POLITICS SCHMALITICS

[pfife]

9 hours ago, Archie said:

Good lord you're delusional.  

Im going to take a break from this socialist oasis for a while.  

your loss chief

[CMRivdogs]

Oasis definition 

something that provides refuge, relief, or pleasant contrast

 

[chasfh]

12 hours ago, gehringer_2 said:

They like an America that existed in their heads but never actually did in reality.

Right. Like just about any other myth, parts of it are sort of true, which they’ve glossed to a bright shine, and the rest of it they just made up to round out the story.

[chasfh]

12 hours ago, Edman85 said:

I've probably moved to the center not the left.

I've voted for Republicans as recently as down ballot 2016. I don't embrace a lot of the left wing ideology, but Trump's emergence and the loons in his wake have exposed a lot of the right wing ideology as fraudulent. I like to call out nonsense on all sides, since irrational polarization is at the core of our problems right now.

What you say is absolutely right, and I also find it interesting how, just as Republican ideology is increasingly being revealed to be wearing no clothes, those same people are homing in on polarization along people in America as a big problem, which they never cared about before, and one that, of course, was created by teh left. All very sweet, isn’t it?

[chasfh]

11 hours ago, Mr.TaterSalad said:

If it were George Wallace running instead of Trump, MAGA would rally behind Wallace and his grievance brand of racial politics just as they have with Trump. Make America Great Again really means Make Power Structures of America Fall Under Total White Control Again. Sure, they'll vote for a John James, Tim Scott, Marco Rubio, or JC Watts when it suits their cause. But by and large, they are frustrated as white people that they don't control major power structures like they did and they see their white, Christian grip on America slipping. Make America Great Again runs along the same lines as Wallace's Stand Up For America. Wallace didn't want to integrate schools, Trump and his father didn't want to integrate his apartment units. Segregation, nonetheless.

Not for nothing, Ronald Reagan also wanted to Make America Great Again™.

[Tiger337]

On 1/29/2022 at 5:29 PM, CMRivdogs said:

 

As long as you continue to look the other way when capitalists employ them, it shouldn't be a problem.  

 

[pfife]

I hope Debbie Dingell sponsors legislation relocating migrants to my town.

[Tiger337]

4 minutes ago, chasfh said:

Not for nothing, Ronald Reagan also wanted to Make America Great Again™.

Every president wants to make America great.  At least that's what they say. America is already great for those who become presidents and that is their main concern.  

[Tiger337]

On 1/31/2022 at 10:00 AM, Archie said:

You are right it is my loss and every American citizens loss they let these illegal invaders remain in the US to spread disease and commit crimes.  All should be sent back until they come in legally.  So many Americans are required to have covid vax but illegals coming across southern border get a pass. How come?

Is that what your ancestors did?  Spread disease and commit crimes?

[CMRivdogs]

12 hours ago, Mr.TaterSalad said:

If it were George Wallace running instead of Trump, MAGA would rally behind Wallace and his grievance brand of racial politics just as they have with Trump. Make America Great Again really means Make Power Structures of America Fall Under Total White Control Again. Sure, they'll vote for a John James, Tim Scott, Marco Rubio, or JC Watts when it suits their cause. But by and large, they are frustrated as white people that they don't control major power structures like they did and they see their white, Christian grip on America slipping. Make America Great Again runs along the same lines as Wallace's Stand Up For America. Wallace didn't want to integrate schools, Trump and his father didn't want to integrate his apartment units. Segregation, nonetheless.

I've been wading thru a book written by James Michener about how close we came to a Constitutional Crisis in 1968. There was fear that Wallace would garner enough EC votes to throw the election to the House. Each party feared the other party would make a deal with the Wallace electors to gain enough votes to win the election.

He was a elector in 1968, no qualifications, just a party hack as he put it. There was a big snowstorm in Eastern Pennsylvania the day the electors were to meet to cast votes. They were pulling guys off the street in order to cast the vote. 

[chasfh]

12 hours ago, Mr.TaterSalad said:

What burns me is when someone who flies a confederate flag and gets angry when statues of Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee come down has the audacity to say to me as a progressive, left wing American that I am not patriotic. You don't get to fly the flag of successionist losers on one end and then tell me I am un-American and don't love my country on the other end. They are serious about it too and see no irony in what they say or do. It is completely lost on them. I don't love America to the point that I lose all sight of its racist, oppressive past.

It makes sense to me that many people don’t believe Confederate ideas and iconography are treasonous or even disloyal because about 100 years ago, i.e., about 50 years after the war between the states, there was a big national reconciliation between the southern states and the northern states.

A lot of people recognized that the generation that fought that war was dying off, so people wanted to honor them on the way out. There were parades all over the country featuring veterans of both sides, and the sense that everyone (or at least every white one) is really on the same side, America’s side, after all. That idea was cemented by everyone fighting together against European enemies in the First World War. The South was rehabilitated as a vital part of America with a beautiful antebellum past to cherish and celebrate in cultural touchstones such as books, music, and movies. And, of course, to mobilize against a common enemy of their own making.

All that peculiar thinking has been passed down through the generations and, as we can see, still persists today in a form much stronger then one might presume, considering it’s been over 100 years since the rehabilitation got under way.

I believe this is a big reason many people see no problem with conflating the confederate flag  with American ideals. In a lot of ways, the Confederate States was the United States, albeit with a stronger slavery institution.

Edited February 2, 2022 by chasfh

[chasfh]

10 minutes ago, Tiger337 said:

Every president wants to make America great.  At least that's what they say. America is already great for those who become presidents and that is their main concern.  

You’re totally right, every president wants to make America great. I would simply stipulate that making America great is a very different concept from Making America Great Again.

[Tiger337]

4 minutes ago, chasfh said:

You’re totally right, every president wants to make America great. I would simply stipulate that making America great is a very different concept from Making America Great Again.

Yes, making America great again is a negative viewpoint as it suggests that America is not already great.  

[chasfh]

1 minute ago, Tiger337 said:

Yes, making America great again is a negative viewpoint as it suggests that America is not already great.  

Right, and also, that it was great once in some gauzy lace curtain past framed by Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver, an America that never really existed for any but a very few, but that strongly animates the imagination of a lot of people who are essentially afraid of the present and the future.

[Mr.TaterSalad]

2 hours ago, chasfh said:

Not for nothing, Ronald Reagan also wanted to Make America Great Again™.

Ronald Reagan was also a noted racist. His conversation with Nixon bears this out.

[buddha]

13 hours ago, pfife said:

I moved from really left to a little less left than I was previously but probably not substantially.

what subjects are you a little less left on?

[chasfh]

The irony … it burns …

So, like, wasn’t the whole idea behind crypto to free money from the yoke of oppressive government stewardship and the tyranny of their stabilizing influence on fiat currency?

[oblong]

It’s all bullshit. But the cats out of the bag and too many super rich people are involved for it to go away. No way in hell they lose out. 

[Tiger337]

A good article by one of my favorite writers (no paywall)

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/02/opinion/tara-westover-educated-student-debt.html

 

 

[gehringer_2]

14 minutes ago, Tiger337 said:

A good article by one of my favorite writers (no paywall)

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/02/opinion/tara-westover-educated-student-debt.html

 

 

I think this is something too many older people don't realize has happened. They probably still think of college economics being what they were when 'working your way through' just meant missing a few parties or passing on IM sports.

[gehringer_2]

48 minutes ago, oblong said:

It’s all bullshit. But the cats out of the bag and too many super rich people are involved for it to go away. No way in hell they lose out. 

I'll be interested to see what Increases in interest rates do to bitcoin. It's proven itself too unstable to actually use as a practical payment currency, and since it is an investment that has not associated income stream with it, it will become ever more counterproductive to hold it in a higher interest rate environment where rising stocks are not bidding up all investments regardless of their return potential.

[Motown Bombers]

The Beto campaign just need to use the old Motel 6 slogan we'll keep the light on. 

 

[Tigeraholic1]

Never forget

 

[gehringer_2]

Excerpted from Jamelle Bouie of the NYT on Whoopi Goldberg's recent 'misstep''

Interesting observation that 'race' doesn't even need to be real for 'racism' to be. A bit counter-intuitive but spot on. 

Quote

If you missed Goldberg’s comments, here is the gist: On Monday, while discussing the Tennessee school board that voted to remove Art Spiegelman’s serialized graphic novel “Maus” from its eighth-grade curriculum, Goldberg claimed that the Holocaust “was not about race” and, in a subsequent appearance on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” said that “the Nazis were white people, and most of the people they were attacking were white people.”

Writing for The Atlantic, my friend Adam Serwer argues that Goldberg’s comments weren’t an act of antisemitism as much as they were an instance of ignorance and American parochialism about race. “I regard her remarks not as malicious,” he writes, “but as an ignorant projection of that American conception onto circumstances to which it does not apply.”

What is true, Serwer says, is that “the Nazi Holocaust in Europe and slavery and Jim Crow in the United States are outgrowths of the same ideology — the belief that human beings can be delineated into categories that share immutable biological traits distinguishing them from one another and determining their potential and behavior.” Nazi antisemitism may not have been based on a “color line” like the one that defined anti-Black racism in the United States, but it was based on a racial conception of humanity all the same.

From there, Serwer uses the work of the scholars Barbara and Karen Fields to give a succinct and compelling account of what race is:

“Race is not an idea but an ideology. It came into existence at a discernible historical moment for rationally understandable historical reasons,” the Fieldses write, “and is subject to change for similar reasons.” It is not necessary for race to be real for racism to be real. It is only necessary that people believe race to be real. When people act on fictions, those actions have repercussions even if the underlying belief is false — even if the people know that the underlying belief they are acting on is false.

I think this is right. I also think it’s worth saying a little about the history and purpose of race, meaning its function in the modern world. For this, I’m going to draw from Cedric Robinson, a political theorist who wrote extensively (and influentially) on the historical development of race and racism. In his 1983 book, “Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition,” Robinson makes two claims that are relevant to our analysis.

The first concerns the development of capitalism in early modern Europe: “The bourgeoisie that led the development of capitalism were drawn from particular ethnic and cultural groups; the European proletariats and the mercenaries of the leading states from others; its peasants from still other cultures; and its slaves from entirely different worlds.”

Robinson continues:

The tendency of European civilization through capitalism was thus not to homogenize but to differentiate — to exaggerate regional, subcultural, and dialectical differences into “racial” ones. As the Slavs became the natural slaves, the racially inferior stock for domination and exploitation during the early Middle Ages, as the Tartars came to occupy a similar position in the Italian cities of the late Middle Ages, so at the systemic interlocking of capitalism in the sixteenth century, the peoples of the Third World began to fill this expanding category of a civilization reproduced by capitalism.

The second claim is related to the first. “The contrasts of wealth and power between labor, capital, and the middle classes had become too stark to sustain the continued maintenance of privileged classes at home and the support of the engines of capitalist domination abroad,” Robinson writes. “Race became largely the rationalization for the domination, exploitation, and/or extermination of non-‘Europeans’ (including Slavs and Jews).”

The basic point, in short, is that the ideology of race emerges out of a prior, feudal world of European “racialism,” in which exploited laborers were assigned a lower order of humanity. (The paradigmatic example, for Robinson, is the subjugation and colonization of Ireland by the English ruling classes.) Meant to make existing hierarchies and social organizations seem natural, this racialism takes on new shape, and attains new function, in the context of European encounters with Indigenous Americans and enslaved Africans by way of capital accumulation in the “New World.” There, it evolves into racism and an ideology of “race,” as skin color and phenotype replace religion and national origin as differences that can be weaponized for the sake of theft, exploitation and expropriation.

If race is so persistent a concept, if it’s so malleable and adaptable over time, it’s because it still serves its original purpose: to naturalize inequality and the domination of one group, or one class, over another. 

 

[buddha]

11 hours ago, gehringer_2 said:

Excerpted from Jamelle Bouie of the NYT on Whoopi Goldberg's recent 'misstep''

Interesting observation that 'race' doesn't even need to be real for 'racism' to be. A bit counter-intuitive but spot on. 

 

people have found ways to demonize "the other" for as long as human beings have existed.  every culture does it.  europeans just gave it the name "race."