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Trump is not a joke

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DB Roy
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Re: Trump is not a joke

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Since the impeachment went through, a couple of republicans have distanced themselves from him. I read there is now a republican PAC opposing Trump. Christians too are finally speaking out. Christianity Today denounced him and wants him removed from office and the editor of the Christian Post resigned when the magazine came out with a pro-Trump piece. He said he can't allow his name to be attached to the magazine anymore. Maybe this is the small leak that will turn larger and larger.
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I think the PAC is led by George Conway. Can't help wondering what the pillow talk is in that marriage (if there is any).
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She isn't listening to George. She said she had it on good authority that the democrats lacked the votes for impeachment. Now, you know her husband didn't tell her that. I'm sure he told her the opposite. But Kelly Anne ran with it and was proven wrong later in the day when the House voted for it.
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My theory on Kellyanne is she is a good actress. She made some strong anti-Trump statements before getting this latest job. So it's possible George & Kellyanne Conway actually agree.
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If you were dating someone like her, you'd find out her last bf was a Romanian hip-hop dancer. When you ask her what you could possibly have in common with a Romanian hip-hop dancer, she'd tell you that she loved you both for different reasons. Those reasons, of course, turning out to be that she was dating a Romanian hip-hop dancer then and now she's with you.
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LanDroid wrote:My theory on Kellyanne is she is a good actress. She made some strong anti-Trump statements before getting this latest job. So it's possible George & Kellyanne Conway actually agree.
Stranger things have come about lately.
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I thought that was an insightful and thoughtful article. There's an author on Patheos, Fred Clark, whose work has helped me understand how much Evangelicalism is tied to racism and whiteness. What the article doesn't get (nor Fred Clark) is the extent to which this combination of white identity with religion is actually motivated by positive and helpful forces. For those of us who can also see how pathological it lets itself get, and how much it is also motivated by evil forces of domination and self-sabotage, getting the whole picture can help us begin to see where the levers are to make some movement happen.

To make the case, let me start with family life in the late 19th century. Respectable culture, the ways of people who had enough money to pay a parson for a proper wedding and to own a family Bible, etc., involved codes of honor for women and men, a strong expectation of chastity for women before marriage, and quite a bit of domination by the paterfamilias. The average field hand or even farmer on a small plot of land was at the mercy of weather, debt, and feuds. They might have to move to escape debts, their children might or might not have been able to read, and management of anger was mostly handled by aggression hierarchies. Rape and incest lurked in the shadows at a significant level. So respectability involved a tight nexus of property with "purity." Women might entertain fantasies of romance, but in truth if they got involved with a man outside of wedlock they were very likely to end up "ruined" in a relatively short amount of time.

As Howard Zinn mentioned in passing, the ways of Native Americans and ex-slaves were quite a bit more fluid about pairing up, and quite a bit more precarious materially. With everyone under more stress, alcoholism, wife-beating and child neglect were at predictably much higher levels, leading to perpetuation of poverty and stress. Religion in either black or white society would have been associated with aspiration for something more settled, more educated and more cultivated. And of course anyone could see that those were "white" ways. In the South where racism was more economically important, more virulent because of the relatively large black working class and the heritage of pitting poor whites against blacks, and more reinforced by the generally poor economy, this association became much stronger, There may have been cultural factors involved in the Celtic heritage, I don't know. There was certainly a heavy burden of poverty right up to the 60s and an automatic understanding that integration of schools meant the poor ignorant white kids would automatically be the ones in school with the poor black kids who were, in general, even more ignorant than the whites. This dynamic is still at play in, for example, Tucker Carlson's screeds about immigrants, which sometimes observe that affluent and well-educated liberals are also generally well-insulated from schools with high numbers of immigrants.

Most white people feel a gut-level anxiety about "bad neighborhoods" and even those of us who want to fix the problem rather than to ghettoize it are queasy about our kids depending on "bad schools" for their education. We have invented magnet schools (but in New York they have to face tough choices about allocating the places at them) and supportive ideology, but we have not yet shouldered the burden of lifting an entire generation of poor kids out of stressful, violent, unsteady lives to be in steady, supported jobs with a high standard of living. And of course high levels of immigration which followed NAFTA's undermining of labor-intensive Mexican agriculture, and high levels of job destruction following trade opening of the 90s, have taken away the sense that white people had a secure future to look forward to no matter how well people of color did or did not do.

Evangelical religion still stands for respectability, most especially in the South. Kids who stay away from drugs and youthful sex, who do their homework and party under supervision, are often doing so because their families have no hesitation about endorsing this as godliness, and feel their kids' eternal soul is at stake as well as their ability to manage any community standing and to have opportunities to, say, get a bank loan. Abortion is a symbol of all that is wrong with modern culture, with its tattoos and designer drugs and hookup culture and emptiness. And it is a particularly ugly and dreadful symbol.

So along comes Trump (and Fox News) who excels at puncturing the staid, well-managed ways of the Politically Correct culture (see CNN). He does dog-whistles on immigration, and he stands for the traditional idea of masculinity and family hierarchy that both evangelical religion and the working class associate with respectability, so he looks like a pushback against chaotic individualist ideology and "anything goes" social anarchy. What Ph.D.'s tend to see as racist structures, the average working-class white family sees as bulwarks of the structures that support respectable ways. Liberals, from this perspective, understand nothing of real life, because they live in ivory towers of diversity claims, motivated by empty ideas about social justice that have nothing to do with the requirements of maintaining a sound and effective family life.

So what are the implications of recognizing all this? How is a conversation about white privilege (or even global warming) possible with people who use rhetoric about the afterlife to repudiate elitist, totally unrealistic ideals?

I haven't seen much insightful discussion of the question. I think we liberals are still using what are essentially hierarchical, dominationist tactics of moral superiority and educational superiority to try to impose our values top-down, and quite frequently avoiding the hard work of maintaining social structure, widely fostering economic opportunity and sharing the burdens of social justice. Our goals of human rights may be salutary, but we haven't thought about a more reconciliation-oriented approach of persuasion and mutuality. In that sense I have more faith in the approach of Joe Biden or even Marianne Williamson than that of Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. Not because the latter fail to be morally correct, but because their favored means are not really in tune with the real challenges and the practical pressures at work.

So one step forward would be more listening and more thoughtful integration of conservative values (and, to some extent, their flawed symbols). Another would be to see resistance to social engineering as a sign of understanding of the ground-level realities, rather than just categorizing it instinctively as examples of the out-dated ideologies we oppose. Maybe that understanding is flawed and of course it is biased (because where you stand so often depends on where you sit) but it also reflects a lot of cold-eyed realism about facts that academics are isolated from.

Ultimately there has to be a change of heart among liberals. Instead of seeking moral purity for our country, which so often involves symbolic gestures and removing the splinter from someone else's eye, it means a lot of conscious surrender of privilege in the interest of improving the lives of the working class. Let those be negotiated with the working class. Fine. That is certainly a way of getting buy-in by those who have the hardest jobs to reach some calm, stable and effective mode of life. It's also a direct outgrowth of the kind of humility that is so missing in liberal ideology.
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Harry Marks wrote:
There was certainly a heavy burden of poverty right up to the 60s and an automatic understanding that integration of schools meant the poor ignorant white kids would automatically be the ones in school with the poor black kids who were, in general, even more ignorant than the whites. This dynamic is still at play in, for example, Tucker Carlson's screeds about immigrants, which sometimes observe that affluent and well-educated liberals are also generally well-insulated from schools with high numbers of immigrants.
The same is true of affluent and well-educated conservatives. How many "poor" whites do you actually know? How many have black friends? What evidence can you offer that poor black kids are generally more ignorant than poor white kids? I see no evidence that this is in any true. The truth is, most whites do not have a single black friend whether the whites in question are rich or poor. They are conditioned from childhood not to. I mean, come on, I grew up in America just like you. You know exactly what I'm talking about. Affluent whites of any stripe avoid contact with non-white people. Especially blacks. They accept white Hispanics and hence we have our Ted Cruz types and, to a lesser extent, people of Far Eastern descent but it's kind of hard to ignore how lopsided it is that it is overwhelmingly white conservative men marrying Asian or Asian-American women. Asian men are not welcome in that group. "We don't want you here but we'll take you women cuz they're hot and they prefer us anyway." Go ahead and deny that is the prevalent mode of thought. It's all over the internet. That doesn't make me weep for the poor little white conservative who have so tough. And if that is your idea of respectability, I want absolutely no part of it in my life. I will work hard to eradicate it from American life but it was how America "grew up" and it is ingrained and THAT is what this fight is all about. That and only that. White respectability is "We can do whatever we want, you do what we tell you to do." But WE'RE the elite???
Most white people feel a gut-level anxiety about "bad neighborhoods" and even those of us who want to fix the problem rather than to ghettoize it are queasy about our kids depending on "bad schools" for their education.
It has been precisely this misguided effort of white people that make the schools bad in the first place--for the minority schools and their own schools. The results are not hard to predict. American student do not perform well against other countries. Some whites say that if you remove non-white test scores, the scores would jump up significantly higher but this is not the case.
We have invented magnet schools (but in New York they have to face tough choices about allocating the places at them) and supportive ideology, but we have not yet shouldered the burden of lifting an entire generation of poor kids out of stressful, violent, unsteady lives to be in steady, supported jobs with a high standard of living.
We haven't shouldered the burden of lifting an entire generation of white middle class kids out of stressful and violent lives. Gun violence doesn't plague only black or Latino schools. And why can't we accomplish this? Golly geewhiz, it might be because the average white Joe conservative screams bloody murder whenever he feels his right to arm himself to the teeth is about to be curtailed. But it's WE who are the elites.
And of course high levels of immigration which followed NAFTA's undermining of labor-intensive Mexican agriculture, and high levels of job destruction following trade opening of the 90s, have taken away the sense that white people had a secure future to look forward to no matter how well people of color did or did not do.
This is just plain wrong and woefully uninformed. NAFTA didn't cause a rise in immigration--legal or illegal. Mexican immigration FELL because of NAFTA. Why? Because ny moving plants out of the US into Mexico, Mexicans could stay in Mexico and get work. Of course, Americans lost jobs when those plants moved. That's the trade-off: You want Mexicans out then give them jobs at home; if you want the plants to stay here then expect illegal immigration. This pont is lost on conservative whites. They want both. They want the plants to stay here with an elimination of illegal immigration from Mexico. You can't have that, white conservatives. Sorry. But do our politicians dare to tell them this? No. Only one actually did--George W. Bush. He told Americans to forget about stopping of outsourcing because it will never happen. But he was the conservative darling of that era and so they pretended that they didn't hear them. Imagine Obama telling them that. These politicians aren't even allowed to tell whites that they are not the only ones who lose jobs in economic downturns. Blacks lose them at FAR higher rates completely out of proportion to their numbers. Our entire system of policy-making is geared towards white conservatives but WE are the elites.
Evangelical religion still stands for respectability, most especially in the South. Kids who stay away from drugs and youthful sex, who do their homework and party under supervision, are often doing so because their families have no hesitation about endorsing this as godliness, and feel their kids' eternal soul is at stake as well as their ability to manage any community standing and to have opportunities to, say, get a bank loan. Abortion is a symbol of all that is wrong with modern culture, with its tattoos and designer drugs and hookup culture and emptiness. And it is a particularly ugly and dreadful symbol.
The abortion rate in the US is lower than the majority of countries in the world. Despite Roe v. Wade being the law of the land, the US has fewer abortions than anywhere else in the world. Look it up--I just did. What white conservatives object is the idea that this should be public. Abortion is fine as long as it's done in private and out of view (therefore out of mind) but when you have clinics where pregnants females can go to get safe and clean abortions--well--that's just unacceptable. It's breaking a taboo. If a person is walking down the street and suddenly has to take an urgent dump, they duck into an alley and let it go. They don't just pull their pants down, squat in the street and shit all over the sidewalk. That's how conservatives see abortion. Like taking a shit, it may be disgusting but everyone has to do it so just do it where we can't see it and everything is fine. If she made a mistake getting pregnant, let her fix it on her own. If you think rural areas of the country don't have a high rate of abortion in secret, you may want to read Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" where the issue is addressed meaning it must have been well-known to people of that period. But a major part of the national dialogue is arguing over abortion which is not even a problem because white conservatives want to make it a problem. But WE are the elite.
So along comes Trump (and Fox News) who excels at puncturing the staid, well-managed ways of the Politically Correct culture (see CNN). He does dog-whistles on immigration, and he stands for the traditional idea of masculinity and family hierarchy that both evangelical religion and the working class associate with respectability, so he looks like a pushback against chaotic individualist ideology and "anything goes" social anarchy. What Ph.D.'s tend to see as racist structures, the average working-class white family sees as bulwarks of the structures that support respectable ways.
I agree with this.
Liberals, from this perspective, understand nothing of real life, because they live in ivory towers of diversity claims, motivated by empty ideas about social justice that have nothing to do with the requirements of maintaining a sound and effective family life.
Well, that's so obviously silly. Liberals don't suffer?? Only conservatives suffer?? Do they think Donald Trump or the remaining Koch brother suffers more than a middle class liberal who fears he won't be able to retire even at 70? But WE are the elite.
So what are the implications of recognizing all this? How is a conversation about white privilege (or even global warming) possible with people who use rhetoric about the afterlife to repudiate elitist, totally unrealistic ideals?
You mean how is a conversation about white privilege and global warming possible with people have to politicize every fucking thing?? Oceans full of plastic? Libtard lies! Rainforest decimated? Libtards blaming the white man!! Honeybees going extinct? Who cares just some libtard weeping crocodile tears over something that doesn't matter and you won't get a penny of my tax dollars to study it!!!
I haven't seen much insightful discussion of the question.
Do you expect to?
I think we liberals are still using what are essentially hierarchical, dominationist tactics of moral superiority and educational superiority to try to impose our values top-down, and quite frequently avoiding the hard work of maintaining social structure, widely fostering economic opportunity and sharing the burdens of social justice.
Whoa!!! Wait wait wait wait!!! So liberals are the ones not maintaining the social structure??? Last time I looked, they weren't electing Donald Trump, they weren't killing initiatives to help the poor, they weren't calling destruction of the environment some tree-hugging faggot tax dollar hole, they weren't spreading guns into every nook and cranny of our social life and then vigorously defending the move despite the obvious fact that more guns is directly proportional to more violence.
Our goals of human rights may be salutary, but we haven't thought about a more reconciliation-oriented approach of persuasion and mutuality. In that sense I have more faith in the approach of Joe Biden or even Marianne Williamson than that of Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. Not because the latter fail to be morally correct, but because their favored means are not really in tune with the real challenges and the practical pressures at work.
I don't care who the dems nominate. Not because I'll vote for anyone to replace Trump even though I will but because reconciliation is not possible with people who threaten civil war is Trump doesn't get a second term. That is a threat to our democracy and way of life. It is un-American and I won't have it! And as long as they keep saying this stupid shit, we are done talking.
So one step forward would be more listening and more thoughtful integration of conservative values (and, to some extent, their flawed symbols).
In a word---NO!
Another would be to see resistance to social engineering as a sign of understanding of the ground-level realities, rather than just categorizing it instinctively as examples of the out-dated ideologies we oppose. Maybe that understanding is flawed and of course it is biased (because where you stand so often depends on where you sit) but it also reflects a lot of cold-eyed realism about facts that academics are isolated from.
Conservative academics are just as isolated if not more. Don't believe me? Listen to Jordan Peterson's unbelievable bullshit sometime. Beyond that, please speak in plain English because I cannot really understand you here. You rail against elites while you talk just like them. Explain that first sentence. I cannot make heads or tails of it and I know I'm not the only here that doesn't. You and Tulip both talk in this incomprehensible jumble of phrases that mark the very intellectual elite you are railing against. I'm not that smart of a person so please talk down to me.
Ultimately there has to be a change of heart among liberals. Instead of seeking moral purity for our country, which so often involves symbolic gestures and removing the splinter from someone else's eye, it means a lot of conscious surrender of privilege in the interest of improving the lives of the working class.
Huh?? You think conservative hate you liberals because you're too morally pure??? What privilege to liberals enjoy that conservatives don't?? And why do you seem to think that the working class is solely conservatives who, we must sympathize with and bend over backwards to help? I AM WORKING CLASS! A lot of leftists and liberals are totally working class. Last I looked, I wasn't living in some mansion. I did not go to an Ivy League school. Did you?? I joined the military as an enlisted grunt so I could put myself through college while I worked. And I started off in junior college not a university. I didn't even get a loan. I just worked. I eked out a degree in electrical engineering. No post-graduate studies, no Ph.D. for me. But I know a shitload of republicans where I work whose parents paid their way through college. I am so SICK of conservative self-pity. They need to shut up and get to work like everybody else. I get up at 5 fucking o'clock every week day and I'm currently doing 12 hours a day to help my company meet a deadline. Who do I blame for that? NOBODY!! I'm just glad to have a job. I don't want to hear anybody else's bellyaching bullshit.
Let those be negotiated with the working class. Fine. That is certainly a way of getting buy-in by those who have the hardest jobs to reach some calm, stable and effective mode of life. It's also a direct outgrowth of the kind of humility that is so missing in liberal ideology.
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Garbage.
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Re: Trump is not a joke

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DB Roy wrote:
Harry Marks wrote: This dynamic is still at play in, for example, Tucker Carlson's screeds about immigrants, which sometimes observe that affluent and well-educated liberals are also generally well-insulated from schools with high numbers of immigrants.
The same is true of affluent and well-educated conservatives.
Most definitely. But the conservatives are not, in general, advocating for integration.
DB Roy wrote: How many "poor" whites do you actually know? How many have black friends? What evidence can you offer that poor black kids are generally more ignorant than poor white kids? I see no evidence that this is in any true. The truth is, most whites do not have a single black friend whether the whites in question are rich or poor. They are conditioned from childhood not to.
Oh, I know lots of poor whites. I am the only one of four brothers to go to college. My cousins are, for the most part, working class. And I do interact with lots of people less educated than me, though I am not really part of the rental-apartments-and-food-pantry set that my family is full of. The evidence says that poor kids do badly in school, on average, and those are disproportionately people of color. Most certainly in the 60s and 70s, when integration was a battleground, the difference was pretty significant. But as I say, the working class white kids were often not much better educated and, as you say, that's still the case today.
DB Roy wrote: Affluent whites of any stripe avoid contact with non-white people. Especially blacks.
I don't think that is conscious and intentional, in many cases. There are people of color in our church and they are great people, but I wonder if black people who have never been to college would feel comfortable with the sermons, the music, the laid-back style, and the high-falutin theology where we go. The best take on this that I'm aware of is "tipping point" analysis, arguing that as long as a space is perceived as mostly white, white people are okay with some people of color being there, but when a critical mass of black people are present then the white folks don't know how to be ordinary with them, and discomfort takes over. For me it has something to do with ability to get an idea of the individual before I need to get beyond polite formalities - if I need to interact more personally without having gotten a sense of that person, then the worry of a cultural difference can be a real barrier in my head.
DB Roy wrote: That doesn't make me weep for the poor little white conservative who have so tough. And if that is your idea of respectability, I want absolutely no part of it in my life. I will work hard to eradicate it from American life but it was how America "grew up" and it is ingrained and THAT is what this fight is all about. That and only that. White respectability is "We can do whatever we want, you do what we tell you to do."
Yeah, I agree with you on that. I'm trying to reach across the empathy barrier, at least to some extent, and it makes sense to me that white evangelical ideas of respectability involve suppressing aggression ("Take this job and shove it") and sexual indulgence ("You picked a fine time to leave me, Lucille") to gradually work one's way to a middle class standing. For complicated reasons those are bound up with being "not black", and with the idea that some people are supposed to be the "help" and to occupy a lower social level that happens to include a lot of aggression and sexual indulgence. I think there is no excuse for maintaining those huge oversimplifcations, but it gives me some impression where the fault lines sit that can allow vast numbers of prejudiced white suburban housewives to also claim Oprah as their guru. And I would like to find entry points for conversation that might actually make a difference to some of these good people.
DB Roy wrote:It has been precisely this misguided effort of white people that make the schools bad in the first place--for the minority schools and their own schools. The results are not hard to predict. American student do not perform well against other countries. Some whites say that if you remove non-white test scores, the scores would jump up significantly higher but this is not the case.
In general I agree with this as well. There are huge parts of the culture of white folks that downplay education and have no concept of helping their kids get ready for college. As I say, there is a lot of it in my family.

I suspect that it would be true that U.S. test scores would be higher if black and Hispanic kids were left out, but for me that just tells us the effect of the oppression those groups have experienced. I teach quite a few Hispanic kids, and some of them are among the most brilliant, but a lot of them have very troubled home lives and very little vision of themselves as a college graduate, much less habits at home to keep them focused on that goal. The numbers are not good, and that is a problem for all of us.
DB Roy wrote:
we have not yet shouldered the burden of lifting an entire generation of poor kids out of stressful, violent, unsteady lives to be in steady, supported jobs with a high standard of living.
We haven't shouldered the burden of lifting an entire generation of white middle class kids out of stressful and violent lives. Gun violence doesn't plague only black or Latino schools. And why can't we accomplish this? Golly geewhiz, it might be because the average white Joe conservative screams bloody murder whenever he feels his right to arm himself to the teeth is about to be curtailed. But it's WE who are the elites.
Yes, you are exactly right here. Many white kids also have little idea of what college requires, and believe they can manage to have a comfortable life without a college degree. Unlike most European cultures, we do not have a cohesive sense that everyone will get a place in the economy and everyone needs to be looked after to an extent. They do not send everyone to college (I think the numbers are still a smaller proportion than for Americans) but they do have a conscious process of looking after the working class. However, where large numbers of non-white immigrants have come, they also have a problem of getting a decent place for them in the economy, and people of color suffer in nearly every European country.

Our Norwegian friends (we met in Africa) have shared the story of relatives who fell into drugs and dissolution. Some of that seems to be a given in life. But there was a time when America thought it could lift most people out of lives of frustration and abuse (when I mentioned violence I had in mind the way life went for the author of "Hillbilly Elegy", which had little to do with guns and a lot to do with fistfights.) Education made a huge difference, and continues to. My complaint against conservative whites is not so much their clinging to gun rights, which is bad enough, but their resistance to paying for schooling for non-white kids.
DB Roy wrote:
And of course high levels of immigration which followed NAFTA's undermining of labor-intensive Mexican agriculture, and high levels of job destruction following trade opening of the 90s, have taken away the sense that white people had a secure future to look forward to no matter how well people of color did or did not do.
This is just plain wrong and woefully uninformed. NAFTA didn't cause a rise in immigration--legal or illegal. Mexican immigration FELL because of NAFTA. Why? Because ny moving plants out of the US into Mexico, Mexicans could stay in Mexico and get work. Of course, Americans lost jobs when those plants moved. That's the trade-off: You want Mexicans out then give them jobs at home; if you want the plants to stay here then expect illegal immigration.
So, this article does a reasonable job of summarizing the effects.
https://www.newsweek.com/nafta-and-immi ... now-593325
The standard view is that first NAFTA caused large unemployment in the agricultural sector, which led to the peak of immigration from Mexico in 2005, and then the gradual increase in better jobs in the manufacturing sector began to play a more important role until now Mexico looks pretty prosperous. When our economy hit the wall in 2008 the net flow of migrants actually shifted toward more returns to Mexico than crossings into the U.S., but the troubles of Central America have continued to scare the Fox News types. NAFTA has actually lived up to the claims that were made that it would reduce immigration, but the initial effect was quite the opposite.
DB Roy wrote: These politicians aren't even allowed to tell whites that they are not the only ones who lose jobs in economic downturns. Blacks lose them at FAR higher rates completely out of proportion to their numbers. Our entire system of policy-making is geared towards white conservatives but WE are the elites.
Another excellent point. White fragility can be pretty astounding sometimes, but they are too fragile for anyone to point it out to them.
DB Roy wrote:The abortion rate in the US is lower than the majority of countries in the world. Despite Roe v. Wade being the law of the land, the US has fewer abortions than anywhere else in the world.
Interesting. I didn't know.
DB Roy wrote:What white conservatives object is the idea that this should be public. Abortion is fine as long as it's done in private and out of view (therefore out of mind) but when you have clinics where pregnants females can go to get safe and clean abortions--well--that's just unacceptable. It's breaking a taboo.
Okay, that's a totally new take on the issue, to me. I have heard before that the South has a code of honoring respectability mostly in the breach, like believing that drinking is wrong even while indulging to the hilt. Thanks for putting it on my radar screen with respect to abortion.
DB Roy wrote:You mean how is a conversation about white privilege and global warming possible with people have to politicize every fucking thing?? Oceans full of plastic? Libtard lies! Rainforest decimated? Libtards blaming the white man!! Honeybees going extinct? Who cares just some libtard weeping crocodile tears over something that doesn't matter and you won't get a penny of my tax dollars to study it!!!
Isn't that what I said? :roll: It feels to me a bit like talking to one of those really thin-skinned people who take everything as an insult. You can't discuss anything that matters without twisting yourself into a pretzel to avoid offending their pride. There's been a lot of discussion in the last five years about the Victim narrative used by Limbaugh, Fox News and Trump to play to this fragility.

However, this discussion started with me making an attempt to underline parts of the victim narrative that have a kernel of truth to them. I don't want to legitimize the claims to be victimized by the government, but I do want to get some thought going about how to address whatever complaints about elite neglect of the working class which might actually be subject to improvement. If those also led to better policies for working people of color, that would be all good. Less incarceration for drugs? Black, brown and white will all do better. More pre-school with adequate pay and facilities? Black, brown and white would all do better. Better mental health care? Black, brown and white will all do better.
DB Roy wrote:
I think we liberals are still using what are essentially hierarchical, dominationist tactics of moral superiority and educational superiority to try to impose our values top-down, and quite frequently avoiding the hard work of maintaining social structure, widely fostering economic opportunity and sharing the burdens of social justice.
Whoa!!! Wait wait wait wait!!! So liberals are the ones not maintaining the social structure??? Last time I looked, they weren't electing Donald Trump, they weren't killing initiatives to help the poor, they weren't calling destruction of the environment some tree-hugging faggot tax dollar hole, they weren't spreading guns into every nook and cranny of our social life and then vigorously defending the move despite the obvious fact that more guns is directly proportional to more violence.
So, if it is a question of who to blame, I get that the gun nuts and the fragile whites are more directly responsible. If that wasn't clear before Trump, it is now. But since when did correctly fixing the blame solve anything. Those of us with some degree of enlightenment are the ones who can have enough vision to imagine a whole different approach.
Just to give you an example, I recently ordered "Until We Reckon" about efforts to use restorative justice in place of incarceration. I haven't read it yet, but the writeup I saw about it gave me real hope that a patient, human approach can get us out of false dichotomies of toughness and laxness.
DB Roy wrote:Reconciliation is not possible with people who threaten civil war if Trump doesn't get a second term.
True, but there is a vast area of white middle class normality that reconciliation IS possible with. I have been astounded at the resistance to reality and to thoughtfulness in that group, these last three years, and I no longer feel confidence about overcoming the tribalism and reactionary racism, but I do feel hope.

There has, in fact, been huge progress in my lifetime. We won the argument about Obamacare and that was a big part of the 2018 re-taking of the House. So I hope for reconciliation, and I refuse to believe it is all about winning against them and not at all about winning them over.
DB Roy wrote:
Another would be to see resistance to social engineering as a sign of understanding of the ground-level realities, rather than just categorizing it instinctively as examples of the out-dated ideologies we oppose. Maybe that understanding is flawed and of course it is biased (because where you stand so often depends on where you sit) but it also reflects a lot of cold-eyed realism about facts that academics are isolated from.
please speak in plain English because I cannot really understand you here. You rail against elites while you talk just like them. Explain that first sentence. I cannot make heads or tails of it and I know I'm not the only here that doesn't. You and Tulip both talk in this incomprehensible jumble of phrases that mark the very intellectual elite you are railing against. I'm not that smart of a person so please talk down to me.
Okay, another good point. Look, pontificating comes naturally to me. Often I am making the argument in my head, just to me, and I apologize for not thinking in terms of other people trying to read the stuff.

So, what I was trying to say is that academics can be pretty far out of touch. You agreed, pointing out that conservative academics are usually even worse, and I would agree with that. But academics are also convinced that their view is the only right one (I might be a little bit of an academic myself) and forget to listen and take stock of the problems with their views. I think the great experiment of Communism is a good example - there are still lots of Marxists out there who will deny that Stalinist and Maoist horrors had anything to do with an ideology that tried to deny human nature. (I know a few). When it comes to race we have to think deeper than just outlawing racism - waving a magic wand doesn't make racism go away, and passing a law doesn't make people treat other people fairly.

The first sentence was "Another would be to see resistance to social engineering as a sign of understanding of the ground-level realities, rather than just categorizing it instinctively as examples of the out-dated ideologies we oppose." Breaking that down into English, what I was saying was that social engineering such as busing for school integration was too top-down and too simplistic. The white people who ended up moving to the suburbs, putting their kids in private schools, etc. if they could afford it, were not just a bunch of reactionary imbeciles. Sure, they had a lot of deep-seated racism, but because judges and "experts" concluded that was the whole problem, and just bulldozed over their objections, the problem stayed almost as bad as when segregation was the law. If we can't imagine our way into their shoes (say, because we already live in the suburbs), then part of the reality is going to go unrecognized.
DB Roy wrote:
Ultimately there has to be a change of heart among liberals. Instead of seeking moral purity for our country, which so often involves symbolic gestures and removing the splinter from someone else's eye, it means a lot of conscious surrender of privilege in the interest of improving the lives of the working class.
Huh?? You think conservative hate you liberals because you're too morally pure??? What privilege to liberals enjoy that conservatives don't?? And why do you seem to think that the working class is solely conservatives who, we must sympathize with and bend over backwards to help? I AM WORKING CLASS! A lot of leftists and liberals are totally working class. Last I looked, I wasn't living in some mansion.

Well, I think a lot of conservatives think liberals believe themselves to be morally superior, and consider us hypocrites for it. The abortion issue has become the great shield - "we may have our issues, but at least we don't make murder legal by accepting abortion." I have heard working class conservatives who had abortions, or paid for them, denounce liberals for accepting it. That's kind of the point you were making about their being just as likely to actually have them, I guess.

I don't think leftists and liberals are all college educated. I think staying in touch with the working class is critical to realism for progressives, and I'm glad you are in the conversation, calling bullshit rather than pontificating. But I know lots of academics, and I do think they are often arrogant and unwilling to listen, and lots of middle class whites (and blacks and Hispanics) who feel besieged trying to maintain standards in their lives. Conservatives often have a point when they feel their legitimate values are being dissed.
DB Roy wrote:I did not go to an Ivy League school. Did you?? I joined the military as an enlisted grunt so I could put myself through college while I worked. And I started off in junior college not a university. I didn't even get a loan. I just worked. I eked out a degree in electrical engineering. No post-graduate studies, no Ph.D. for me.
I went to state universities for undergrad, and got by with little income in grad school, again at a state university. My Dad drove bus for a living.
DB Roy wrote: But I know a shitload of republicans where I work whose parents paid their way through college. I am so SICK of conservative self-pity.
I'm mostly sick of the people who play it for political mileage. Most of the conservatives I know have a very independent, self-reliant view of life, but they often drop that when it comes to politics. Because Fox News tells them how mistreated they are, and that feels better than just thinking things through.
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