment have been exceptionally robust.
Obviously, they have been flawed, but the fact that they can evolve with the times is what it’s all about. Obama has described the process quite eloquently.
We’re not doing democracy any favors by handing electoral power to the wealthy. Citizens United (etc.) is a step backwards for sure. But that’s what we’re here for – to keep fighting. At this moment in our history, that means fighting Republican control of the government. Since Republicans don’t represent a majority of the people, making sure that people are not disenfranchised is the answer to that problem.
I think what happened with the words of the Constitution is that the “italics” got stuck on for long periods of time for certain people, and then finally turned off in portions over time as we discussed and sort of chewed over the ins and outs of html, whatever that is.
I’m not demonizing white men either. Russell is one.
(Emphasis added.)
Seriously, try to keep your claims straight for more than a single damned paragraph.
Really, McK? The American Civil F’ing War. The only way that doesn’t satisfy your second modest request will be if/when you add a pile of unstated premises that somehow discount this mind-numbingly obvious example – based on your upthread euphemizing, it looks like this won’t count because it was just a matter of heel-dragging but good-hearted WM being rationally convinced of the reasonableness and rightness of giving up a trifling “privilege” like owning slaves by other WM. I certainly hope my low expectations aren’t doing you justice, though.
the democracies beginning in the Enlightenment have been exceptionally robust.
One depressing reason they’ve been robust has been their marked tendency to place most or all nations not abiding by their political systems (and pointedly, also not possessing military and economic parity) firmly under their boot heel. I’m not saying that the West is a seething nest of demons or anything, nor that the fruits of the Enlightenment are not sweet, but it was not “rule of law”, “constitutions”, and “electoral politics” that made Enlightenment democracies robust – it was their technological advancement/progress and callously expansionist tendencies. Let’s not wax romantic about why Western democracies have so far endured better than their predecessors.
Seriously, McK? Really?
Yes, seriously.
That statement is not true.
Normally, a statement like this is followed by evidence or an example. You deny that the Age of Enlightment, the Reformation, the Renaissance, etc weren’t the precursors of modern western liberalism?
If not, what historical factors gave rise to modern western liberalism?
Do you deny that racial, gender equality and religious freedom and tolerance are the product of modern western liberalism?
If not western liberalism, what was the historical cause-and-effect giving rise to these features that are nearly unique to western liberal democracy.
If the latter statement is true, then we have to concede that, as imperfect as those WM surely were, it was they who got the best of what we are today started. Repeating: they got it started, got the ball rolling, put things in motion. Centuries went by, but we can trace the inception pretty easily.
Nor is this an abstract point. WMP is the left’s rationale for all manner of new stuff. A straw man, WM hanging on to their privilege, is an article of faith–which like many other articles of faith, is without tangible, direct evidence.
As far as the Civil War etc., citing the Civil War as an example of white men extending civil liberties to others because white men fought the war seems, to me, to miss a fairly important point.
And that fairly important point would be . . . ?
and the changes are still happening. and the same class of people are resisting them, exactly as they always have, and for exactly the same reason : they don’t want to give up what they have.
First, can you be more specific: which group of WM is fighting to hang on to what privilege? Second, not every change is for the better, then and now, e.g. communism. WM both promoted and resisted it. Third, not every change conjured up by the left is as self-evidently a grand idea as, say ending slavery, or as obviously correct as “equal means the same.” So, give me an example of an awesome idea on the left that is being opposed on the grounds of WMP. Please, I’d like to see it.
Absolutely I dispute this. First, read what I’ve said already; find someplace where non-white men running the show have done for women and minorities what white men in the US and the West have done; and show me a decent example of WM doing something to hang on to something. Is this some kind of conspiracy theory?
Really, McK? The American Civil F’ing War.
NV, you almost have a point. I’ve done a lot of writing today in between trying to practice law. See the word “decent” in the second to last sentence? It should read “recent”. You are correct–I concede and may have even referred to the Civil War at some point in this thread. Yes, WM were very much in the business of trying to hang on to their black property. Other WM put paid to that and then passed some amendments that have held rather nicely and have served as the basis, most recently, for requiring all states to recognize gay marriage.
Now that I’ve rewritten the question, feel free to answer it.
I’m not saying that the West is a seething nest of demons or anything, nor that the fruits of the Enlightenment are not sweet, but it was not “rule of law”, “constitutions”, and “electoral politics” that made Enlightenment democracies robust – it was their technological advancement/progress and callously expansionist tendencies. Let’s not wax romantic about why Western democracies have so far endured better than their predecessors.
One of the things I like about ideologically driven revisionist history is that it is so easily refuted, even if its adherents never seem to grasp the point. The Age of Enlightenment was the product of the Renaissance and Protestant Reformation. The church and the state, the sole sources of authority, began to cede autonomy over time. A lot of time. The Enlightenment is generally thought to have ended in roughly 1780–not a lot of democracy, and most colonialism by then was Spanish, English and Portuguese and mostly under monarchies.
Then John Locke and others got busy. Adam Smith came along. The initial push back was the new, moneyed class pushing back against the aristocracy. It is hard to demand something of those above you when it is demanded by those below you. So, over time, we arrived where we are today.
As for “The History of Colonialism: Current Revised Historical Version”, here is a game one can play: find a country or two that were not colonized, and were not western European extracts. I propose China and Japan. Now, find some countries that were colonized: I pick India, Mexico, Venezuela, Cuba, the Philippines and the Congo but any will do.
Were either China or Japan on a “equality under the law/rule of law/consent of the governed” trajectory prior to encountering the west (other than unconditional surrender in 8/45)?
Were India, Mexico, Venezuela, Cuba, the Philippines and the Congo on that same trajectory prior to colonization?
That is, did European colonization throw off some specific country’s path to “equality under the law/rule of law/consent of the governed” or some similar outcome?
For every country that was once a colony, e.g. the Congo, and had a bad outcome, aren’t there countries that were former colonies that had a good outcome? Would you say India’s colonial history led to the elimination of the caste system or would you say that India, left undisturbed by England, was pointed toward a classless, caste–less society?
And, to find out how comparatively awful colonialism was, just make a list of non-western countries that were colonized and those that were not, look at their histories, and tell me that, on balance, colonialism was worse than not.
The fact is: both were equally shitty near term. In the (way) out years, British influence was more of a positive than a negative in most countries outside of Africa.
Africa may be the one place where, south of the Sahara, Europe screwed the pooch.
However, as bad as colonialism was for Africa, for outright awfulness, the prize goes to China. In the last 2000 years, China has murdered more of its own through war and ideologically induced famine than any other country in the world. You might give the West credit for Maoism, but there were many more killed pre-Marx.
Here’s another question: how many former colonies are currently getting screwed by socialism, another western export? Cuba, maybe? Venezuela? Argentina?
Now, let me try to get back to my main point, because a lot of collateral stuff has come up, and not without good reason.
Here is the thing: the WMP hanging on to *whatever* argument is simply wrong. There isn’t any conspiracy. There isn’t anything concrete that WM’s have to hang on to that everyone else doesn’t have. We all vote, move about freely, own such property as we can afford and care to buy, marry, have children, have open discussions about these and other topics. Moreover, history argues against this notion: it is WM who gave birth to what is best about our society and western society and it was WM who, over time and under pressure from others less favorably situated, who changed peacefully (with noted and notable exceptions).
So, what the F is all the WMP stuff? Well,I’m guessing it is several things. One, it is a conversation stopper when, for example, a WM disagrees with TNC’s ridiculous conspiracy theories or a WM disagrees a racially-charged accusation from the left. Either the WM opinion can be dismissed or discounted (given the source) or WM are disqualified from disagreeing because they don’t understand their privilege and the power relationships and all manner of other purely subjective notions that some employ to stifle debate.
Two, it is a handy device for reassigning assets: WM have all the money; they got it by exploiting all Non-WM; ergo, if they won’t give up X percent of their money voluntarily, we, the exploited, are justified in expropriating X percent of WM’s money.
Three, which is kind of derivative of One and Two: the subtext of the left’s identity politics seems dividing the pie (a nebulous terms for a broad range of desirables: power, money, jobs, representation) based on gender and ethnicity. For the same reasons that WM were persuaded to agree to equality under the law, etc, many–and not all of them WM’s–oppose reward and whatnot by gender or ethnicity. That is not hanging on to something, that is making sure that future generations have equality of opportunity, not some ethnic/gender-based spoils system regulated by the central gov’t.
Well. I’m not going to pile on, as other folks have made my points and more except to say that hairshirt’s point that
What we’re talking about are circumstances, past and present, … not some inherent evilness that is unique to white men is what I was talking about. I would note that the article that I cited that seems to have gotten your back up was a discussion of why Tony Abbott got turfed out in Australia. I just want to emphasis that I used that because it made the same points as what I had written here and I wasn’t trying to take a shot at white males/you.
Why do keep saying there’s no conspiracy when no one is positing one? TNC doesn’t. He writes about systemic racism. It’s not the same thing.
What there is is a constituency. It is only a subset of white, male, straight, Christians, but it is also not insignificant. See Donald Trump.
When you discuss the left’s purely subjective notions, McKinney, are you being dimissive or stifling debate? I don’t know how this meta-argument works. It sounds like disagreement. Is that not allowed, at least when “the left” does it?
I seriously can’t figure out half of what you’re on about here.
I just want to emphasis that I used that because it made the same points as what I had written here and I wasn’t trying to take a shot at white males/you.
Yep and I meant to include you on this hit list. (Smiley face goes here).
The whole notion of whites becoming a minority, coupled with the ability to harness the internet to disseminate information, along with perceived changes in gender and gender relations makes tribalism a lot more salient, especially when people are trying to hold on to advantages, real and perceived.
Please, don’t be bedazzled by my tag wizardry. It’s not that big a thing.
Substantively, who is trying to hold on to what, specifically? I’ve seen references to this by many of the lefties here in a variety of contexts–could someone let me in on it? Apparently there is a memo out there I missed that everyone is referring to that spells out what underlies these various statements. The WMP memo maybe?
What the hell are y’all talking about? What are we supposed to be doing? Specifically, that is.
What I think McKinney is trying to say (correct me if I’m wrong) is that it is only some WM who have the privileges which are being objected to. And he’s right in that.
Those who expand that to all white males are simply wrong to do so. (Not to mention damaging their cause by alienating white males who might largely otherwise.)
All of which doesn’t change the reality that, other things being equal, being a white male makes a lot of things in life easier. Not necessarily easy, depending on those other things. And those who have it harder do not have it impossible by any means.
What I think McKinney is trying to say (correct me if I’m wrong) is that it is only some WM who have the privileges which are being objected to. And he’s right in that.
I’m trying to figure out what the *privilege* is and *who* is doing *what* to try to *hang on to* whatever it is.
The whole notion of whites becoming a minority, coupled with the ability to harness the internet to disseminate information, along with perceived changes in gender and gender relations makes tribalism a lot more salient, especially when people are trying to hold on to advantages, real and perceived.
Again, didn’t claim anything about the perniciousness of whites, said this is what happens with people. My reference to ‘white minority’ was to provide background, not point fingers.
Substantively, who is trying to hold on to what, specifically?
OK, let me give you an example
Birthright citizenship.
Take it away.
wj,
Given the history of western conquest, colonialism and black slavery, all “whites” (all sexes)have “privilege”. We benefit from the wealth our ancestors expropriated. This wealth helped fuel the Industrial Revolution.
Sadly, my review of world history since about 1400 does not show any great effort to give it back on our part. Foreign aid doesn’t even begin to right this account.
Perhaps the correct term would be patrimony?
It is too bad that all of us will not be around when the world fully turns on its racial axis, and black and brown will have practically all the financial wealth that exists and whites will speak bitterly of “brown privilege”.
Humans have been known to be a nasty and unforgiving bunch.
Birthright citizenship.
Ok, I’ll address this, but I hope there is more there, there.
The less attractive term is ‘anchor babies’. It happens. A woman crosses the border, has a child (almost always at local or federal taxpayer expense), and the child is a citizen. Using the child’s citizenship as the lever, the mother, the father, the siblings and ultimately the extended family immigrate. There are high social costs. Education, even in Spanish, is minimal. There are important cultural differences–from car wrecks to construction accidents–there is enough of a pattern to suggest a disconnect between how to safely drive and work here verses Mexico. Additional social costs are bilingual education, welfare and crime. The feds don’t or won’t keep the stats, but immigrant crime is very high.
It may be WMP that says, “we are tired of paying for this” and “that is an abuse of the 14th amendment” or it might be a disagreement on policy. I’ll go with the latter. So will a lot of African Americans.
So is that a statement of what you believe about birthright citizenship? Are you also arguing that it needs to be repealed? (or, a la Huckabee and Dred Scot, that it was just fuzzy headed liberals misreading the constitution?)
It also seems that your examples are drawn from Mexican immigrants, so is it just those folks south of the border or is the whole question of birthright citizenship something that needs to be jettisoned? Or is it that it would be a good thing if we could just stop those mexicans from taking advantage of it?
I’m not asking for a bunch of cites, I’d just like to get you on record as to which of your statements are what you believe.
We’ll see how long it lasts.
It won’t last long if we sit back to watch. Or if we are calm and forgiving of people who want to hate on immigrants.
McKinney, you need to reevaluate. Your “anchor baby” thing is ugly and wrong. Most of us (me included) have very close (2nd or 3d generation at most) immigrant roots. We don’t have room? Are you freaking kidding me? Lots of baby boomers are going to die soon. Plenty of room.
Sapient and LJ, pls hold on the mind reading. I will address the birthright/immigration issue separately. Maybe one of you two can post to get things started. I spent a lot of time responding to and addressing many here. I would like to continue that subject before moving on. Thanks.
I’ll post, or lj can, but not sure what his time zone is these days.
I pay taxes too. My parents had dementia and were cared for by immigrants in a senior center who were incredibly compassionate, and probably made very little. My grandparents (on one side) lived in Texas in an immigrant community. They came from a country that was authoritarian (the Austro-Hungarian empire – they were Slavic) – no particular experience with Anglo-American culture. They learned to speak broken English by reading the newspaper and raised their kids, sending some of them to college, others not. Their grandchildren assimilated very well, thank you very much, and speak good enough English to be quite easily self-supporting. Everyone paid their freaking taxes.
Room? Who’s going to take care of my drooling Altzheimer’s self, are you? Are your kids? Doubtful! Immigrants will take care of me, and with my heartfelt thanks, I hope they and their children take a page from my grandparents’ book.
You are so totally wrong about this McKinney, it makes me ill. You live in Texas. Don’t you even look around? Or when you do, do you even see who’s there?
McK, you’re taking on too much. I’m far left and I agree with part of your hymn to the glory of Western civilization, but TNC is talking about how white America put into place policies that segregated blacks and sometimes destroyed their communities and not in the distant past, but in the middle of the 20th century.
BTW, much of the unnecessary death toll in China in the 19th century could be partly blamed on Western influence, I think, but I could be entirely wrong about that and it wouldn’t refute TNC in the slightest. You’ve written enough to start dozens of arguments, most of them largely irrelevant to the question of whether there is such a thing as white privilege in the US today.
McTx: “There are high social costs.”
There are also high social benefits.
Conservative politicians have no problem shipping good paying jobs overseas. They claim high social benefits, i.e., lower prices due to cheap imports. To hell with displaced and unemployed workers.
But if we import cheap labor to have low prices, suddenly everything changes…I guess low prices are now bad?
Conservatives on this issue are simply incoherent.
Similarly, there is the whine about our demographic challenge as our population ages.* A wave of young immigrants solves that problem.
I’m absolutely with Sapient on this one. A generous immigration policy compassionately solves a host of problems.
*ps: When people discuss “growing GNP” you should be aware that a significant component of that growth is simply population growth.
The Right (McKinney speak) is simply out of its xenophobic mind on this issue.
I’m absolutely with Sapient on this one.
oh, dear..:)
Substantively, who is trying to hold on to what, specifically? I’ve seen references to this by many of the lefties here in a variety of contexts–could someone let me in on it? Apparently there is a memo out there I missed that everyone is referring to that spells out what underlies these various statements. The WMP memo maybe?
I have to say, I don’t know exactly, and I’d guess it varies. Like lj wrote – real or perceived.
I know an older white family member of mine is very bothered by “political correctness.” I’m not even completely sure what he means by that, but I can tell you that in past decades, he seemed to enjoy openly using words like “faggot” and “nigger” among larger groups of supposedly like-minded people. Over time, the supposition of like-mindedness became more and more likely to be wrong in social settings where he had to make such a supposition because he didn’t know everyone, even if everyone was white and no one seemed anything but straight.
All lives matter – because white people are being killed by police left and right. Blue lives matter – because they don’t have funeral parades down Main Street with bagpipers when cops get killed.
It might depend on what level one is working on politically. I have to think there are plenty of GOP candidates who sense exactly what “the left” does with regard to people – particularly white males, particularly straight Christian ones – feeling like they’re losing something they don’t want to lose.
Immigrants are criminals, and not just for immigrating illegally, but for dealing drugs and rape. Muslims are terrorists. The Gay Agenda is about violating the free exercise of (Christian) religion. Blacks have declared war on police, and black protesters are rioters and looters. Obama is fomenting all of these things and ruining America. Donald Trump will make America great again. (No more Obama checks for you, rioting welfare recipients!)
The left call anyone who denies any reported instance of racism a racist. That’s just as true as the right claiming that anyone who reports an instance of racism is pulling the race card.
I have to say, it was easier not so many years ago to demonstrate the white-privilege thesis when people like George Wallace were around, openly spouting off in front of throngs of eager (white, Christian and mostly straight and male) supporters.
Maybe it’s sort of to your credit that you can’t hear the dog whistes playing the same melody, only a few octaves higher, McKinney. I think you’re honestly not feeling a loss of privilege as times change (even if you say some historically weird stuff). You don’t perceive something among some of your fellow whites that I and others here do. Maybe we and Donald Trump are wrong in perceiving it, and you’re right not to.
to make a concise reply to McK’s questions to me in his 6:19:
my point is not that modern western liberalism has not brought many wondful things.
my point is that it is not the first time or place in history where those things have appeared.
that is all.
our society is not the only time that self government, religious tolerance, gender parity, cultural pluralism – pick whatever you like – have existed in the history of the human tace.
do you need an itemized list of every instance of these things over the last 10,000 years?
or can we just leave it there?
oh, dear..:)
Awww. You’re so sweet!
do you need an itemized list of every instance of these things over the last 10,000 years?
I came up with the one. You’re welcome.
MkT I’m sorry you think I’m mind reading, I really don’t know if you were explaining current perceptions about birthright citizenship on the assumption I didn’t know or if you are pinning your flag to that mast. Birthright citizenship seems to me to be the perfect example of not wanting to grant people today what was on offer in the past so I didn’t think I was opening new fields, just trying to give you a specific example to work with. As Donald notes, you’ve put out enough to start a dozen arguments, but how they are related to white privilege, I’m not really sure. Just trying to narrow the focus a bit.
sapient, if you want to mail me a post, I’ll put it up. classes are starting here, so I don’t have any time to write one.
However, this site seems interesting
http://immigration.procon.org/
I’m working with Japanese students for debate, and this provides information from both sides of various topics.
lj, sorry. I confused “post” with “comment” and I don’t think I have a whole lot else to offer unless I did the research on how incredibly important immigration is to our economy, and how productive people are who come to the United States.
Unfortunately, I don’t have time to do that within the next month. I commented on my own family background, and will add that I look around every day with gratitude for the diversity in language, food, and other cultural benefits that immigrants in my community offer every day. They have not only benefited previous generations, but are enriching the experience of younger people that I’m acquainted with in numerous ways. People who don’t see that need to look harder.
Let us suppose, for the sake of discussion, that we did away with birthright citizenship. What happens next?
Well the first thing we see is a growing population of people who were born here (and maybe had parents and grandparents born here), who know no other country or culture, but are not citizens. Look at the Korean population in Japan or the Turks in Germany to see what that can result in. It ain’t pretty.
Sure, they could go through the naturalization process. But why should they? They’re Americans in every cultural sense (and, probably linguistic sense as well — as in they are as unlikely to speak no language but English as any other American). They just aren’t citizens because of massive paranoia before they were born. Once you do away with birthright citizenship, it just rolls down thru the generations.
So, having repealed the 14th Amendment, do we find ourselves re-enacting it?**
** And until that point, do we count these multi-generation but non-citizen residents as 3/5 of a person for the purpose of allocation members of the House of Representatives? Just wondering.
I came late to this and most of what I might have said others have already said. (All those years teaching history of imperialism wasted!)
But I did want to note this piece of classic anti-immigration rhetoric from McKT, which could have been – may have been – lifted verbatim from the Know-Nothings of the 19th century or their early 20th-century descendants:
Uneducated, non-English speaking people cannot contribute meaningfully . . .
Wow. I mean, Wow. Every descendant of every Southern or Eastern (or far Northern European), Latin American, Asian, or other “non-English speaking” immigrant over the past couple of centuries should be outraged over this unrepentant bigotry.
McTx: do you ever worry about being pulled over by the police, while driving home, hauled out of your car, and shot to death for no particularly good reason?
That’s WM privilege: “freedom from fear”.
I’d guess that you don’t fear being raped, either.
The odd thing about McKinney’s immigrant argument (beyond it being oddly framed as “the left” wanting to bring people over, hand-picked for their lack of understanding of pluralism, democracy, and rule of law) is that immigrants are generally coming here because they recognized that the United States is better than the place they’ve left.
People from failed or failing states particularly know what it looks like when stuff is going or already is bad. Somehow, their ignorance of pluralism, democracy, and rule of law is not total, because they recognize that those things are desirable. I’d argue that a good number of them have a better appreciation of pluralism, democracy, and rule of law than people who have known nothing else and take them for granted.
Then, of course, there’s this. I suppose it’s one form of American exceptionalism.
Maybe simply being born in the United States (to American-citizen parents?) doesn’t somehow imbue an individual with special insight.
Ok, HSH and SnarLo have responded. To repeat: let’s finish one conversation before beginning another. Nothing anyone has said, particularly Dr. N, leaves me wondering if I’ve lost my mind. I’m happy to address both the birthright citizenship and the more general immigration issue under a different post. And, I’m singularly unimpressed by the subjective pejoratives and name-calling. Not offended, but not impressed.
Back to the discussion at hand, I agree that a number of my points are collateral if not digressive. In my defense, I am responding to more than a dozen of you, and in many instances I am making subsidiary supporting arguments to address or distinguish discrete points raised by specific individuals.
So, we can continue or not. Your call.
Quoting HSH:
Maybe it’s sort of to your credit that you can’t hear the dog whistes playing the same melody, only a few octaves higher, McKinney. I think you’re honestly not feeling a loss of privilege as times change (even if you say some historically weird stuff). You don’t perceive something among some of your fellow whites that I and others here do. Maybe we and Donald Trump are wrong in perceiving it, and you’re right not to.
First of all, I don’t like the ‘dog whistle’ meme. Which is why I haven’t characterized WMP as a lefty dog whistle, although if I understand the DW term, the shoe fits as well as any of the stuff on the right does. I think of it more as *code*. Both sides have their codes. WMP is part of the lefty code. I just want to know what it means AND what WM’s are doing, in a concrete, specific way to preserve it. You know, like affirmative action on the right: it’s a broad term, and mean anything from quotas to outreach. A slice of the right uses AA as code for *quotas* and the subtext is that blacks can’t cut it without quotas. So, I get that code exists. I submit that left is as subject to it as the right.
If you want to say, WMP is the right to call blacks racially derogatory terms, I’ll have to disagree with that. A lot of what you recite is a characterization of right wing talking points. WMP is the same thing on the left and I’m calling y’all out on it. With minimal success. Just like many are calling me out on birthright citizenship and immigration. Here’s the difference: I’ve agreed to engage and to do so substantively. Y’all are dancing around the question.
SnarLo gets specific: “Freedom from fear”. Ok, that’s probably true for me, McKTex, given where I live, the hours I’m home, where I go at night (almost nowhere unless forced, and then I’m home by nine or so), and, yes, when I am pulled over, I don’t worry about getting shot.
That said, the black on white vs white on black crime stats, and rape stats, suggest that lower income whites may not enjoy the same freedom from fear I do. I don’t know this, but that is a draw-able inference.
In other words, freedom from fear is not a universally enjoyed WMP or even a WP.
If I were a young black male, I’d be nervous about police attention, not the least in part because I’ve been hearing all of these bad things. The precise demographic of unarmed shootings is young*black*male. The larger demographic is young*male.
So, again, while I’m outside the zone of fear for police shootings, it is not unique to young blacks, even though young blacks get a disproportionate amount of attention, it is a matter of degree, not kind.
When I was young and encountered the police, they were a lot more interested in me than they are now. Flashlights into the back seat, where had I been, where was I going, had I been drinking, did I have any dope, blah, blah, blah. I was occasionally mouthy and once found myself with not one but five tickets after one particular encounter. If I hadn’t had a one year old in a car seat, I might have gotten a ride downtown.
A young black male meeting the same cop I met would have, at a minimum, been taken downtown-however, this was 1977 and the Houston Police Department was then pretty much the East Texas Redneck Brigade. The death of Jose Campos Torres a year later while in custody brought a lot of change. Mr. Torress wasn’t shot, FWIW. He as hand-cuffed and thrown into Buffalo Bayou. There were arrests, prosecutions, convictions and minimal sentencing. Riots with attendant gunfire followed a year later. Ugly stuff.
Torres was not black, FWIW.
So, I can see the ‘freedom from fear’ element. It is a bit less than you think it is, not unique to blacks, but it isn’t nothing either. And the rape thing as well, but that isn’t a WM privilege, that is an M privilege outside of prison.
Big picture: Is that it? Is there anything else? So how does that play out in Australia–from where this discussion emanates–and, more to the point, what are WM’s doing that is objectionable to maintain these two privileges?
I came up with the one. You’re welcome.
Thank you sir! 🙂
I understand you’re a busy guy right now, however I would welcome a future post from the pen of sapient, should you ever be so moved.
Uneducated, non-English speaking people cannot contribute meaningfully
I suspect that, upon reflection, McK might want to dial that statement back.
Hope so.
FWIW, I also have an immigrant grandparent and great-grandparents. The greats never spoke English well, came with bugger-all, great-grandpa dug ditches for his dinner. Literally.
My Anglo forbears arrived in the late 18th C as indentured labor, which means they arrived with less than nothing. Dead normal for that time and place. In fact, they were a leg up on all of the Anglo forbears who came here as an alternative to jail or hanging.
The colonies were quite the dumping ground for merrie old England.
WMP is part of the lefty code. I just want to know what it means
It just means that in most situations, whether social legal or economic, a white male will likely get a better shake than a not-white male.
All other things being approximately equal.
Do we need to enumerate examples of this for the point to be persuasive?
And yeah, that’s about it. That’s what people mean when they say “white male privilege”. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s not an accusation directed at white males, it’s not an attempt to sneak the global socialist agenda in through the back door.
It’s a simple observation that, all other things being approximately equal, white males receive, and can expect to receive, better treatment than not-white males.
Uneducated, non-English speaking people cannot contribute meaningfully
I will address this when and if someone posts on the topic.
It just means that in most situations, whether social legal or economic, a white male will likely get a better shake than a not-white male.
Here we go. This is what I was looking for. Ok, so WMP is nothing new, yes? And, compared to days of yore, is less now than it was, yes? And, continues to decline, yes?
Isn’t that a good thing? Don’t WM’s say they only want a level playing field? Ok, level it, where it isn’t already level, so that everyone has the same shot.
*Shot* does not equal *outcome*.
Russell, thanks for the response.
…what are WM’s doing that is objectionable to maintain these two privileges?
If nothing else, supporting idiotic candidates for (not exclusively) national office. Those candidates are generally interested in at least maintaining existing wealth and power where it now lies, which is mostly in the hands of white people (most of them male, most of them Christian and straight). That’s the lay of the land as it is, for whatever reasons (and there are many).
Power and wealth in the United States, and a number of other places, rests primarily in white, male hands. People at a high level – particularly, but not exclusively, Republicans – want to keep it that way, even if it’s not out of racial or any other animus. They just want to keep what they and their fellows have. There’s nothing unusual about that. It’s not something special to white people, per se, anymore that there’s something special about black people that makes them more likely to be poor.
It’s a paradigm people are born into, and when that paradigm is to their benefit, they want to maintain it. You don’t have to espouse some sort of white AA for that purpose. There’s plenty of de facto white AA already in place as it is. If you’re fighting against any policy that can remotely be considered AA, to the benefit of other-than-white people, that would be enough.
If you’re going to take any of this as a suggestion of some highly organized and broad conspiracy, then you’re naturally going to disagree. There isn’t one. But I don’t think anyone is trying to say there is.
What there is, among many middle-class whites, is generalized angst about blacks and other minorities, particularly those who are immigrants, particularly Latinos and Muslims among them, somehow taking over the country (with Obama’s help, natch). I don’t know what kind of bubble you’d have to be living in not to see that. And I think it’s fairly clear that it’s feeding into the political discourse coming from high-level candidates, politicians and political operatives, particularly on the GOP side.
If you can’t see it for yourself, I don’t think there’s any way to prove it to you.
What russell just said at 10:01.
It’s not about taking ‘WMP’ away from WMs. It’s about extending its benefits to all.
The only reason to complain about that is if you know that your current privilege level is one based on fncking over the less-privileged. Don’t expect much sympathy.
(and, BTW, you don’t get much sympathy from dumping huge posts with lots of controversial stuff, then not wanting to deal with the fallout)
iOk, so WMP is nothing new, yes?
No, it’s not. But I do think there’s been a recent up-tick in white defensiveness, but not something remotely approaching some sort of historic significance.
And, compared to days of yore, is less now than it was, yes? And, continues to decline, yes?
Yes and yes, though progress is slowed by what I’ll call “legacy systems.”
Isn’t that a good thing?
Yes, but it would be a better thing if marginalized people were being de-marginalized faster and without it upsetting as many not-marginalized people.
Don’t WM’s say they only want a level playing field?
Hmmmm…some do. I don’t think all of them really mean it or understand all the ways in which the playing field isn’t level. In the latter case, they aren’t going to support any leveling where they don’t see the necessity. Of course, others say the races shouldn’t mix and other such things. It’s kind of a mixed bag, like just about everything.
McKT, WMP is not any kind of dog whistle. The whole point about dog whistles is that they don’t mean what the words say, as is sort of the case in your Affirmative Action example. WMP means exactly what it says, and one can agree or disagree as to whether it still exists, what caused it, or what its implications are. You ask for examples, and I hesitate because many here are much better informed on US politics than I, but isn’t there some kind of attempt at the moment to make it harder for voters to prove their identities etc in order to vote, in areas which are mainly black? Using forms of ID which black people are statistically less likely to have? If that’s correct, isn’t that a case of mainly white men trying to fix the vote in order to ensure it goes the way they want it to? And isn’t Citizens United somewhere on the same spectrum – enabling corporations, whose executives are overwhelmingly white, to influence the vote? And if the reply is that both of those things benefit the GOP, are not republicans mainly white?
I think the Child of Loki makes an excellent point: the kind of freedom from fear I think she is talking about is not dependent or consequential on analysis of crime stats, it (the fear) is bred in the bone if you are female and walking alone at night, or if you are black in the US and to a much lesser extent the UK (don’t know about any other European countries, but it might apply to Germany and some of the Eastern European states as well). And I’m guessing that what’s bred in the bone takes generations to change if circumstances change, and they have to really significantly change.
As far as the treatment of human beings goes, I’d put the Renaissance as one of the darkest ages in Western history. The witch craze was just one symptom (in the Middle Ages it was heretic to believe that true witches existed). And the rise of protestantism led to the bloodiest wars before the twentieth century (with both sides to blame equally).
Switzerland executed its last witch in 1782 and did not rehabilitate her before 2008 (over local protest). The last Swiss canton did not give women the franchise before 1990 (forced by the feds over the repeated majority votes against it by the male voting population).
Before the enlightenment genocide tended to ‘just happen’ occasionally. Post enlightenment it was put on firm legal and ideological grounds and often meticulously planned in advance.
There may be no current Christian theocracies but major churches had and have major influence in several formally ‘rule-of-law’ countries. Poland, Ireland, Russia, Greece, Spain, to a slightly lesser degree Italy. It’s worse in regions of South America (with the elites proud of their Spanish heritage) and Africa (elites often trained in the West).
The West has no right to throw rocks on others at least as long as we wish to complain that they get hurled back on us for our own hypocrisy (by the hypocrites on the other side).
For clarity’s sake: rule of law is not identical with democratic. Classical Prussia was very much rule-of-law with the absolute monarchs proud to bind themselves to it (it went downhill after the French Revolution gave it a bad name for some time and Prussia got under the ideological influence of Austria and Russia).
GftNC: fear of violence (officially sanctioned or criminal) has monetary costs, opportunity costs, and psychological costs. Only one of which gets quantified. They should all be considered to be a ‘tax’, and one that we’d all be better off not having to pay.
Personal note: walking around Osaka at night. Most dangerous thing was some of the scooter riders. None of the guarded, bullet-proof glass, security, stuff that are ubiquitous in urban USA. The cost of fear was suddenly obvious to me. Much better than experiencing the anti-privilege of a YBM in the USA, but it takes some contrast with one’s ‘normal life’ to get a hint of feeling for the issue.
Ok, so WMP is nothing new, yes? And, compared to days of yore, is less now than it was, yes? And, continues to decline, yes?
Yes, yes with the caveat that “the days of yore” are not all that “yore”, and yes.
Isn’t that a good thing?
Yes.
Don’t WM’s say they only want a level playing field?
Yes, that’s what they say.
Ok, level it, where it isn’t already level, so that everyone has the same shot.
In a nutshell, that’s basically been the project of the “progressive” impulse in this country since, at least, shortly after its founding.
*Shot* does not equal *outcome*.
Quite so. But, no shot, no outcome.
Thanks for your comments here McK.
As far as the treatment of human beings goes, I’d put the Renaissance as one of the darkest ages in Western history.
I wouldn’t go quite that far, myself, but only because most ages of human history have lots of darkness to draw upon.
Yes, “Renaissance” does not equal “sweetness and light”.
For clarity’s sake: rule of law is not identical with democratic.
That is correct. They are orthogonal concepts.
Also, not for nothing, but the feudal system had its upsides. It emerged to address specific historical conditions, and was successful in doing so.
Wouldn’t care to live under it, because I’m not a creature of those times and circumstances. But, IMO it behooves us to not assume that how we live is the pinnacle of some kind of human social evolution.
Humility is the beginning of wisdom.
WMP is the thing that stops you from being arrested if you build a clock. it’s the thing that stops George Zimmerman from chasing you around the neighborhood if he doesn’t recognize you. it’s the thing that keeps you from getting shot if a cop spots you with a toy gun.
Child of Loki: True, and fascinating stuff btw.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/ann-coulter-jews-rant
I’ve been predicting we’re going to hear about the “f*cking Jews”, in Coulter’s words.
Yes, bottom line, things are getting better over time (glacially for many people’s tastes) and on the whole in the areas we’ve been discussing. Who would deny?
But since most conservatives like everything to be viewed through a market-based lens, I’d like to know what market the 11 Republican demagogues last night, and the remainders not invited to the debate, and most of the right-wing wurlitzer punditry, including the stringy, lank-haired potty-mouthed harridan in the cite, who gets more airtime than McTX for some mysterious reason (surely McTX has better looking legs), think they are addressing with nearly all of their marketing budget, ammo, advertising.
If the market for this crap is shrinking, why doesn’t the Republican Party sell off this underperforming division and downsize it, you know, rationalize it.
Instead, during every election cycle these market lovers try, with increasingly pointed advertising, to bring back the Old Coke of hating on the Others in the old bottles.
Like Fiorina, at HP, they spend enormously to go after a shrinking market, like Compaq in personal computers, and in the process damage the entire company, excuse me, country.
Did I say company? Maybe I said family? No, country, is what it is.
Why blow the entire budget on the buggy whips, the incandescent light bulbs if you will, of racism and the other foul isms?
So, what is the profit margin opportunity they see in a shrinking market that McTX doesn’t seem to, except in the immigration issue, which, again by the way, would have been mostly off the table if the Republican-led but bipartisan immigration legislation had not been deliberately scuttled by the same republicans who wrote the damned thing.
My theory has always been that Nixon’s southern strategy, and Reagan’s southern strategy, and Bush I’s southern strategy, and Dole’s southern strategy and Bush II’s southern strategy, and McCain’s southern strategy, and Romney’s southern strategy and the enormous marketing budget expended by all of the above to maintain market share in the South was merely and cynically (even though much of it is in fact sincere hatred of the Others in all their motley) a way of garnering that few percent of the vote to get to 51% so that the traditional business end of the Republican Party could get their lower/eliminated taxes and kill government.
Now it seems the tail (this supposedly shrinking market of hating on the Other) is (deservedly) wagging the dog with great vigor.
My solution would be to cut the tail off the dog, chop it into bite-size pieces, poison it with strychnine, and feed it to the dog and kill it.
The Republican has been chasing this tail for decades and now the tail turned around and caught the dog and that speeding pickup truck with the eminently killable armed haters in the back looking for victims.
And when, I ask you, is a f*cking Jew going to punch Coulter in her f8cking face and break very f*cking bone in it as a small downpayment on saving the f*cking country.
Count: that cr*p from Coulter is just a cry for attention. The GOP circus train has left her behind.
Best to just turn and walk away slowly.
If a white male Oath Keeper was turned in by an elitist, overpaid, politically correct public school teacher to the jackbooted, union member, health insurance-cosseted government authorities for making an innocent clock that is right twice day, his fellow Oafs would build a clock with a bomb attached to it and break him out of oppressive government custody.
Bingo. No argument there.
But even if you’re a white boy, you can incur consequences if you eat your poptart into a shape that looks like a gun.
Some kinds of idiocy are colorblind.
As they should, considering the empty calories in a pop tart.
From a comment section regarding the invention of the gun:
“The plans from DaVinci are the earliest recorded blue prints of a “hand cannon”. A protege of DaVinci’s took the plans to be evaluated by a WATCH SMITH (where fine metal parts can be produced) in Germany.
About 500 years prior to DaVinci, the Chinese already had the technology of what we call, gunpowder for explosive purposes. However, they did not invent the gun, more or less they invented the cannon.”
Large CAPS mine.
No one ever turned these people in.
Well, da Vinci got at least unpleasantly (though not physically painfully) interrogated under suspicion of being gay (likely true) and consequently left the country to avoid any more inconveniences. And he kept some of his weapon designs secret (and noted the fact in his papers) because he feared the potential of abuse.
WMP is the thing that stops you from being arrested if you build a clock. it’s the thing that stops George Zimmerman from chasing you around the neighborhood if he doesn’t recognize you. it’s the thing that keeps you from getting shot if a cop spots you with a toy gun.
Assuming it is as you say, who wants this to continue and why? The beginning premise, in LJ’s extract, was that Abbott and Co wanted to perpetuate WMP. Others here have made similar assertions in various contexts. Nothing you’ve described sounds like anything anyone not so far out on the fringe as to be virtually invisible would support.
So maybe we have two classes of WMP. We have the kind that SnarLo and others describe (Zimmerman’s stinger out from Trayvon look-alikes, but McKTex gets a pass), and then we have the kind that WM’s want to perpetuate–or is it the consensus here (if there ever is a consensus) that they are one in the same?
If they are different, let me now refine the question: what are the specifics of WMP that WM’s seek, institutionally or otherwise, to perpetuate, and what identifiable processes are WM’s employing to do so?
As an aside, I am fascinate to know more about Russell’s comment, ” (Me) Ok, level it, where it isn’t already level, so that everyone has the same shot.
(Russell) In a nutshell, that’s basically been the project of the “progressive” impulse in this country since, at least, shortly after its founding.”
What, going forward, would progressives do to level the playing field? I propose this as a separate post, Russell could write it, or maybe the illustrious BP, or Cleek or SnarLo could guest post.
After, of course, we do birthright and immigration. Who’s going to do that one?
I recently added National Review to my daily read. I have never cited here to NR for the same reason I pay no attention to links to American Prospect or Daily Kos–it’s partisan advocacy, not objective analysis.
I’m making an acception, today, because of SnarLo’s points. I thought they were pretty good. I now offer another insight on the kid with the clock:
President Barack Obama, never one to miss an opportunity for cheap moral preening, invited Mohamed to the White House. That’s an interesting gesture: Anybody want to hazard a guess as to what would happen if a young man showed up at the White House visitors’ center with a backpack in which was a homemade device full of circuit boards joined to a timing device? I do not frequent the White House, but I often am in the House and Senate office buildings in Washington, and my best guess is that if I’d tried to bring Mohamed’s clock into one of those places, there would have been guns drawn.
Read more at: “>http://www.nationalreview.com/article/424202/ahmed-mohamed-clock
gone?
So security measures are different at the White House than at your typical school? Wow…that’s some serious thinking.
Yep, no such thing as white privilege. It’s just a liebral myth.
“A Muslim teenager built a simple clock out of electronic components and took it to show his engineering teacher at school — but he was arrested when another teacher thought it looked like a bomb and alerted administrators.
Police in Irving, Texas, never suspected the device was an explosive device and did not alert the bomb squad, but they still arrested 14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed because he could offer no “broader explanation” for his clock besides describing it as a device that measures time.
When another 14-year-old boy built a nuclear reactor at his parents’ home he was invited to meet with officials from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Department of Energy — who offered their expert assistance, equipment and encouragement to apply for a research grant.”
http://www.rawstory.com/2015/09/white-kid-builds-nuclear-reactor-and-homeland-security-offers-help/
God, where to even start? So much wrong in so many words. Well, from the top…
“Seriously, McK? Really?”
Yes, seriously.
I expect this is another episode of “McKTx parses their words very finely and everyone else’s as coarsely as needed to make their point”, but this is ridiculous. I’m not sure how you can in good faith assert that an inherent capability to assimilate Western Liberal democratic values does not rise to the level of a “special insight”, but that’s exactly what your words that elicited my exasperation hash out to. If a lack of a “cultural heritage” including WLD values will prevent immigrants from assimilating, then cultural heritage provides “special insight”. QEFD.
On the same subject, you’re trying to have it both ways. As usual, I might pettily add. Immigrants from countries lacking WLD traditions can’t adopt said values and will instill their evil non-Western non-Liberal non-Democratic values on the West… but all the good in the world, all the progress, can be traced back to the spread of American WLD values… into countries that you quite loudly claimed not only did not but could not have any sort of “cultural heritage” of said traditions. Yet somehow they managed to adopt those novel values seen nowhere else in human history. Why was that, and what’s changed? How is it that whole nations without the magical cultural heritage of American WLD values managed to embrace and (imperfectly, of course; look at all those parliaments!) adopt said values in cultures with neither the tradition of WLD nor government and institutions promoting WLD values… yet it’s now nigh impossible for those lacking a “cultural heritage” of WLD values to absorb them when living inside of the greatest bastion of freedom and WLD values ever to grace the Earth with its presence? I’m suddenly grossly underwhelmed by your faith in the US.
One of the things I like about ideologically driven revisionist history is that it is so easily refuted, even if its adherents never seem to grasp the point.
I couldn’t have said it better myself. To give the above dead horse one more solid whack, you scoffingly posit your “proof” to be that it’s “impossible” that no one can name an example of a system of thought that you can’t claim to be derived from WLD thought, that is major, and that endures still. Plus any other criteria you need to add to make your claim unfalsifiable (in case it’s not obvious, I agree with russell that your tendency to loaded questions is one of your least attractive rhetorical qualities). You’ve also bemoaned that no one has offered “proof” of the contrary in addition to a lack of torturously-narrowly-defined counterexamples. Here’s the thing: you yourself have only offered evidence, not proof. Your “proof” amounts to an assertion of post hoc ergo propter hoc, with a side of causal reductionism and cherry picking. As an aside, I’m slightly amused by my competing desires to characterize your standard of “proof” as fundamentally anti-conservative or pretty much the ne plus ultra of conservative thinking. It’s a bit of both, I suppose, in different contexts. Your “proof” basically boils down to a lack of counterexample, and from that you assert that a counter isn’t possible. So, how would this argument have held up in 1770? If the success of the thing is the ultimate proof of its supremacy, there’s no way to prove its value until it exists. In 1770, your lofty claims that nothing delivers rights better than American WLD would be literally meaningless. So how are they proof, exactly? If “proof” is merely that another system delivers better results and endures, then we won’t have “proof” that there’s something better until WLD is eclipsed. Again, though, this is absurdly anti-conservative, as it’s an assertion that something with no precedent is better than whatever best existing systems preceded it. Likewise, it’s the very image of conservatism, in that it assumes that perfection was achieved sometime in the past and cannot be fundamentally improved upon. Like I said, slightly amusing.
But we were talking about revisionist history, weren’t we? We had you claiming that China counts as “never having been colonized”, which is sorta interesting on and of itself, but typically can be justified by fine parsing. Then we have your – to be blunt – ignorant statements about colonialism’s impact on India.
Would you say India’s colonial history led to the elimination of the caste system or would you say that India, left undisturbed by England, was pointed toward a classless, caste–less society?
I absolutely would not, and I find it utterly appalling and thoroughly revisionist that you’d claim it was. Your claim is absurd. The caste system as it exists today was shaped, reinforced, and encouraged under the Raj. It was part and parcel to destructive divide-and-rule imperialist governance. That you’d claim otherwise, let alone the opposite, is insulting uninformed. Laughably uninformed. And this isn’t even the first time we’ve butted heads on this. Seriously, McKTx, educate yourself about this before you try to trot it out as proof of your thesis. Hell, just go skim Wikipedia; it’s a piss-poor, shallow source, but it’s a hell of a lot better than “I feel like this is how things went down”. To cite a glaring example, “untouchability” was not outlawed under the Raj; that came with anti-discrimination measures in the 1950 Constitution.
This entirely sets aside genocidal policies in India (and elsewhere; indeed, the violent “blessings” of British colonial rule were still being doled out for a few decades after WWII) that killed tens of millions over the course of the “civilizing” and “markedly positive” British Imperialist rule. See e.g. But noticing those would require grasping a point contrary to your ideologically-driven revisionist understanding of history, so that’s not going to happen… right?
Africa may be the one place where, south of the Sahara, Europe screwed the pooch.
Wow. Rose-colored blinders. I really can’t say anything more, so I’ll just refer you back to your quote about ideological historical revisionism.
Here’s another question: how many former colonies are currently getting screwed by socialism, another western export?
But, but… isn’t socialism just a product of WLD Enlightenment values? Oh, wait, no, only the good effects it’s had in forcing the Liberals to be more, well, liberal, are attributable to that. All the bad stuff you can pin on socialism is purely the fault of that alien doctrine. Sorry, I forgot. All good things in Western influence flow from the adoption of American WLD values, and all bad ones flow from either clinging to backwards pre-WLD values or embracing evil non-WLD values like socialism.
See the word “decent” in the second to last sentence? It should read “recent”.
Convenient, that.
Now that I’ve rewritten the question, feel free to answer it.
Lemme guess, being almost 40 years ago, the Rhodesian Bush War isn’t “recent” since it ended around 35 years ago. And the resistance to the end of Apartheid is still too old at 20? And lemme guess, contemporary efforts at apartheid in Eretz Yisrael don’t count because it’s not a decent example, what with… hmm, can’t argue that Israelis aren’t white, the PC police on both the right and left would savage you, so I’m assuming it’s not decent because the “Demographic Problem” posed by Israeli Arabs and the squatters in the “Occupied” Territories is a problem of an external existential threat, not of maintaining majoritarian privilege.
Or will you instead insist that we’re suddenly only talking about the US when we say “Western”? In which case, I’m flummoxed, because I’m pretty sure any examples I come up with will be dismissed as “too marginal” or “too nebulous”, and I’ve already wasted far more time on this than I should have.
What, going forward, would progressives do to level the playing field?
My position on stuff like this has, for a long time, been that it’s time to quit shilly-shallying around with remedial crap like affirmative action, reparations, whatever.
If you are found to discriminate or in any way impede someone’s exercise of their civil rights based on race, gender, creed, what have you, then you go the hell to jail.
Or, insert some other punitive measure, as you wish, as long as it’s not a fine payable by someone other than you, personally.
Hiring, housing, whatever you like. Discriminate, and you do hard time.
IMO that would accelerate the process of our collective social evolution significantly.
In general, I’m kind of weary of half-@ssed, well-meaning, throw-them-a-bone measures. They just put a band-aid on the underlying disease.
I say cut it out, root and branch.
But, I suspect my view is not typical.
OK, I gather from McKT (probably kindly) ignoring them, that my points about voter restriction and Citizens United don’t make sense in the WMP discussion. Can anybody explain (briefly – I don’t want to take up your time) why?
…what are the specifics of WMP that WM’s seek, institutionally or otherwise, to perpetuate, and what identifiable processes are WM’s employing to do so?
How about attempting to enact a voter-ID requirement just before an election where it is extremely obvious that doing so will prevent many poor people, a disproportionate number of them urban blacks, from voting?
link
The level of skepticism and befuddlement you seem to have over institutional or systemic racism is torturous, McKinney. You seem, at times, to acknowledge these things, but turn around and say you have no idea what anyone’s talking about at others.
You’ve written enough to start dozens of arguments, most of them largely irrelevant to the question of whether there is such a thing as white privilege in the US today.
Argh, truer words. Back to lurking, or trying to, anyway.
who wants this to continue and why?
simplest answer possible: assholes, because they’re assholes.
why would someone want to be able to treat a different class of people badly? because he’s an asshole. why would someone want to know he’s able to get away with things he knows people from other classes can’t? because he’s an asshole. why would someone enjoy thinking he’s superior to another class of people and to support that notioni by pointing to stats that say that those people are on the wrong side of the law more often than people from his class – ignoring the fact that the reasons for that other class end up on the wrong side of the law includes an overabundance of assholes? because he’s an asshole.
I should probably add that the aim of some instrument of institutional racism does not need to stem from racial animus. This is a matter of opinion, but my thinking is that any practice, rule, policy or law (or whatever institutional arrangement) that obviously burdens a given group (in the sense of protected class) disproportionately should be modified or abandoned as is feasible to eliminate, or at least mitigate, that burden.
So, in the example of the PA voter-ID law, the impetus may not have been animus toward poor or black or elderly or disabled people. It was to, depending on who you ask, prevent (not-demonstrated-to-exist) voter fraud or to suppress the votes of likely Democrats. In either case, just not caring how it affected those people, even if you had nothing against them as members of whatever class (other than Democrats, maybe), still makes it institutionally racist (or otherwise discriminatory), IMO.
Not trying hard enough not to hurt people of, say, a given race – when it’s obvious that you will – is enough.
OK, I gather from McKT (probably kindly) ignoring them, that my points about voter restriction and Citizens United don’t make sense in the WMP discussion. Can anybody explain (briefly – I don’t want to take up your time) why?
Actually, not ignoring. It’s a busy day at the office AND the Voter ID thing, like immigration or birthright stuff, is pretty much a stand alone topic. The left’s view, I think, is that Voter ID is Voter suppression. One counter view is that with some number of millions of undocumented persons in the country, how does one insure that the person voting is entitled to vote. And then you have this from our Rio Grande Valley, http://www.texastribune.org/2015/07/24/lawyer-ags-office-probing-election-contest-in/.
I know and like Gilberto Hinojosa, so this isn’t happy stuff from a personal perspective.
But then, HSH, gives a link and says,
How about attempting to enact a voter-ID requirement just before an election where it is extremely obvious that doing so will prevent many poor people, a disproportionate number of them urban blacks, from voting?
In looking at the link, it appears that the law was passed two years before it was stricken down. I haven’t read up on this issue. I’ve been required to show my ID or registration every time I’ve voted and I don’t see an issue. It’s a big deal to some people, I don’t really get it and I don’t see having to prove you are who you claim to be to be onerous. The list of other things you have to have an ID to do is quite long.
The level of skepticism and befuddlement you seem to have over institutional or systemic racism is torturous, McKinney. You seem, at times, to acknowledge these things, but turn around and say you have no idea what anyone’s talking about at others.
If you take racism to be endemic or systematic or institutional as a matter of core belief without examining the underlying facts, then, yes, you believe what you believe.
So far, we have black men, women, voter ID, and maybe one or two other concrete examples. HSH, if it is as you say, there ought to be a lot more that comes to mind.
who wants this to continue and why?
simplest answer possible: assholes, because they’re assholes.
Ok, that’s fair in the sense that only an asshole would want something like that. Does that mean that WM are assholes? Or that all WM want these things? Because I don’t buy that at all.
If you are found to discriminate or in any way impede someone’s exercise of their civil rights based on race, gender, creed, what have you, then you go the hell to jail.
Ok, giving this just a moment’s thought, a well-funded religious group could litigate any number of small, private, secular businesses into the ground just, you know, because they could. As old farts around here say, that gun kicks as hard as it shoots.
See the word “decent” in the second to last sentence? It should read “recent”.
Convenient, that.
Now that I’ve rewritten the question, feel free to answer it.
Lemme guess, being almost 40 years ago, the Rhodesian Bush War isn’t “recent” since it ended around 35 years ago. And the resistance to the end of Apartheid is still too old at 20?
I think both are valid examples of WM, nominally products of the western liberal heritage, doing exactly what WMP means, if it has a meaning.
Anything more recent than those examples and closer to home?
In either case, just not caring how it affected those people, even if you had nothing against them as members of whatever class (other than Democrats, maybe), still makes it institutionally racist (or otherwise discriminatory), IMO.
If this were true, then any legislative act that, for example, required people to pay a tax or buy insurance or otherwise part with their wherewithal is institutionally racist if it were shown to have a disparate impact on blacks or Hispanics or what have you.
Does that mean that WM are assholes? Or that all WM want these things?
it means people who want these things are assholes.
WM, given their current dominant status, obviously enjoy great success in legislating in their own favor. and a lot of WM are assholes, especially when it comes to stuff like this.
The Count (at 11:29) asked an interesting question:
I suspect is that the reason is that, unlike companies, the Republican Party (and the Democratic Party for that matter) doesn’t really have a CEO who could make such a decision. If they succeed in electing a President, they may come sorta close — but not very.
What they have is a bunch of local leaders (regional VPs, if you will). Who, in most cases, find that this kind of stuff does have a (local) market — which is their market. So they keep it up.
Why do would-be Presidential candidates do so as well? Because they are focused on a specific market: Republican primary voters. And, in that market, it appears to work — indeed it is critical to success. At least they all seem to think so.
That does leave some (growing) challenges when they try to shift to the wider market come the general election. Especially since their opponent is going to be rude enough to quote their statements in the primary campaign. But if you don’t sell in the market that is the primary, you are not even going to get to where you need to worry about that. So you gotta do it in the primary campaign.
Only if you take what I wrote out of context, McKinney.
Certainly, there can be instances of laws that are demonstrably necessary and that will burden a given group more than others, but that there’s also really no known, feasible alternative for.
The PA voter-ID law was not only timed just before an election, but was pushed with great urgency, even though there had been however many elections prior to the law, none of which were determined to be affected significantly by voter fraud. It was just so, so important that is law be on the books and in effect before this particular gubernatorial election.
link
From the link:
My apologies for not originally linking to something on the earlier history of the law and the initial hold placed on it. I assumed the NY Times article on the law later being struck down entirely would have gone into that history.
Honestly, I’m only so interested in proving to you that white privilege and institutional racism exist. I’ve neglected my own work enough today because of that effort.
giving this just a moment’s thought, a well-funded religious group could litigate any number of small, private, secular businesses into the ground just, you know, because they could.
You can’t have everything, where would you put it?
You asked what “we lefties” would propose. That’s what I would propose.
Discrimination is a criminal act, covered by criminal law, with criminal penalties.
Either that, or we can wait another 4 or 5 generations for the Age of Aquarius to arrive.
🙂
As far as what “white male privilege” looks like to me, I would offer the following.
If you are a white person shopping in a nice store, people likely won’t follow you around to see if you’re a thief. If you’re not white, they often will.
If you want a cab, your odds are better if you’re white.
If you’re driving a car in many places, your odds of getting pulled over are better if you’re black, especially black and male.
If you find yourself in the criminal justice system, your outcomes will likely be worse if you’re black, especially black and male.
If you want to rent an apartment, your odds in some places are better if you’re white.
If you have a professional job, or maybe any job, you’ll probably get paid better if you’re a male.
In all the cases I’m talking about, assume all other things to be equal.
If you want to tack on *straight* white male, your odds of being publicly hassled or assaulted for no good reason whatsoever are better if you are apparently gay. Whatever “apparently gay” happens to mean wherever it is that you live.
And yes, I know you know a gay guy who grew up in OK and wasn’t hassled. Lucky him.
It’s bullshit like all of the above that makes it PITA to be not white and not a male in the US.
Better than it was, still kind of sucky a lot of the time.
Generally not bad enough to keep folks who really want to rise above from doing so, it just makes their hurdles higher, and there are more of them.
And I say “generally”, because for some people circumstances are such that just getting to normal takes semi-heroic effort and discipline.
No margin for error.
All of that sucks, is not fair, and should change.
Russell, on way to mitigate the example that you start with: Make it a criminal act (or at least a civil tort) to repeatedly bring false charges of that kind.
You’d want to set a threshold, so that legitimate complaints could be brought without serious risk. But if someone is repeatedly bringing such complaints, and the courts are finding them unjustified, that is some kind of harrassment . . . even if each one is against a different (small) business.
One counter view is that with some number of millions of undocumented persons in the country, how does one insure that the person voting is entitled to vote.
Because historically you have to (a) register, (b) show up to vote, and (c) sign the voter roll. (a) would seem to be quite enough to keep most undocumented persons out (“Really, you want me to register with the government of the place I’ve entered illegally? No thanks.”) (b) and (c) limit voter impersonation fraud to a great enough extent that an ID requirement is not necessary and, as I think has been demonstrated over and over, far more likely to keep more eligible people from voting than it keeps ineligible people out. Moreover, it’s essentially a poll tax – or at least comes a lot closer to one than the traditional registration requirements.
Absentee ballots are a different issue and, IIRC, are far more susceptible to fraud and yet are very often not subject to these new voter ID requirements.
O.K., so wj has agreed (confirmed?) that there are enough loyal consumers of this unsafe, explosive, poisonous, flammable product that the Republican Party peddles every two years to warrant the marketing and advertising expense.
So why is anyone arguing that this pollutant which is still being marketed as a dessert topping to some in the white male market (and their self-immolating idiot attendants of various other persuasions) we’re talking about is only detectable in residual trace amounts left over from the historical racial, sexist, homophobic, and nativist toxic dumps in our social and political environment?
Kind of like George Carlin said about the “undisputed heavyweight champion of the world”.
Well, if it’s undisputed, what’s all the fighting about?
All of that sucks, is not fair, and should change.
Ok, I agree. The relative prevalence varies from time and location, perhaps, but everything you list happens somewhere, some number of times a day, week or month. I’m highly unlikely to see it (I have, but not often, and because I’m not in a position to see it).
Like Cleek, you identify things that happen, and inferentially, the kind of people who do those kinds of things.
The disconnect is this: OTOH, it is said that WM want to protect and preserve their privilege; OTOH, assholes want to specifically treat blacks or women or whoever differently and unkindly (an understatement in many respects); and on the third hand, there is a list of bad things.
Is the privilege that WM want to preserve the same or different from the list of bad things you give? Because I really don’t know anyone who endorses anything on your list; I haven’t read of anyone like that (other than an obvious outlier moron); it just doesn’t seem to be part of anyone’s policy program.
So, when lefties refer to WM preserving their privilege or fighting to hang on to their privilege, or some similar words, and assuming it’s not the privilege to do what you list, what privilege are we talking about?
I know I sound like a broken record, asking the same question over and over again, but there is a reason. First, I’m white. Second, outside of the office, 95% of my social interaction is with other white people. About a third of that interaction touches to one degree or another on current events, politics, etc.
I can’t think of anyone–the tea party guys I know, my very conservative Opus Dei Catholic friend, men and women I play golf or drink with (or both)–ever saying anything about losing ground to minorities or wanting to deny people something or anything even remotely like that.
I get around fairly well and Texas is not exactly the last bastion of liberal thinking. What y’all describe is not on the radar screen that I’ve been able to see in terms of something WM are trying to preserve. It just isn’t there. If I’m wrong, show me where.
O.K., so wj has agreed (confirmed?) that there are enough loyal consumers of this unsafe, explosive, poisonous, flammable product that the Republican Party peddles every two years to warrant the marketing and advertising expense.
Respectfully, Count, neither you nor WJ have identified anything concrete or specific. Of, if you have, I’ve missed it.
BTW, I watch the debate last night. I saw two Hispanics, an African American and a woman on the stage. I wouldn’t pour raw sewage on Cruz, but it’s got nothing to do with his ethnicity. My preferred candidate is the woman. But, the point is, this fixation on skin color as some kind of national policy barometer seems misplaced.
Gosh, if the justification for onerous voter ID laws is because there are “millions” who “might” take advantage, then we certainly can expand greatly the extent of similar oppressions without losing our L(big L)iberty.
what privilege are we talking about?
they’ve been listed on this thread multiple times.
Obama should invite the National Review editor to accompany Ahmed into the White House.
https://twitter.com/POTUS/status/644193755814342656?ref_src=twsrc^tfw
One wonders how GSA or whomever furnishes and supplies the White House managed to sneak in all of the clocks and computer and telephone equipment with circuit boards in them the place is bursting with.
“Bob, you have a cellphone, fine, go ahead in.”
“Sally, iPad is it, with circuit board, entree, sil vous plait.”
“Quaneeza, make yourself at home with that Apple Watch, but keep your feet off the seat cushions.”
“Nelly, do you need help carrying that modern electronic digital grandfather clock up to the second floor? Jery, would you grab the other end of that for her?”
“What’s your name, kid?”
“Ahmed, sir.”
“Ahmed … AHMED! .. (does a Barney Fife double take, runs three steps in one direction, turns and doubles back, popeyed, tries to draw his pistol which hangs up in his holster, his hat flies off and his handcuffs rattle to the floor, which he then kicks across the room. He farts.) ….. whoa nelly, who goes there, stop right there, kid! Say, what’s with the alarm clock? (into his shoulder intercom: Get me backup quick and alert homeland security, pronto) Now how bout you just put that down real slow and careful-like and then hit the deck with your hands and legs spread eagle.”
“Wait a second , who are you?” (looking at Ahmed’s companion)
“Rick Lowry .. editor of the National Review”
“Are you with this terrorist kid, whose neck I presently have my boot resting on?”
“Well, I was asked to walk in with him by the President, to my chagrin.”
“Thata clock you got with you too. What is it, National Clock Day around here?”
“Yes, I … well, it’s a Christmas present for the First Lady”
The alarm on Ahmed’s clock goes off, right to the second by the way, and everyone jumps.
“Never mind, you look OK to me, Rick, was it? Proceed to the elevator and the President will be with you shortly. That’s a very nice timepiece.”
“Hey, Ahmed, you tell you’re having trouble breathing one more time, and you and that “clock” you tried to smuggle in, and I are going to book a flight to Guantanamo.”
they’ve been listed on this thread multiple times.
Indeed.
More.
I get around fairly well and Texas is not exactly the last bastion of liberal thinking.
I live in the People’s Republic, in a lovely reliably (D) town near the water, full of progressive thinking people.
Our police log recently recorded a call from a citizen who wanted the cops to investigate some suspicious kids on bikes.
They were suspicious because they were black.
It became kind of a joke, circulated on FB for a few days. I give the cops credit for writing it up the way it was phoned in.
I often think that many forms of discrimination are worse in areas that are nominally “progressive”, but where contact with real, live, actual black (or whatever) people is pretty rare, than it is in nominally “conservative” areas where people of different colors interact with each on a regular basis.
That’s kind of all to the side of you basic question, it was just an anecdote I thought might give you a laugh.
Your basic question:
So, when lefties refer to WM preserving their privilege or fighting to hang on to their privilege, or some similar words, and assuming it’s not the privilege to do what you list, what privilege are we talking about?
The places I see it are places like my sister and brother-in-law, who was a union electrician, complaining that the blacks are exploiting affirmative action to take all of the jobs.
Ditto my departed step-mother, who was a steward in a union shop for many years.
Ditto a guitarist I sometimes work with, who is a union mason, although his beef is more with Latinos.
All of the above are economically driven, but that tends to be viewed through a lens of skin color.
I see it in the folks in my town, who got all bent out of shape when the Dominicans from the next town over came and fished for squid off of one of our town docks, and responded by banning fishing there.
It was a safety issue, natch! But really, more like “not quite our kind of people, dear”.
Also something of an economic issue there – the lovely seaside suburban paradise you worked so hard to get to live in, and now you have to share it with those people from the ghetto – but again, viewed through a lens of skin color.
I used to see it when I lived in the neighborhood where all those Dominican squid jiggers came from. All the old-school French-Canadian and Yankee folks whose folks and grand-folks worked in the now-defunct factories in town, and who now were scratching out some kind of blue-collar living doing something or other, resented the hell out of all the Dominicans who were moving in.
Economics again, but viewed through the lens of race and language and culture.
I think stuff like this, in one form or another, is dead common.
Those are my anecdotes. Most folks can probably come up with a few of their own.
I wouldn’t pour raw sewage on Cruz, but it’s got nothing to do with his ethnicity.
I watched the first half-hour or so of the debate on YouTube today.
What struck me was that every candidate, when replying to a question, responded to Tapper. They faced him, made eye contact with him, directed their responses to him.
Except Cruz. Cruz talked to the camera.
The guy gives me the creeps. It’s not about his politics, or whatever, I just think he’s a creepy guy.
It’s like Eddie Haskell is running for POTUS.
So, when lefties refer to WM preserving their privilege or fighting to hang on to their privilege, or some similar words, and assuming it’s not the privilege to do what you list, what privilege are we talking about?
It’s not necessarily true that extending the privilege we’ve been talking about (e.g.fewer obstacles to getting jobs, apartments etc) to everyone dilutes it so that the people who currently have it will have less, but that seems to be the unconscious fear that non-malevolent possessors of WMP have when, for instance, opposing measures that can mitigate the unfairness (AA etc). Of course I have no proof for this theory, but that’s what it looks like to me.
I often think that many forms of discrimination are worse in areas that are nominally “progressive”…
Can’t argue with that. I shudder to think what would happen if busing was implemented in good liberal gray Seattle to deal with school segregation….which we indeed have to a significant degree.
You want to get well off liberals mad as hell at you in this city? Propose multi-family zoning in their lily white single family zoned leafy neighborhoods!
http://www.historylink.org/index.cfm?DisplayPage=output.cfm&file_id=3939
History is instructive.
I like the Cruz/raw sewage connection, McKT. I’ll be stealing that.
How did Trump and Huckabee miss NOT having raw sewage poured on them?
Briefly, the African American is on record comparing Obamacare to slavery, which besides disqualifying him from opining on either subject (and many others), sounds like something some of the white male conservatives who I know would say, except that they would add that Obamacare is worse because the deductibles were generously waived for the slaves at no cost to the government.
One of the Hispanic immigrants helped scuttle immigration legislation he helped conceive because it might help some Hispanic immigrants. That is white, straight, and male by any other name, except for those white, straight males who would disagree.
The other Hispanic you’ve dealt with.
The woman received absurd amounts of money for ruthlessly screwing up a major corporation, which she then refused to spend, until it looked bad that she hadn’t, to pay her campaign workers’ wages from the last election she lost. That’s slavery, not Obamacare, and a page out of every ruthless dominant white male CEO there is, although I concede there are many (most) decent ones too, male and female.
The closeted gay man among the eleven will go unremarked until he comes out.
In short, these four were on the stage because they qualify as part of the mixed eleven nuts who might appeal to the largely white, male, and conservative non-sensibilities among the 27%, could it be 41%?
IMHO the qualification, which is exercised with great affirmative action by the right wing of the Republican Party, is their shared sociopathy.
but, but, but JEB! smoked pot!
Jeb admits to smoking pot.
Anyone care to guess how many of the rest did so, but haven’t owned up to doing so? Given their ages, there almost have to be some among them who did.
And, if one of those who are not admitting it starts gaining ground, will have someone else’s Opposition Research folks leak a story about it? With witnesses and everything. Gotta think the dirty tricks possibilities are legion.
Gotta think the dirty tricks possibilities are legion.
Nobody cares about pot anymore, which is why it mystifies me why we’re still putting people in jail for it. Oh, I guess we’re full circle: WMP.
The reason we are still putting people in jail for it is that it isn’t really true that “nobody cares about pot anymore.” There are still a significant number of people who do care. And they have a disproportionate impact in Republican primaries — so many Republican legislators are at risk if they agree to legalize it. So it remains illegal.
There are still a significant number of people who do care.
Maybe, if by “significant” you mean whatever critical mass (but still a minority) who could mess things up in an election.
I live in Virginia, where there isn’t a referendum system for legislative initiatives. There’s a strong majority of people (according to polls) that support decriminalization of marijuana. It’s not going to happen though because that would mean how would we incarcerate black people, even though black and white people use it at the same rate?
Open thread? Here goes….
why-does-nobody-theorize-about-causes-health-uninsurance?
The beginning premise, in LJ’s extract, was that Abbott and Co wanted to perpetuate WMP.
Thanks for underlining that it was from the extract and not from what I wrote. It’s probably worthwhile to quote exactly what it says
The “normality” which has been lost in Australia and other western democracies is the unquestioned social and political primacy of white men. Recent decades have seen new kinds of political claims emerge, and a plurality of values, cultures and lifestyles. The rules of the game have, after long struggles, shifted.
Rather than respond to this with accommodation, negotiation and hospitality, much of the right have elected to fight a prolonged culture war that demands the return of white, male, heterosexual authority, something that never truly existed in the way they imagine it.
I’m not sure what you are disagreeing with here. I understand you want to know about WMP and you don’t think much of the idea, and the Guardian can be pretty fiery as rhetoric goes, but part of the pushback you are getting here may be because you are addressing folks here as if we were the writer.
Is Abbot and Co trying to bring back WMP? That’s an interesting question, but the fact that he was kicked out of the leadership role by his own conservative party suggests that he was further right so the appelation of ‘and Co’ isn’t really true. It wasn’t liberals who did this, it was the people who conceivably share his basic political stance. In fact, talking with Aussie friends, (who are generally liberal), they were a bit disappointed that Abbot was out because it may be enough of a bandaid to keep the conservative party in power.
At any rate, I’m sorry I didn’t make that observation earlier, but my point in linking to it is that it discusses the dynamic that I was talking about.
I don’t smoke pot anymore, having given it up long ago.
But I live in Colorado, one of the homes of legal and taxable pot.
The entire subject makes everyone high.
Our Governor, John Hickenlooper, a moderate nice-guy Democrat in all ways, and a formerly capitalist entrepreneur in his private activities, which included mostly enabling people to get sh*tfaced by other means, via the brew-pub route, is understandably concerned about the availability of legal pot, voted in by the voter Amendment process, to the underaged, like maybe this was or was not a problem before legalization, go figure, but without the jail time.
The Republicans in the State are on a bad trip over the whole thing, even the libertarian ones among them, because while Bob Beauprez, our version of Jeb Bush with an extra length of right-wing rebar shoved up his fundament, vowed to seek the outlawing of legal pot selling in his pursuit of the governorship in our last election, he lost by a scary small margin of slightly deficient Obama hatred.
Meanwhile Republicans in the State House are cautious about voting to take away the right to sell pot from the pot entrepreneurs, but rumble constantly about lowering the taxes on pot sales, somehow turning inside out Reagan’s dictum, retrieved from a Reader’s Digest article he absentmindedly secreted in his pajama pockets in 1958 and came across in a news conference while fishing for a breath mint as he came through the door of the White House Press Room in 1981 to prevaricate on taxes, which stated that if you want less of something, tax it.
Meanwhile, the steep taxes assessed by the Democrats, and refunded by the stupid Tabor tax limitation Amendment, garroted through the legislative meat grinder years ago by Douglas Bruce, who I believe is still doing time for evading even our low taxes in our underfunded penitentiary system (look it up), don’t seem to be making a dent in pot consumption, if my lunch last week in a great Mexican taqueria in a pretty much Spanish-speaking mini-strip mall was any indication.
(The Spanish speakers among the owners and staff had some of their children sitting at a table after school speaking fluent English as they did their geometry homework while waiting for their elders to get off work. But I guess it’s the boxcars for the lot of them.)
There was a pot joint .. nondescript signage .. next door and the traffic in and out was far more prodigious than Reagan predicted for your over-taxed entrepreneurial small business establishment, including (excuse me) very attractive women of all age groups in short shorts coming and going and looking perfectly happy being heavily taxed.
Given their ages, there almost have to be some among them who did.
i’m pretty sure Aqua Buddha did.
not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Tabor became law under by voter referendum, not legislatively, so I wasn’t represented.
I’ll unpack this, maybe tomorrow:
http://finance.yahoo.com/video/cramer-technology-doing-job-fed-221500668.html
heh…when Cramer blamed the lack of code writers and engineers on our schools, I tuned out…
You beat me to it.
A little under-cover Beatle love to all of you, people of the north, south, east and west country:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FiQnrRT16s
Ok, giving this just a moment’s thought, a well-funded religious group could litigate any number of small, private, secular businesses into the ground just, you know, because they could. As old farts around here say, that gun kicks as hard as it shoots.
Except, funnily enough, that tends not to happen IRL.
Where such legislation has been enacted for some time, for example:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equality_Act_2010
I remember, as a teenager, listening to similar concerns about the Race Relations Act in the mid ’70s. What seemed to many an outrageous intrusion into their reasonably held (ha!) private beliefs, is today entirely unexceptionable.
You can’t legislate belief… but you can give it a good kick in the right direction.
Nice cover, Count. Did you in the States get her cover of Valerie (my favourite recording of hers)? This is the link to the official video, in which she couldn’t appear because she was in rehab, so the girls he appears to pull out of the audience are all lip-synching to her soundtrack.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HLY1NTe04M
And now it’s wall-to-wall middle aged Scandinavians:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/10/hit-charade/403192/
We were arguing a while back about the ubiquity of interspecies gene transfer.
Here’s a striking example:
http://phys.org/news/2015-09-naturally-gm-butterflies-gene-wasp-associated.html
Crikey Nigel, on your first link re the Scandinavians. That’s unbelievable. No wonder my record collection consists mainly of (mostly old) Bob Dylan….
Coulter clarifies–
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/ann-coulter-calls-fury-jewish-824476
I believe her. She’s an Islamophobe who loves Israel and Reagan and Trump and hates immigrants.
Or alternatively she is a cynical nihilist who believes in nothing except what brings her attention.
I’d tend to pick the second of the above, Donald.
Aufmerksamkeit-Suchenden über alles.
And now it’s wall-to-wall middle aged Scandinavians:
I recently had an exchange with a friend about popular music after seeing a post on fb about metal being more popular than pop on Spotify (featuring an image of Taylor Swift, made to look goth-metallic). My thinking was that Spotify was geared more towards people who didn’t want to listen to the crap they could hear just about anywhere else anyway.
My rant on (narrowly defined – we’re not talking Beatles here) pop involved the ever-changing rotation of songs, for short attention spans, but with the underlying formula remaining exactly the same.
I had no idea so much of it was coming from so few sources and that it was so highly manufactured. It kind of depresses me.
Nihilists! F*ck me. I mean, say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.
manufactured pop music has a long history. as do prolific professional song writers.
Sure. The surprising part for me was a matter of degree (like, no musicians!).
now that really doesn’t surprise me much. pop/dance music has long since stopped sounding like real instruments are involved. it’s all synths and drum machines and loops and digital bleeps. i’d be surprised to learn that actual bands make those sounds.
sucks.
and i assume all vocals in that stuff are 100% auto-tuned, and that each syllable is pulled from a different take and assembled by a producer who is trying to get exactly the right emphasis in every part of every word.
also sucks.
just gimmie indie rock!
I wonder what this Ann Coulter supporter is on about.
You can ask a presidential candidate a question like this, and he doesn’t bat an eye. Nothing odd about that, right?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brill_Building
I vaguely remember Randy Newman in an interview years ago talking about going to work in the Brill Building in a big room with all of the lyricists lined up at desks like accountants.
The songwriters had their own little cubicles with a piano/guitar.
Barry Gordy and Hitsville, man.
Yeah, the machines are the new Wrecking Crew.
My obvious troll for Hartmut to correct my German was perhaps too obvious.
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2015/09/when-do-we-get-rid-muslims
Hey, look, we can’t have people walking around running for President and saying sh*t like this.
It’s disgraceful, disgusting. It’s dangerous, as in people are going to f*cking die, as in exterminated.
If this country wants to be exceptional, start now and GET RID of the haters. And don’t give them cover by having one whit of sympathy for their nihilistic victimhood.
We can’t have this anymore. And we’re not going to.
Full stop.
if the GOP wants to turn itself into a drunken Eric Clapton rant, who am i to stop it?
Even super-genius Bristol Palin thinks there’s more racial strife lately, and it’s Obama’s fault.
And now it’s wall-to-wall middle aged Scandinavians
Did anyone know any of the current hits cited in the article?
I’d heard of some of the performers, but I don’t think I know any of their music. I have never heard of the tunes.
I miss Amy Winehouse. She was still kind of figuring her sh*t out, still needed to get a little better control of her instrument, but she was the real deal. An honest-to-god soul singer.
Even her jazz stuff was pretty good. If she had wanted to continue down that path, there would have been some stuff she would have needed to work on, but she understood how to work a line.
Check her out on Body and Soul with Tony Bennett. Yeah, it’s a hokey production, but she really does nail it.
Here she is covering King Pleasure’s vocalese of Moody’s Mood – a little bit stiff rhythmically (which may well be due to the freaking hip-hop drum track that straightjackets the arrangement), but her articulation of the line is really good. Kinda channeling Billie in some ways, but WTF – you go try to channel Billie and see how you make out.
No doubt her folks had a very hip record collection, because she really got inside the styles she worked in, and that stuff is just not in the air anymore like it was, say, 50 years ago. It’s not something you would get in day to day life anymore, you kind of have to go seek it out. And, it kind of has to speak to you at some level.
The girl had big ears, and an obvious affinity for the styles she embraced. Anybody can dress up like one of the Ronettes, not anybody can sing like that.
Or, put themselves out there like that. Winehouse left it all on the recordings and on the stage, she wasn’t holding a whole lot back. That takes a toll, doing that and not having it eat you up is a life skill, which I guess she had not mastered.
She was the real thing, I’m very sorry she’s gone. I would have loved to have heard what she would do at age 30, or 40, or 70.
RIP
Yeah, the machines are the new Wrecking Crew.
Talking about machines and Tin Pan Alley…
Irving Berlin could play the piano, as long as you wanted it played in the one and only key he could play in.
Which was F freaking sharp – six sharps. The man dug the black keys.
To accommodate singers or instrumentalists who wanted to work in a different key (which was most likely EVERY PERSON WHO EVER WALKED IN THE ROOM), he had a piano that would mechanically transpose F# to whatever key was desired.
Always with the machines, these guys….
last but not least, what the Count said at 11:12.
not just “what the Count said”, but somebody should freaking bronze what the Count said.
stupid ignorant know-nothing bonehead resentment is all well and good around the Thanksgiving table, or the end of bar where all the drunken losers hang out.
But sooner or later people end up getting beaten up, or killed.
Zero tolerance for that bullshit, please.
I dig the black keys, too.
I don’t play piano, but when I do (Dos Equis?) have the occasion to noodle around on one, I bang away on the black keys. You can groove on a pentatonic scale without going off-key (very often), even with almost no skill whatsoever. And it’s easier to rock out than playing in C major or A minor on just the white keys (too many notes).
Russell, a million thanks for Amy’s Moody’s Mood. Once upon a time I played the King Pleasure LP all day and night, then lost it and was never able to get it again. I’d never heard this – it’s uneven, but in the best parts terrific. She was indeed the Real Thing
stupid ignorant know-nothing bonehead resentment is all well and good around the Thanksgiving table, or the end of bar where all the drunken losers hang out.
Unfortunately it seems that resentment of all kinds is a lot of people’s raison d’etre.
Here’s another instance where one might be accused of mind-reading were one to speculate on the thinking behind the disgruntlement of the students in question.
Unfortunately it seems that resentment of all kinds is a lot of people’s raison d’etre.
indeed.
‘assholes’, as i called em.
HSH, did you happen to notice that the pro-Confederate flag protest occurred in a town called “Christiansburg”? Just a bit ironic.
Slarti, I have seen far worse mangling, especially in American movies (the Brits are usually much more careful).
Just a bit ironic.
It should be ironic, but it’s entirely consistent with how an appreciable number of self-described Christians practice their religion – especially the ones who are the most vocal about their Christianity.
Really, though, this whole Confederate flag (i.e. Army of Northern Virginia battle flag) business is an excellent example of the WMP thing we were discussing on this thread.
It’s claimed as a symbol of Southern heritage, as though the South and Southern culture didn’t exist before the flag and didn’t continue to exist after the flag had more or less become a relic of history, only to be revived and adopted by the Dixiecrats 80-some years after the Civil War, in opposition to blacks and their northern sympathizers in the Democratic party, and later by others in opposition to the Civil Rights Movement.
It originated in the fight to maintain the slavery of blacks, by whites, and was revived in the fight, by whites, against civil rights for blacks.
So, all these years after the Civil War, what gets chosen, from all the possibilities, as the go-to, number-one symbol of (almost exclusively white) Southern pride? Yeah, the f*cking Confederate flag.
But I’m sure it’s just a coincidence.
That’s probably the nicest thing anyone has ever said about my German. Thanks!
I waswanting tp go for something more like aufmerksamkeitsüchtig, but frankly my ability to throw together correct German-language compound words has never great.
Associating the German language with the Nazis is a bit lame, though.
But that’s what most people, especially in the US, think of when they think of Germany. France has it slightly better with Napoleon and Louis XIV who had and have a better PR (despite their scorched earth policies).
Sign language connects Germany to late Prussia/early German Reich by imitating the Pickelhaube.
What’s the alternative? Going back to the fake Russian accent to mark bad guys? 😉
Btw, in the German dub of the newer Star Wars trilogy the baddies have a French accent for no discernable reason.
Interesting about the German language dub of Star Wars. I wonder if the Japanese version has the baddies with Chinese accents….
This should really help Jeb Bush peel away those Tea Party Trump voters among the lynch mob getting ready to hang both him and Obama:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/jeb-bush-trump-obama-muslim
Jeb is just a regular Atticus Finch, ain’t he.
Scout, you get on home now, this is nothing for you to see.