This judicial ruling about the raging debates over group-based benefits vividly highlights the social, political and culture divisions driving U.S. politics.
when I started reading this, I was thinking "what's his point, which side is he taking?"
I realized after reading through to the end, that this is what old-school reporting used to look like at places like "The New York Times, a former newspaper."
He extracts the key points that judges on both sides of the argument made, and presented them cogently.
Leaving his opinion to the end : 'this is just the start.'
I do have a beef about folks when they say "the pandemic caused businesses to be shut down." The state - not the virus - made decisions to shut down businesses. They designated certain businesses as 'essential,' with little exposure into the decision making process.
In my state, the gov decided that the state run alcohol stores were 'essential.' But not locally run bike shops which'd have tuned up old bikes, gotten folks outside and exercising.
IT's easier to squeeze Amazon, Target, WalMart and other big boxes than asking for donations from tens of thousands of small businesses who don't give huge $ to political candidates. Target's revenue was up nearly 50% last year.
I don't begrudge them for making hay, but Governor Walz should have to account for the thousands of dead businesses in MN that he killed, let alone the 6000 dead Minnesotans, most of whom died in nursing homes that he himself had full authority over.
There's a reason why Amazon, Walmart, Bezos etc are all pushing for $15 minimum wage and leftists are too naive to see the long game. They think Amazon, Walmart are pushing for it because they really care about the poor workers lol. No, it's because that's an easy way for them to get rid of small business competition and undervalue the skillset of those who were previously making $15 and get the value of their work cut in half overnight.
To a large degree you're right. But if states had implemented better minimum wages to begin with this might not even be a topic of discussion. Cost of living is lower in some areas, but Amazon/WalMart/Target penetrate them ALL. Hence they are still stealing labor from small mom'n pop SBs even in remote/rural areas. Nothing in your comment addresses that issue just like nothing in the GOP's platform dating back to when WalMart shut down 90% of small town America's small businesses starting in the mid 90s. Something has to be done and states aren't doing it. What is the right's solution to this? Allowing "the free market" to decide is exactly what sent all the manufacturing (and tech) jobs overseas and allowed the big box chains to ruin small town America. Again, what's your answer?
The jobs wouldn't have been "sent" overseas, if it hadn't been "allowed" in the first place. Our government has been in the enthrall of global corporations since the end of the Cold War. They all want their invites to Davos.
Good points all. In my state (CA) - specifically LA county (where, thankfully I do not live) outdoor restaurant dining was banned, but outdoor dining on location movie sets was okay. Tell that wasn't a political decision made for the privileged folks.
You mean the socialist Sweden that went broke when it ran out of other people's money and reinvented itself as a capitalist economy. The Sweden that decided to let individual choice determine response to Covid instead of govt lockdowns in most other "democratic" western states?
"Sweden is a competitive and highly liberalized, open market economy. The vast majority of Swedish enterprises are privately owned and market-oriented, combined with a strong welfare state involving transfer payments involving up to three-fifths of GDP.[28][29] In 2014 the percent of national wealth owned by the government was 24%.[30]
Due to Sweden being a neutral country that did not actively participate in World War II, it did not have to rebuild its economic base, banking system, and country as a whole, as did many other European countries. Sweden has achieved a high standard of living under a mixed system of high-tech capitalism and extensive welfare benefits. Sweden has the second highest total tax revenue behind Denmark, as a share of the country's income. As of 2012, total tax revenue was 44.2% of GDP, down from 48.3% in 2006"
Here in the USA that would be called "socialism" by a lot of brainwashed fools.
That last one is an area where I found the Swedish example especially instructive. They did not wear masks and left all their businesses open, but despite that had a 90% drop in business.
I actually did not support the quarantine, (I do support non government mandated masks and vaccines) but I find it fascinating that when people don't feel safe they self quarantine. It should have been obvious, but since where I live it was required the debate was all about the requirement, but what the effect of Covid-19 would be on business even without a mandate.
Totally hypothetical at this point but I think people would’ve gotten over the fear as other people who weren’t afraid kept going on with their lives and did go out. Without the lockdown mandates, I think it’s very possible fewer people would’ve resolved to just sit in front of their TVs/social media where they were absolutely assaulted with fear & panic, and as a result they would’ve been much more receptive to the notion that the sky didn’t fall.
Apparently Democrats greatly overestimate the odds of getting sick from COVID and the percentage needing hospitalization. I find it interesting to compare the US to various countries in Europe and the UK, where I have family and friends and follow their news closely. Because the COVID news wasn't driven by partisan hysteria, while people wore masks when asked and in required areas, they were also very quick to stop wearing them when it wasn't necessary. By contrast, in the US even vaccinated people deem it morally right to keep wearing masks because its for the "good of society", adding an entire political-moral-virtue signaling dimension to the COVID pandemic that doesn't really exist in other countries.
Put it this way, when people got upset that COVID cases and deaths sharply plunged in Texas after the governor ended the mask mandates, we know there is a problem.
I usually get the argument that Sweden has a relatively small population when the subject is social safety nets and M4A, but their COVID approach didn't work out too well for a lot of people, relatively speaking with population considered (about the same population in a nation the size of Houston or LA - or even smaller). So which is it?
Not to confuse you with the facts, but as of 6/11/2021, deaths (the only meaningful Covid statistic) per 1 million population: New York 2,766 Texas 1,796 Sweden 1,431
Are you a bigot towards atheists? (From previous excellent posts, I don't believe you are, M. Charles. Just pointing out here that one atheist's denigration of another's beliefs should not tar-and-feather other atheists, who have absolute respect for differing beliefs. My problem with atheists is they tend to be Authoritarian Socialists.)
Translation: You prefer authoritarian corporate capitalists and their cronies in power. Definitely NOT labor or the average, ya know, little guy like most of us are.
I tend to not bother engaging with atheists, but Sevender's comment seemed judgmental. I imagine he supposes MountainMan is Christian and he either dislikes Christians or anyone who doesn't believe in the disproven theory of spontaneous generation. I'm a Taoist, myself; so I guess I don't really care.
No, I think he means the formerly socialist Sweden that now has a "mixed economy", which is what the vast majority of American "socialists" really want - kind of like a return to our own system in the 50s and 60s, but with universal healthcare and improvements in access to education. Regardless that it's a mixed capitalist economy, what most indoctrinated Americans would say if they were to look at Sweden is that it's "socialist" (despite the fact that it isn't by European standards). Free universal healthcare, a strong social safety net, relatively high taxes, free education (mix of private and public), etc. Do you disagree with that opinion?
Even though Sweden's school system is often called 'private' (also called 'free') it's still 100% taxpayer funded through universal vouchers, and there are in fact still government (local) run schools. Forgive me for getting down in the weeds on this, but I research education, so that's one area I'm particularly interested in.
The jury's still out on whether their system works, but in some areas there have been declines - say, math fluency.
"In 2000, Swedish students performed well-above average on an international test called the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). By 2012, they were below average in math, reading and science. Sweden had the steepest decline of any participating country over that time period. (There were 65 participating countries that year.) In 2015, the scores rose to meet international averages, but Sweden’s performance remains far below what it once was. The drop has prompted a flurry of debate in the country about what led to the decline and whether the growth of free schools is to blame."
Back to that country's handling of the COVID pandemic, one must keep in mind the nature of their healthcare system. It's a de-centralized, but still universal and mostly taxpayer funded system that provides excellent preventive and specialty medicine. This is another topic on which the jury is still out, but Sweden was likely factoring in the broad reach and free availability to all Swedes of access to medical care if needed due to COVID. The other factor was likely the unique mix of libertarian attitudes and the collective belief that one's fellow citizen would do what's "right" to stop the spread. Such implicit trust in both the government (both regional and national) and one's fellow citizens doesn't exist in the USA like it does in Sweden. And trust me, I know I'm sounding like a broken record here, but again the jury's still out on how successful their policies (or lack thereof) have been. They did (perhaps still do) have one of the highest infection rates in the EU.
Sucks that there's no edit feature on Substack. What I meant to say was highest infection rates in the Scandinavian countries, but still lower than many EU countries who *did* implement lockdowns of various sorts. Hence, my third use of "the jury's still out" on how well it really worked.
"Infection rates" is a meaningless statistic because it is driven among other things by testing. More tests = higher infection rate, all else being equal.
Although still subject to error (intentional and unintentional), "deaths per 1 million" is a much more meaningful statistic. As of 6/11/2021, deaths per 1 million population: New York 2,766 Italy 2,101 UK 1,874 USA 1,845 Texas 1,796 France 1,686 Sweden 1,431 Germany1,075
Sweden’s HDI value for 2019 is 0.945— which puts the country in the very high human development category—positioning it at 7 out of 189 countries and territories. The US is in spot 17. I have never been to Sweden but traveled extensively in the US. I am surprised the US is even in spot 17.
Scandinavian countries: super low population, super low corporate income tax, super high personal income tax of 60% for anyone making 1.3x average income of $60k, 25% sales tax on everything, homogenous population with limited immigration, rich with oil extraction, relies on USA for defence. Sweden never shut down businesses for COVID.
Leftists proposal: super high corporate income tax, lower personal income tax, "what do you mean I need to pay sales tax!!!???", SHUT DOWN ALL BUSINESSES OR YOU WILL KILL MY GRANDMA, no fossil fuels, open borders where no one is illegal, illegals get free shit in a country with 35x the population, shut down defence.
> "Scandinavian countries tend to levy top personal income tax rates on (upper) middle-class earners, not just high-income taxpayers. For example, in Denmark the top statutory personal income tax rate of 55.9 percent applies to all income over 1.3 times the average income. From the American perspective, this means that all income over $65,000 (1.3 times the average U.S. income of about $50,000) would be taxed at 55.9 percent."
> "However, depending on the structure, a VAT can be a regressive tax because it falls more on those that consume a larger share of their income, which tend to be lower-income earners."
> "While Scandinavian countries raise a lot of revenue from individuals through the income tax, social security contributions, and the VAT, corporate income taxes—as in the United States—play a less significant role in terms of revenue. All Scandinavian countries’ corporate income tax rates are lower than the United States’ rate."
Ive actually been to Sweden, have you? Stockholm is a nice place but there are still homeless people sleeping in those incredible streets just a few blocks from the statue of Gustav
This is what I don't understand about "leftists". I come from one of those South Asian countries where girls and women are advised not to go out alone at night. It's fucking unsafe, I know how fucked up things are there. Yet leftists who claim to care about "women" don't want any limits or background checks and are pro illegal immigration.
Remember when Trump mentioned 1/3rd of the migrant women in the caravans are sexually abused on their way to the border and media "fact checkers" said false because 1/3rd implies 33% when the real number is 32%?
Maybe because they are not real lefties, but a billionaire-financed cosplay lefties? A real lefty knows that uncontrolled immigration benefits the capitalists because it depresses the cost of labor plus injects strife between the workers to they fight each other instead of those who exploit them. Nothing exactly new there, even Karl Marx wrote about it in those terms. Also immigration breaks down social solidarity - another useful feature exploited by those who find social democracy and social safety net too much drag on possible neoliberal profits. The uncontrolled immigration into former social democratic strongholds in North Europe and Germany for example caused much damage to fabled social safety nets there, which benefitted the richest.
Pretty easy to see why the DNC supports illegals. They win elections with them. And with state elections for big states like CA comes national legislating abilities.
"In my state, the gov decided that the state run alcohol stores were 'essential.' But not locally run bike shops which'd have tuned up old bikes, gotten folks outside and exercising."
I never understood this. Does the owner of the bike shop not have a family to support?
It always makes me uncomfortable when government starts identifying some people as essential and other as not essential. That never ends well.
"Uncomfortable"? Like when some goon is about to apply some "pressure"? What you describe SHOULD be scaring Americans beyond belief.
NO private-sector paying work is un-essential. MOST public-sector work IS, including,of course, the choosing of winners and losers in the labor/owner marketplace.
100% this. Only thing anyone could have done differently is told people to take this opportunity to get healthy and start working out, losing weight and eating healthy, avoid smoking etc. But that would be called fatphobia and offensive in today's "big & beautiful" world. This is even more crazy in places with socialized medicine - where everyone pays into everyone else but is not allowed to present criticisms.
The executive orders from governors are what closed businesses. I know this for a fact because half the businesses in my area have big fucking signs up saying it and showing the order.
The government had to be shut down, no FOIA requests were processed for example, but the UFO departments at the pentagon and FBI were operational and declaring UFO's real.
The state of Illinois had just made pot legal, so all the new pot shops (owned by political class) had to remain open as essential, but churches had to be closed.
These "relief" checks are literally the crutches the government hands out after it breaks your legs.
The bigoted rhetoric of Judge Donald is a perfect example of why the door to unconstitutional bigotry and racism should never have been opened in the first place via affirmative action. The cancerous notion that we should judge people differently based on the color of their skin is something that every decent, moral person should reject and abhor. The fraying fabric of our society is destined to be completely torn apart as more racists and woke zealots, like Judge Donald, find their way into positions of power.
It's why the chosen leaders in any Institution that purport to have Moral Authority with their constituents need to have a clear and convincing passion towards staying focused on their True North.
Once you get sucked off your perch at the top of the mountain by miscreants and malcontents, there's only one place to go.
Down..down..down.
We'll see if any of them are capable to stopping the free fall and finding their way to the top of the mountain again.
Watching Big Tech suck the hind teet of Joe Biden is rather disturbing in a number of ways.
I think the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment would take care of just about all of these programs, ultimately. Let the Left hem and haw about amending that out of the Constitution for once.
"nor shall any State ... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws"
I agree with your point. Judge Donald's argument was not well-reasoned.
There remains the question of how to address systemic racism, which has caused tremendous suffering in the U.S. (and elsewhere). "Reverse racism" won't work. Ending racism would seem to require morally elevating the human species as a whole, but how on earth can that be achieved? We seem to be moving in the wrong direction.
>There remains the question of how to address systemic racism, which has caused tremendous suffering in the U.S. (and elsewhere).
There remains the question of whether in 2021 "systemic racism" exists in the USA. Many, including myself, would argue that it hasn't existed for ~60 years when the last Jim Crow laws were purged from the books. All sorts of people have been left behind in our crony capitalist system. Trying to lump these people together into arbitrarily created groups and pretending that the plight of one poor suffering person is worse than the plight of another poor suffering person because of some "historical injustice" is worse than useless, its counterproductive. We as a people and as a society should strive to truly be "color blind" - the opposite of what race baiters and identity fetishists making up the racist "antiracist" movement seek. We should implement universal programs that offer aid and assistance to all people in need, no matter what circumstances landed them in dire straights or what their skin tone. By definition, class-based assistance will disproportionately benefit those who suffer the lingering effects of "historical injustices" - along with everyone else in need of aid.
I have been screaming this since Floyd was killed and everyone started saying lets defund the police. You want to stop people from getting killed by the police? end the goddamn war on drugs! My god American's have given away almost all of the protections afforded by the 4th Amendment in the name of stopping drug use along with billions, probably trillions, of tax dollars to incarcerate people. Humans have been using drugs since the dawn of man and I find it highly doubtful that Biden's drug czar, what a title, who wouldn't want to be a Czar?, will be the one to end it but he and his cronies will surely profit from it. An ounce of pure heroin's street value greatly exceeds the price for an ounce of gold, if drugs were legal that price would drop, why legalize what is effectively very pricey gold that you can farm year after year?
A few years ago I had the pleasure of seeing Wes Moore speak on a couple of occasions, about a year apart. At the second event, I had the opportunity to meet and speak briefly with him. He is a very impressive person. Not once in those two speeches did Mr. Moore ever utter the words "systemic racism". In fact, he felt the issue needing to be addressed was a lack of "social capital" among certain ethnicities.
I agree with what you just wrote, in case that wasn't clear from my previous comments. With one exception, though - I do believe there is still systemic racism against black people and other groups in the U.S., though not in the sense of it being codified in law. That's not to say that the situation isn't better than it was sixty years ago in some ways.
On the other hand, the Biden policy that's the topic of this article is an example of systemic racism that was codified in law (or policy).
If you look at it from the perspective of 1% - it is extremely productive. Creation of arbitrary groups, handing them this or that token favor, pitting them against each other is exactly what they want to prevent any sort of solidarity that would challenge them down the line. It can come down even to simple mundane electoral policy - it is difficult to envision a political candidate today who could cross much of these imposed race/identity lines - unless of course an empty suit candidate with nothing but platitudes sold heavily by MSM.
That is all by design - creation of arbitrary groups some of which get more or less "candy" from the ruling class, and pitting them one against the other is the goal. The more such arbitrary groups can be created the better. Even the pretense is sometimes enough to create animosity. The latest example is talk about "reparations" - a completely bogus, unfair and illegal idea, yet it works so well to split poor / working class Blacks from everybody else.
I keep wanting to know what we are talking about with the word "minority".
Do we mean globally? Because last I checked, Asians were the majority there.
Do we mean within a country? Not all countries are majority white, are they systemically racist towards every other race then?
Do we mean within a state? Look at CA and lets talk racial makeup.
How about within a county or city? In the Bay Area go look at the racial makeup there and tell me who the majority is?
How about at a company? When I worked at a Korean company I was one of 4 non-asians there.
Just want to be sure we are setting baselines and rules here for what minority fucking means.
I know one minority for sure that no one can dispute. Only white males have given up their power and asked for more diversity. We have NEVER seen that in any of the other countries around the world.
No one is clamoring for mixed-race Koreans to be better represented in Korea. No one is bitching that more white people aren't in charge in Nigeria.
just want to make sure we are all on the same page here
That's certainly not my definition. I interpret the term in a straightforward way. As one example, I consider the Biden policy discussed in this article to be racist, whatever his administration's motivations may have been.
A dirty secret of systemic racism is that it doesn't exist with first generation African immigrants. Every year there is some story about the half dozen kids that got admitted to every ivy league school and it's always the same story. Nigeria, Ghana, Zimbabwe...never Philadelphia, Baltimore, Detroit.
We need to find a new term. I agree with you there is systemic racism, but people always assume I mean it in some weird woke way I did not intend so I now avoid the term, but it would be good to have something.
Affirmative action initially meant that firms and colleges need to act affirmatively to reach out to minority candidates to expand the size of the talent pool. Everybody could agree with that. Today, affirmative action means racial preferences; few can agree with that.
Combined with the dogma that leads to 1,000 word memorized response whenever a word triggers someone and it's a wonder we can still communicate at all.
The current administration and its followers has divided our people and, every other word that comes out of Washington is “racism”. It’s more exhausting as was Trumps flamboyant behavior yet not one Republican has the courage to criticize them in a big way. I often wonder if this 6T new infrastructure bill will include a Gulag. After all, it will be cheaper to beat the opposition into submission and get a cheap labor.
She is part of the Elite. So are the Obamas. So are the Clintons. So is anyone who went to an elite law school or rose to the very top of the federal Civil service. These programs are quite lucrative for those members of the Elite who come from the appropriate minority populations. These programs don't help the less connected members of those same minority populations.
Shouldn’t we define systemic first. The system is racist. Which system. Economics, cultural, political? The whole thing. The US. NATO, the world? Is there any part of the system, however you define that, that isn’t racist? Is the system human created? Is it autonomous? I really don’t think that term can be refined so everyone understands it the same way. And if people are talking in different languages (believing only their definition of the word) then no one can build a consensus and resolve any problems.
Right. How do we incorporate other nations/cultures into systemic racism? Or are only the Anglo groups capable of racism? I dislike twisting words, grouping them together and ending up with some bastard word salad that means nothing. So many questions, so little clarity.
Pat: That's a good point, also made by others here. I tried to clarify in other comments how I was using the word "systemic", but one of Merriam Webster's definitions fits fairly well: "fundamental to a predominant social, economic, or political practice" (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/systemic). At least that distinguishes it from "legally codified". To further clarify, I was referring to the U.S.
It's sometimes easier to discuss these things in person.
It seems to me that you would say the "system" is automatically "racist" if 51% of the population is white. Is that the definition of "systemic racism"?
WOKE thought leaves us with a quandary. It has been said that punctuality, hard work, efficiency, and even math is evidence of white racism. If that is true, then success, integrity, intelligence, logic, and society itself is inherently racist. It is not a large jump to say that non-whites value tardiness, laziness, sloth, and the lack of thought or introspection. Therefore, the WOKE ideology is completely racist and those who accept its tenets believe that blacks are inferior and ill-equipped to survive in modern society.
"Systemic racism" where there is scant evidence of actual racist acts (unequal outcomes is no proof of racist acts!!!) is simply evidence of a refusal to accept the cumulative impact of individual differences in effort, talent, etc.
I agree with your second statement, but there's plenty of evidence of racism causing inequality in the U.S. (among other places).
Your first statement is reasonable on its face, but it seems to assume that the "we" who will change the system will be free of prejudice. The state of affairs discussed in this article shows us how hard it is to achieve that goal.
Oh really? Perhaps you can document racism in college admissions, for example. Unless of course you want to include racism limiting Asian and white admissions at elite universities like Harvard and favoring admission of less qualified blacks. Of course you will respond that racism accounts for the lower grades and test scores of blacks. And that unseen and unmeasurable racism accounts for lower test scores because racism requires a single answer to the question what is 2+2? Anything to avoid individual responsibility.
I'd suggest you read the autobiographies of of Clarence Thomas and Jackie Robinson.
Except that "systemic racism" is a myth created by social "scientists" (I should know with a PhD in sociology!) to try to explain "unexplained variance" in outcomes for blacks v. other groups. If you refuse to include variables like group IQ differences in your models then observed differences must be due to some unmeasured variable. Let's call that unmeasured mythical variable "systemic racism." Voila. Almost like "proof" of manmade climate warming.
Real world example. Disproportionate number of blacks in prison. Since we can't include higher offense rate for blacks in the model, only possible explanation must be "systemic racism." Much easier to find "poof" of systemic the simpler your model. The more you add independent variables (age at first arrest, prior convictions, etc.) the more racial differences disappear. That's why "proof" offered by Democrats often comes from two variable models. Black students more likely to be suspended. Must be due to SR. More blacks in prison? Must be due to SR. More blacks in poverty. Must be due to SR. So easy to be a liberal Democrat!
Because in the US it is haram to mention class (poor people might get fancy ideas!), all the social pathologies stemming from extreme inequality, lack of social mobility, and gradual erosion of middle class that becomes more and more indebted and insecure are all lumped under "race".
It can be just as inaccurate and unhelpful to blame all of the ills of society on "class" (the Marxist approach) as it is to blame them on "systemic racism."
Let's start with an objective assessment of America. There is a lot more social mobility and a lot less "extreme inequality" than critics on the left grant. That's why millions would risk death to get here. I'll grant the erosion of the middle class especially the decline in family wage industrial jobs, but the average low income American today enjoys a higher (and more secure) standard of living than those in the "middle class' (whatever that means) of the 1930's.
Personally, I found the huge growth of govt and bureaucracy at all levels and the consolidation of media the greatest to our democracy today.
I am definitely not suggesting that class is the only to blame, just pointing out how curiously absent it is from conversation. I think that is "by design" because talking more about class (which cuts across racial and many other divides, including much of the "identity" sub-groups) could lead to some concept of solidarity which is something the owner class (30 million Americans owning 70% of the wealth of nation) would definitely like to prevent.
As for social mobility in the US, it is not that great, not even among top 25 in the world.
The main reason immigrants (esp. Central America) flow into the US is that their lives and livelihoods are under threat in their own countries. US policies (esp. NAFTA) that devastated small farmers (making their farms source of debt not income), "war on drugs" and of course support for various right-wing juntas that unleashed death squads and even outright genocides on indigenous peoples (Guatemala never really recovered from that) are strong factors. Of course, once in the US, everybody wants some of the "American dream" to happen, but data shows it is harder and harder to make it a reality.
Agree that class needs to be included in any comprehensive model. My head just about explodes when sociologists, policy makers, etc., who know better, revert to two variable models to make political points. Classic example is claim that women make 72 cents on the dollar compared to men. Anyone spending more than a half hour looking into it knows that is total BS when time in labor force, etc are added to the model.
"Race" is an especially interesting (problematic? useless?) variable. Is it self identified or defined by how others view you? Is it something in the genes? Or is it a proxy for subculture? What about "half blacks" like Barack Obama? Does he count as 0.5 black in your statistical model? What if a person is 1/4 black but identifies as white (or Hispanic)? Which analytic basket do we throw them in? Is an adopted black baby raised by a white family in a white neighborhood really "black?" Are African blacks who move to the US as adults and speak with a British accent scored the same on the "blackness" variable as native born descendants of slaves?
Why don't we start with defining what success would like by consensus? Definitions of success are shockingly lacking in politics because then we could hold people to them.
Unless there, in reality, is very little systemic racism. The hard battles have already been fought and won. All that is left is the racist race-baiters like BLM and Sharpton-types.
If you wanted to inspire a white identitarian reactionary movement, you could hardly do worse than close or restrict everyone's methods of livelihood by force and then only compensate non-whites.
It's almost as if the powers that be *want* such a movement. We've all been warned that far right white supremacists are the biggest danger in the U.S. today. They've even barricaded the capitol to protect against it.
They would fucking LOVE it if a real movement emerged. They're already gearing up to launch a war against "domestic terrorism." I think Glenn wrote about this a couple months back.
I would. I've had the discussion many times with real officers. They are afraid to issue the order. They aren't sure what would happen. They could get shot.
You just need to develop a stereotype which stigmatizes them as other, done in every war. The purge of extremists and the institution of Critical Race Theory into the military ethos is a good start. Also the Jackson State and Kent State shootings are illustrative. How about the long history of the Labor Movement. In the battle of Blair Mountain bombs and poison gas were used. And then can we really dismiss the Civil War out of hand.
The Nazis also tried to do the same to their army. It didn't work, and they tried harder than most. The atrocities were mostly committed by SS members. They had a real problem even with the Gestapo types, who were originally German cops and ultimately begged off of Einsatzgruppen service. For that matter, the Imperial German army (okay, mostly Ludendorff) tried its best to indoctrinate annexationist sentiment, also a nonstarter. You don't think these US soldiers haven't been hit with endless EEO and sensitivity training over the past 20 years? They are pretty close to immune to indoctrination. Look up SHARP training. They're still fucking and raping each other anyway. And using racial slurs.
Anyway, i've deployed with this army to various parts of the globe over the last 15 years and they obviously aren't who you think they are.
They claimed they were fired at. There is an interesting and plausible story associated with that. Anyway that is the reason the guard is not issued ammo for crowd control nowadays, and why the Nixon administration, of all people, assessed the guardsmen totally in the wrong within a few months. They understood when you start shooting at your populace, they start shooting back.
But it did happen (orders to shoot were NOT obeyed) in the rump Soviet Union. Remember when Boris Yeltsin jumped on that tank to address the crowd? The tank driver invited him.
I'm not taken in by that. Evans' work on the Third Reich (3 volumes, but the first two are more poignant in this regard) speaks to a lot of reasons why Naziism only worked in Germany and not elsewhere. The Nazis were not innovators - the components of their worldview and program were threads drawn from Bismarckian Germany and sometimes even the distant Prussian or Medieval German past. It wouldn't have worked in France or Russia and certainly not in the US.
That's not to say that there aren't future totalitarians in our population, but you'll be hard pressed to find them in the military. The nature of the lifestyle and leadership focus tend to push those people out.
i think the military/State will fail utterly in that first step. Koresh, as with any individual, is easy to defame. A free people are never evil/subhuman, and the military, at ALL ranks, are not that gullible.
When a U.S. military squad is ordered to fire on a large group of Americans, I believe you will see not just non-compliance, but open defiance and defection.
I think you're right about that, large scale military combat is very unlikely. My concern is that any sort of violent reaction, even at a small scale, will be used as a justification to peel away 1st, 2nd, and 4th amendment protections.
Particularly in the past year, we've seen state governments testing the boundaries to see how far they could push; shutting down churches while businesses were open; Congresspeople pressuring tech companies to silence political opponents; we've seen people vilified and subjected to lawfare for brandishing weapons on their own property when surrounded by mobs; we've heard the mockingbird media squawking about the "threat" of rightwing domestic terrorists; the feds building a theatrical militarized fence around the capitol to protect it from the supposed threat.
Will they send the military to shoot down millions of Americans? No. Would they use any sort of rightwing identitarian movement as a pretext to come down HARD and strip away more rights? You betcha. From reading rightwing message boards, there's a strong suspicion that the feds are trying to provoke them into action; and if no such action is ever taken, there will eventually be a false flag.
Maybe that won't happen; I hope not; but we can see how the chess pieces are positioned on the board.
You don't need violence to have a revolution anyway, and the military need not be involved. The template for revolution in the US would be Euromaidan.
It could have happened, say, if Trump won in 2020 plus we had a more dire financial crisis caused by the pandemic at the time. It would have looked like massive street protests mobilization, resulting in the media and elites deciding to "re-form" the gov't without Trump involved. There would have been resistance and aftershocks for years, but little to modest real violence. In the literature on revolutions there is little bloodshed when average age of population >35, and US is 38.
"When a U.S. military squad is ordered to fire on a large group of Americans, I believe you will see not just non-compliance, but open defiance and defection."
If you go back and look at what people were saying in 1861 it was the same. One senator said that when the Civil War was over, he suspects he would be able to clean up all the blood spilled with his handkerchief.
I would have agreed with that until recently that we had moved beyond a time when soldiers would open fire on civilians, but we have been fed a steady diet of "your political tribe is not human" propaganda over the last 10-15 years that this has changed my thinking on this.
I think a guy from the Mississippi, or Texas National Guard would have as much trouble opening fire on a group of Seattle and Portland protestors while screaming "take that antifa and George Soros!" at the top of his lungs as a North Korean soldier would have killing an American, which is no trouble at all.
In the Civil War it was so true that they had to draft a bunch of foreigners - noncitizens - to serve in the Union army. 43% of the whole force over the conflict was first generation immigrant. Another 10% were former slaves. So white Union citizens - comprising something like 80% of the entire country minus slaves, were represented at the rate of 47% in the Union forces.
If you are getting the impression that the Union didn't have its heart in it, you'd be right.
I'm very serious about this: we are reaching the point where we may lose the ability to even have dependable armed forces. The growing gap in this country is between the elite and the folks who primarily currently make up the armed forces. That's, for example, why you saw heavy participation from veterans in the Capitol riot.
As the gap grows, though, in particular the gap in support for the wrong kind of overseas deployments (and formerly trusting vets who now know that their deployment to Iraq was a total scam are among the most disillusioned), we may earnestly lose the ability to recruit for the armed services in this country.
We've gone from "thank you for your service" to "f you for your ideas".
Two risks: one a loss of ability to recruit overall. Two, a more thorough extension of the light purges already happening, and/or recruiting being effective only from pools of a less fit pool of remaining willing folks - taking a job working for woke elite for $ but without the passion and patriotism that offset the need for higher compensation in our historical armed forces.
The contemptuous attitude towards our armed forces where I am originally from is awful. But that has been going on for 30 years or more. It's analogous to the Red/Blue divide - the vast majority of soldiers come from the red side. The only large-scale recruiting from blue areas I ever see are minorities within cities, who are looking for a ticket out. Sometimes a few PTI cases. One guy I know had a bust for dealing weed back about 15 years ago and the PTI condition was him enlisting. Since we're being more selective about who is inducted nowadays, that might not happen today.
Anyway, most soldiers never see how bad the attitude is in places like NY/NJ or CA. They don't come from there and their bases aren't anywhere near there usually.
Killing an maiming brown and black people in far away lands is increasingly the only remaining social climbing opportunity for brown and black people at home. You have to hand it to the Empire, it is really set up as a self-licking ice cream.
The police in most metropolitan areas that were damaged by last summer's riots stood by and watched it transpire at the order of their political masters. Why do you believe soldiers will behave differently?
Actually that kinda proves my point. The police stood aside for their own interest. With no backing from city hall, why risk lives, career and even freedom. Soldiers will feel the same way.
Is nobody living in a capitalist country allowed to criticize capitalism, or is just me? Kind of proves my point: as soon as "class" is mentioned, thought police jumps out and tries to shut you down, even on Substack comments section where we are supposed to have freedom of speech? In any case, much more consequential people engage in class warfare, and by their own admission with great success too:
Its the greatest trick the rich ever pulled, making the poor think having money is a terrible thing.
Take your class warfare bullshit and pound it in your fucking ass you piece of shit. I am tired of people moaning about someone else's success as somehow indicative of why they lack it.
" . . . the ‘way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.’"
I've always felt this way ("If you want a color-blind society, be color-blind"), but just yesterday I read somewhere this very sentiment is an example of systemic white supremacy (along with having a conscience and principles and a strong work ethic).
These days what ISN’T an example of white supremacy? For a party claiming to want to heal racial divisiveness, no one is doing more to racially divide this country than are Dems and leftists.
Yeah it still weirds me out how such a 180 was done against the “color-blind” crowd, people who are so clearly inoffensive and yet have been villain-ized as enablers of white supremacy.
Certainly bad news for Jimi Hendrix, who espoused that view:
“I don't look at things in terms of races. I look at things in terms of people. I'm not thinking about black people or white people. I'm thinking about the obsolete and the new. There's no colour part now, no black and white.”
For people like me who grew up idolizing Hendrix and really digging songs like Sly & the Family Stone’s “Everyday People”, this idea of color-blind harmony being a covert tool of white supremacy is truly baffling.
And when you give it to her, tell her, "Now you can go vote with your money. By the way, I'm tapped. A job would get you some more voting money, that is IF your white privelege doesn't get in the way."
According to the materials used by White Men as Full Diversity Partners (https://wmfdp.com/ ) in their training for white male leaders at major corporations like Lockheed Martin, those are indeed insidious aspects of white male hegemony. Since WMFDP are both college-educated and making bank consulting to huge multinationals, I can only defer to them on these points.
As I noted above, ultimately, it's a complicated issue and while any form of racial discrimination feels icky, formal race neutrality has always had a way of favoring a specific group and increase inequality. Personally, I don't think people who fail to at least acknowledge this are operating in good faith or find that racial inequality is an urgent issue. That's the start of any convo for me: shit sucks and must be addressed and if you're gonna advocate for race neutral stuff then explain how it addresses racial inequality.
That’s not how the burdens work here. The government must show that the preferential treatment is necessary and narrowly tailored to address specific and intentional discrimination. It failed to do so here.
I know the burden. I wasn't talking about the opinion, more about values. This decision is correct and the law is unconstitutional. My point broader: the prohibition against racial discrimination (absent compelling state interest etc...) was enacted in a specific context for a specific reason (slavery and Jim Crow). But like I said, the point of recent social movements is that rigid race neutrality (even w the narrow exceptions) hasn't worked to resolve long standing issues of racial inequality. PERHAPS TODAY, progress, equality, or justice demands some or more discrimination favoring certain non-white groups.
Everyone who replies with "but the constitution" or "the 14th amendment" is completely missing my point.
The long-standing issues of racial inequality were resolving themselves right up until the point where the government starting taking a more active role in social engineering.
Agreed. Gross inequality is not great and usually a sign that something has gone wrong in the system but to borrow from Thomas Sowell, who seems to have a lot of fans on this board, it would be strange if groups of people having different cultures had identical outcomes.
"Perfect" meaning there are no cheaters involved? Thousands of years of human history say there's no such animal. There will always be some (hopefully small) number of people who look at the world as a zero-sum game and who care only about making sure they get as much of the pie as they can by any means they can. May as well talk about perfectly rational human beings.
As a dedicated Jungian, I believe in racial traits and in the collective unconscious. I've read the much-maligned BELL CURVE and, having heard comments by LeBron James, it is hard not be be a racist. That being said, immigrants to the USA from Africa are often successful, hard-working, and literate. A friend who is a retired college professor once asked a black Somalian student how he became so proficient in English and an acknowledged scholar. The young man replied that he chose not to associate with black students born in the USA. Values and success are associated more with family values than anything else.
I can agree with the notion that a mandated "race neutrality" can result in problems being overlooked and ignored.
The problem is that there is never going to be a perfect, ideal world. Even under the most egalitarian societies there were still elements of inequity in some form, and it's because humans are not and have never been and will never be completely equal. Keeping the impossibility of any kind of perfect society, the real question should be what is the cost of "race neutrality" versus "race consciousness"? Which approach leads us to a better world?
Ultimately, the whole racial inequity argument is problematic because it's not really about race, is it? It's about black Americans. It's specifically about black Americans. It's difficult to make wide sweeping arguments on "race" when so many other racial groups are quite successful and doing quite well. Even the whole Latino experience is mainly mirroring the typical immigration experience, Latinos as a whole occupy the same niche in American society the way the Irish and Italians did a century ago. Construction workers today, the boardroom tomorrow. As we speak the second and third generation of Latino Americans are rapidly moving into the professions and managerial classes.
I'll be the first to acknowledge the black American experience has historically not been a good one. The history of the United States is ridded with systematic oppression, culturally and politically, against black Americans. It is the national shame. At the same time, the past 50 years has seen enormous gains in the position and acceptance of black Americans. Staggeringly enormous. Despite all the gains, including the first black president, we do still have many lingering disparities. And, interestingly enough, despite the major civil rights and economic gains, there's been distinct steps back in certain cultural areas (marriage rates, out of wedlock rates, two major factors that play a key role in building up wealth and stability). Black men still disproportionately interact with the police, on the other hand, black men still commit a disproportionate amount of crime.
If we want to have a frank and honest discussion about the history of black Americans and their treatment by the larger American society (which, frankly, has been going on my entire life and I'm in my 40s, we were already extensively discussing redlining and Jim Crow and the Civil Rights movement when I was at school in the 1980s), we also need to have a frank and honest discussion about the role of merit (why do some black Americans succeed while others remain mired in poverty), and, absolutely, cultural factors and to what degree are these cultural factors ingrown or a direct byproduct of racism.
The whole current dialogue on racial equity is only allowed within very narrow parameters with whole fields of questioning and topics firmly off the table. Which is why it's become so difficult and fraught with tension - we are just not allowed to talk about many factors surrounding black America.
And regarding your comment "but the constitution" or "14th amendment" also tells me you are missing a key point too. These are key ideals and promises that have been extraordinarily successful for a very long time. It does not mean they were faithfully carried out to perfection. The Civil Rights movement itself was very much based on the Constitution and forcing proper adherence to the 14th amendment. When you weaken the principles of the Constitution and the 14th amendment to allow "positive" discrimination you also risk allowing other forms of discriminations to flourish because the original principle is weakened. What is the difference between privileging one racial group, regardless of the merits of the argument, versus privileging another racial group? As long as any privileging exists, the argument against any other forms of privileging weakens. And that's the risk you take.
This will always be a hard sell, if using persuasion to advance it, and spectacularly counterproductive if using the force of law to establish it. There is hardly a better way to incubate an army of future white nationalists than to tell the current generation of whites to suck it up and accept discrimination because it's your turn, oh and also, discrimination is bad so you better not do it to anyone else.
Justice requires equal opportunity, but equal opportunity does not guarantee equal outcomes. If it did, I'd be challenging LeBron James for a spot on the starting five.
The Pilgrims arrived believing in sharing the product of their collective labor. Many starved that first winter. Only when individuals were allowed to keep the harvest they produced did they produce more than enough for the entire colony.
This fundamental truth has been repeated around the world for 400 years. We even see it in fables (grasshopper and the ant). We can deny it just like we can deny the laws of gravity. But jump off a cliff and you still hit the ground.
Your point is that you don't have an answer and you are willing to participate in racism to see if you can find one - that is the entirety of your point and it is, frankly, repugnant.
The government cannot engineer outcomes, sustainably, but it can do its stated job and not support or promulgate racism. You have no evidence that you can create equality out of inequality, in fact all of human history shows the opposite, but PERHAPS TODAY will be different.
I get it. But a majority culture is not going to enable minorities without backlash. It's why Jews operate the way they do around the world - historically, they could never be secure as a minority that a pogrom was not right around the corner. So you save what money you can and keep your distance from the majority culture.
Let's do a thought experiment of a Jewish minority trying some of the measures tried today. What might have been the response of the local population, almost regardless of where we are talking about? I suspect there would be even fewer Jews in the world today.
After doing that thought experiment,, what do you think the chances of race agitators of today not bringing unforeseen horrors onto their fellows later?
Let's do another thought experiment and we no longer do a Census where it asks for your race.
Look, we're a "Mutt Nation" now with mixed marriages creating 60% of America's DNA.
Does anyone with an IQ north of 83 believe that slicing and dicing us based on melanin in our skin think this is healthy for a nation founded on All Men are Created Equal?
That's our North Star.
Equality.
Show me where we don't have equality of opportunity.
Show me where slavery is the cause of black on black violence in America that's accepted and normalized for the political left?
Show me where slavery has anything to do with 82% of babies born in Minneapolis to single black women and the resulting 50% graduation rates from high school?
Where does slavery say that teachers and police have to solve the problems that the black culture has caused?
The power of the Collective is only as strong as its weakest link.
Anyone have any doubts what the weakest link is right now in our American Collective?
Was there an argument? You said that neutrality has always had a way of favoring a specific group, that anyone who disagrees is not operating in good faith, and that this is the start of the convo for you (which I took to mean that there can be no further conversation unless we at least agree with you on this). That's not an argument. It's a way of insisting that we start the conversation on your terms.
There is an essential divide between what you are suggesting and how I see things (yeah yeah, probably more white supremacy). We can certainly agree that racial discrimination was and is a thing, and certain ethnic classes of people have been disadvantaged in the past and present and that ought to be rectified. No argument at all.
But where you (presumably) and equity activists differ from me is they are thinking about aggregates and I am thinking about individuals. You can say, "black Americans as a group are disadvantaged," and that would be correct. But you cannot say, "this American is disadvantaged because he is black."
The problem with affirmative action and race preferences as government policy is they ignore this central fact. And more insidiously, by waving a flag of racial preferences they don't actually accomplish anything close to the stated goal of racial equity; these days it's the flag-waving that seems to matter most.
Yesterday Freddie deBoer wrote about this with regard to the SAT and college admissions. Activists are attacking the SAT because they claim it reduces minority admissions (assuming of course we discount Asian-Americans as an officially oppressed ethnic minority). deBoer's point is not only is that not true, but if minority admissions are less than what they ought to be it's because of conditions earlier in the lives of minority students that make their SAT scores lower (because, as deBoer insists, the SATs really do an excellent job of what they are designed to do).
He doesn't get into details, but I understand exactly what he means: instead of dreaming up racial quotas for universities and job placements, why not emphasize skills for life success throughout primary education, for all children, regardless of race? Isn't that what disadvantaged communities need more than quotas? But that's hard work and anyway the NEA and their cheerleaders in government have made it clear children and their success is of decidedly secondary interest to them.
(BTW, deBoer would probably be horrified by my invoking his name in this discussion. I believe but do not know he is probably a proponent of affirmative action in many areas of society. But I thought his SAT argument provided an interesting basis for emphasis on the importance of early education for all children, regardless of race).
So yeah, perhaps "the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race" is a little naive in the grand scheme of things, but as government policy I still believe it is sound (and fair), and better for the disadvantaged individuals we all want to help.
If you decide to launch a program aimed at enhancing outcomes in, say, schools located in high crime districts, CRT activists will try to block it even if it overwhelmingly benefits poor black children. Reason: Because it doesn’t benefit rich black children.
Every system and ecosystem in nature has a hierarchy.
In each hierarchy you can stack into 10 deciles from top to bottom.
In these hierarchies, nature never knows when something from the bottom decile is going to fight it's way up top, buf if you live in Georgia..you know that kudzu made it to wrap itself around your big beautiful oak tree.
In these hierarchies (including humans), we sort out by IQ, height, weight, muscle structure, and left vs. right brain propensities. Some people are born with grit, others have to learn it.
No matter, because in these hierarchies, you will always have Oppressors and you will always have Oppressed. If you move the bottom 10% up to the top 10%, all you've done is replace Oppressors with new Oppressors.
If you accept natural law, then you'll realize that if you're born with a low IQ or if you're 5'6"...you're not going to be playing for the Lakers and you're spouse it not likely to be 5'10" because that's just the way nature works.
Maybe if you're 5'6" with bad hair you develop a social media company instead while you look at any NBA full roster and you might find 1 team with 3 or more white players..that's nature...and equality..and merit at work.
If you want to challenge natural law, now you're thinking you're God and that, mon ami, is where we part company.
What you describe is not equality, it's the inequalities inherent in our species (as in other species). Equality in this context refers to equality of rights. The whole point is that we can and should transcend our animal nature, and not blindly accept "natural law" as our sole guide.
Needless to say, transcending our animal nature is difficult and, in many people, unnatural. As you point out, humans naturally organize themselves in hierarchies. The point of "wokeism" in corporations these days is not to eliminate hierarchies, but to change the distribution of race, gender, etc. within the hierarchy. The idea of eliminating or greatly reducing the degree of hierarchy is, of course, not even discussed and, I suspect, doesn't even occur to the corporate leaders. Our species still has one foot mired in its primate past.
In nature survival of the fittest was applicable in deriving our many species, however that is no longer really true considering the devastating affects man has had and continues to have on nature world wide. America defines itself as a democracy, which is not suppose to be based on a survival of the fittest mentality but a sense of equality for all. However that is also no longer true. since a minority or people own most of the wealth in this country and through their generous offerings place people, politicians, in positions of power who will do their biding. An oligarchy would be the better term to describe us.
"formal race neutrality has always had a way of favoring a specific group and increase inequality."
Hmmm. This troubles you? Why? Because you just don't like the consequences of neutrality? You want to put your thumb on the scale why? Have you ever stopped to wonder why some succeed and why others do not?
This is a perfect example of leftist argumentation. Argument on the merits of a position is not permissible, only discussion of how to remedy the problem is allowed.
If as an individual one believes that a certain oppressed group "deserves" more than say, those of Western European descent, well then that person can individually elect to engage with that group. Maybe I want to support African immigrants by eating at Ethiopian restaurants, whereas I don't want my taxes to fund a group home for indigent Ethiopians who are here illegally, and thus relocate to avoid such a local tax scheme. Who wins? That little restaurant no longer gets my repeat business, my taxes are no longer collected, and I may lose a neighborhood I love. Those are individual choices we make to address actual or perceived inequality. The idea of a government mandate to force Western Europeans to eat at Ethiopian restaurants to ensure their survival (have you seen the photos of grocery shelves with product tags calling out "Black-owned business"?) is anathema to everything this country was formed to address.
Interesting to see the impact on Vermont, which affirmatively denied the vaccines to white people.
Generally the strongest supporters of purely race-based preferences fall into one of two groups: economically privileged members of the newly racially privileged groups who are in it for the gibs, and whose rhetoric always references “centuries” of discrimination because they realize their pleas sound hollow coming out of their Beemer; and economically privileged suburban white women who don’t personally know any minorities who aren’t neurologists and stand to lose nothing from the law, but love to shrilly volunteer members of their ex-husbands’ race and gender to make the noble sacrifice.
I agree that most of the "wokeism" we see in corporations is performative (or even worse, disingenuous P.R.).
The company where I work, like many these days, has diversity and inclusion programs and a lot of talk of equality on Slack (a popular messaging tool). In one thread, I suggested that our company donate 5% of everyone's stock options to underprivileged schools (based on school funding, not on race), as a way to help eliminate some of the inequity that prevents many minorities (and white students in some areas) from ever getting the point where they can apply for high-paying jobs. That stopped that conversation in its tracks.
I made the same suggestion a second time in another Slack thread on diversity and inclusion, and it was also met with silence.
I think Freddie deBoar captured this in a recent post.
To paraphrase, black people want equality and jobs? They get Aunt Jemima removed from the Syrup bottle. White women gathering to cry about their white privileged and fragility before heading to their Pilates Class.
Eavesdropping on $5,000 Anti-Racist Dinner Parties
I think a lot of our problems could be ended or significantly ameliorated by completely getting rid of the tax code and replacing it with a simple, low rate flat tax. Low rate. For businesses on revenue, for individuals on income. No exemptions, no exceptions, no CPAs, no lawyers. Just an enforcement arm; anyone caught tax dodging pays double for 5 years. Something along those lines.
The FairTax is a national sales tax that treats every person equally and allows American businesses to thrive, while generating the same tax revenue as the current four-million-word-plus tax code. Under the FairTax, every person living in the United States pays a sales tax on purchases of new goods and services, excluding necessities due to the prebate. The FairTax rate after necessities is 23% compared to combining the 15% income tax bracket with the 7.65% of employee payroll taxes under the current system -- both of which will be eliminated!
Get a Tax Refund in Advance on Purchases of Basic Necessities
The FairTax provides a progressive program called a prebate. This gives every legal resident household an “advance refund” at the beginning of each month so that purchases made up to the poverty level are tax-free. The prebate prevents an unfair burden on low-income families.
Yes, but why siphon it through an accounting of income in the first place.
No refunds. Just stop taxing what we want to encourage: work, i.e. free-market determined wages, i.e. income and saved income (property). If we want to be wealthier, why tax it at all?
Just use federal excise taxes. The mechanism (corporate point-of-final-sale) already exists.
Why tax income or wealth at all? Don't we WANT to maximize wealth creation (and the concommittant faster rise in standard-of-living)? Why tax it at all?
Why not tax consumption instead? Exempt food. 20% Federal excise tax to replace ALL income/property tax (States could do the same at 5%) should be enough (maybe phase it in around $100).
The poor have two friends, and two friends ONLY. 1) The hiring rich man (or his wealth, which is chasing rate of return, and therefore looking to hire), and 2) a small gov't. which is NOT needlessly impairing the rich man (i.e. his wealth/income), and which does NOT usurp the wealth creation of either man.
I am brown and if I lived in Vermont and saw that they were only vaccinating non-whites, I would fucking freak out simply because to me it would indicate that we are being used as lab experiments.
No need to vaccinate a state where it's entire populace (White male bald boomers with pony tales) that wake up and kick off the day with 10 bong hits then chow down on some Ben & Jerry's.
Interesting graph showing white Americans in the bottom third. Why are they not disadvantaged? What about poor whites? Why aren't they disadvantaged? We do have systemic racism and poor whites are the target.
As someone coming from Eastern Europe (since 2015 in the UK) I also am shocked to see the massive levels of homelessness (and that group isn't diverse at all - white males in their 30s, 40s and 50s in 99% of the time...).
According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, there were roughly equal numbers of white and black homeless people in the U.S. in 2019, but since the overall black population is much smaller, the rate of homelessness among black people is much higher than among white people.
It's true, and important to note, that many white people struggle economically in U.S. society, but it's not true that they are more disadvantaged than other groups.
I misread your first statement about what country you were referring to. This thread started with jlpp's claim about the U.S. ("We do have systemic racism and poor whites are the target.")
In any case, the statistics you cited don't really support your contention that the U.K. homeless population "isn't diverse at all" (at least not for London). The chart shows a good deal of diversity. In terms of their overall population, white and black people are about equally likely to be homeless according to those statistics.
I think it's important to note that many white people struggle economically, and many are subject to prejudice (e.g., prejudice of affluent white U.S. coastal liberals against white "deplorables"). But it's obvious that, at least in the U.S., black people and various other minorities have been subject to prejudice and have suffered greatly because of it.
Do you solve the problem of homelessness by attacking it as a problem of discrimination, or by attacking its economic and social roots. Seems the latter solves it for everyone and the former helps solve it for some at the expense of others.
I am in shock. You mean they actually made a ruling based on the US Constitution? I would like to think this is a first step to ridding ourselves of the authoritarian/collectivist/statist rot that has besieged us- but that is probably wishful thinking on my part.
In this context it's mostly not wishful thinking. There have been US district court rulings on both the restaurant program, and another for farmers and ranchers that gives preference to blacks. Those rulings have been going in favor of litigants challenging their exclusion from the programs.
That'll never happen because American's love their Constitutional Rights. There's that is, not yours or anyone else's. They have mostly made it into adulthood without realizing it can't work that way.
I was not responding to the decision in this case. This is what he wrote I was responding to:
"I would like to think this is a first step to ridding ourselves of the authoritarian/collectivist/statist rot that has besieged us- but that is probably wishful thinking on my part."
I don't believe in general American's care about the Constitution beyond where it protects their interest. Just one example, but have you noticed that the press is far more interested in their right to publish whatever they want than your right to free speech regardless of the fact that both rights are found in the same 1st amendment?
I struggle to see where Judge Donald intellectually justifies her rationale around her decision that the government needs to act fast to remedy something she believes happened 200 years ago.
These type of people (Marxists) are very dangerous to America, particularly when they find their way to our court system.
Treat everyone equally and demand that every person born in America own their own agency.
After that, we do things based on merit.
Otherwise I'd be making $1,000,000 a year on Substack or be playing for the Lakers while Lebron James sat on the bench.
It's time for the memory of Sandra Day O'Connor to show itself to this country, otherwise this tribalism hiding in front of a very clear Marxist/Leninist movement has the potential to literally destroy the American Experiment.
While we may mock the French from time to time, right now they are to be admired. Let's look to them to solve that which ails America right now.
1) Macron himself has told Biden "You keep that CRT crap out of Europe." They invented Viva LaDifference and Liberte...and by golly...they mean it.
2) France doesn't slice and dice their population in 31 of your favorite flavors. You're either French or you're not French.
3) France's abortion laws are the model for us to use for our own resolution of these court cases. Abortion is legal in the 1st trimester and after that, you need some very compelling reasons to obtain an abortion. It doesn't make the far left or far right happy, but it solves the problem and empowers women to align their Reproductive Freedoms with Reproductive Responsibilities.
4) And let's not forget that without France stepping in.....George Washington and America itself would have died at Yorktown. We'd have 20 different nations across this North American continent, each with their own President and Army.
Let's stop this Intersectionality Bullshit.
After all, when you slice and dice it all the way down to the core, you end up with.....wait for it....
The Individual
God Bless America and God Bless those who sacrificed their lives in service of this nation over the past 244 years to make all this beauty, wonder and opportunity available to anyone who chooses to avail themselves to these opportunities.
Besides showing whites doing poorly relative to other ethnic groups the graph sort of disproved the concept that POC are disadvantaged at all. Why are Indian Americans so successful if we are so rascist?
Education. Respect and reverence for the intact nuclear family.
This is a nation built by 1st and 2nd generation immigrants (legal).
You can see this when you start to slice and dice Blacks into:
Black-Americans
African-Americans
Liberian-Americans
Somali-Americans
Kenyan-Americans
Sudanense-Americans
Eritrean-Americans
Jamaican-Americans
When you begin to look at the underlying attitudes of each of these subgroups, you'll find huge disparities in worth ethic, respect for tradition, loyalty to family, reverence for Institutions with Moral Authority and a serious focus on tomorrow instead of whining about how bad their life was 10 years ago (except Ilhan Omar, she won't shut up about it).
Very true. Senator Moynahan pointed this out in the 60"s when he was a sociologist. The breakdown of black families was the real cause of AA lagging behind. But the lft does not want to hear it.
Telling people to be responsible doesn't get you some folks' votes, they prefer to be told that someone else is gonna solve their problems, despite all the evidence to the contrary.
There's no question it's much easier to be told your problems aren't your fault but due to factors beyond your control. You're not a corporate vice president? No problem, it's because society is racist. You don't do well in school? No problem, it's due to racism. John McWhorter called it the babying of black America.
I do agree that to an extent black Americans have had to face life challenges that most whites never did, but it is to an extent and doesn't explain everything or justifies all problems. The real risk of today's wokery is the way it seems to be absolving black Americans of individual responsibilities and the encouragement of the mindset can absolutely make things worse, not better.
Thomas Sowells “black rednecks and white liberals” is a very interesting juxtaposition of culture versus race. I personally am much more interested in culture then race. I believe it to be determinative.
Culture certainly plays a role, but it's difficult to discern the influence of culture versus that of the environment (in this context, a history of racism). Native Americans are plagued by poverty and alcoholism, but to reflexively attribute that to their culture or innate characteristics would be to ignore the devastating effects of the racism and violence to which they were subjected. A group's culture can be degraded by the trauma of oppression and violence.
I have no statistics on this, but my personal experience has led me to believe the "Native Americans are plagued by poverty and alcoholism" is a trope. After all, the same lack of an enzyme to process alcohol many Native American's carry is also carried by groups such as the Japanese they descended from.
Delta Force, the premiere inter-military special forces unit is dominated by Native America's despite Native American's representing only 1% of the population. They are also over-representing in receiving Congressional Medals of honor and other military awards as well as in the combat units of our military.
The plague is not the culture of Native American's, but the Native American reservation system.
There's this old myth about America's staying in their small home towns generation after generation, but that has never been true. The most ambitious have always left to seek opportunity with the less driven remaining behind. What you see on Indian Reservations is no different than you find in small towns in West Virginia and New England. Generation after generation, the talented and motivated leave to seek opportunity while those who are not remain behind.
Over several generations this creates what you now have on many reservations. It's only more obvious there because they are identified as Native American areas. At the time the reservation system was created there was a fear and a debate over this very issue, but given how things had gone up to that point it was politically impossible to not give them sovereign land in this way.
Where I grew up, some of the smartest and most athletic people I knew were of Native American decent and none of them lived, or had any interest in ever living on a reservation.
"The plague is not the culture of Native American's, but the Native American reservation system. "
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True. A late friend of mine was a bona fide Chief from Oklahoma(he called himself an Indian but never mind. Pre-politically correct days). Interesting fellow. He pastored a Church in Alabama during the early 60s. The Klan burned a cross in his yard.
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My friend said that if you want to see a monument to the failure of Socialism look at the reservation system.
Only Native Americans are not subjected to any racism or violence. There are not bands of white gangs going onto reservations attacking people. There is nothing keeping them on a reservation. In fact their entire existence is subsidized by the US Govt.
But we have to respond to racist attacks. Culture is most certainly more interesting, not to mention indicative, but public racism damns all, and must be responded to.
Here in the UK, white working-class boys have the worst educational outcomes of all, whereas Nigerian and Indian immigrants are near the top. Jamaican, near the bottom.
This ought to be sufficient to reject the UK-based race hustlers' claims out of hand, but no. I can't even be asked to find their response to this natural experiment, it's too frustrating.
You're hinting at a much bigger point, which is that racism can be afflicted. Let's say you're a white person who just went about her business, has a couple acquaintances in her life who are black - you know, most white people. Then one day a black person tells her she's a racist. She blows it off. The next day, the same thing happens, and the day after that. She starts getting pretty annoyed at being constantly called a racist. She wonders if the black acquaintances in her life think she's a racist, but she doesn't dare ask them. But she finds herself thinking about it, a lot. Now she's on the defensive and wondering what to do about it. Does she defend herself against slander, pretend it's not happening, or react angrily and play into the hands of her accusers?
The same phenomenon is happening right now with Asians - there's a lot of talk about anti-Asian racism, when for the longest time there wasn't. Does it happen? Sure. Is it something all white people are guilty of? Absolutely not. Are we suddenly, as white people, being put on the defensive and forced to react? Bingo. And Democrats only need a small minority to react angrily to get their headlines and push the division narrative.
I'll add that the reason this has worked so well pushing anti-black racism is that for decades - centuries - blacks have been told that they are discriminated against because of race, so whenever something doesn't break their way and it's a white person making the decision, it's because of conscious or subconscious racism and no other reason.
The household income chart Glenn included makes this a difficult hill to climb for race hustlers when trying to open the narrative to anti-Asian racism. In 2020, Facebook employed more people of Asian ethnicity than whites. That's a fact. But less than 4% of their workforce is black. Is Zuckerberg - who had more influence on the 2020 election than any other private individual on Earth - an anti-black racist? I think it would be right to demand that Facebook increase it's percentage of black workers to match the national population. Walk the talk, Zuck.
The median household incomes of Syrian Americans ($74,047), Korean Americans ($76,674), Indonesian Americans ($93,501), Taiwanese Americans ($102,405), and Filipino Americans ($100,273) are all significantly higher than that of whites ($69,823)
POOR whites - the one group unlikely to benefit from affirmative action OR legacy policies - may be the single most neglected population in the USA.
both good comments. Brainwashing is shortcut term for the above. College is becoming or already is just 4 years of indoctrination in exactly your scenario.
Really, if you have to go back 75-90 years... I wonder who was running the country back then. Oh yeah, it was FDR, beloved by every contemporary Democrat.
the Tuskagee experiments continued through the 1970's so we are looking at about 50 years. Is your argument that White people wiped out all racism among them in the last 50 years? If so that's impressive given that racism is common to all groups (except White people apparently) and goes back to literally our earliest tribal reptilian brain we still carry with us today.
I have a more realistic proposal for ya. The statute time on the release of allowable state secrets is 50 years, so as they come out we do a rolling "oh, well that was 50 years ago!" despite no proof or reason to believe anything actually stopped 50 years ago. I'm in my sixties and every few years we go through another "well that was 50 years ago," which we have been doing for the 50 years of my life I can recall such a thing.
Now the FDR as democrat thing is what I thought you would lead with. We've only had the Republican Party since 1854. Is your argument that half the country was not racist until 1854 and those are the same people who became Republicans? Maybe it's that everyone was racist until 1854 when half the country gave up their racism and joined the Republican party?
FDR was certainly a democrat and a bigot, but it was J Edgar Hoover's FBI that worked with him to illegally use census data to identify and round up Japanese and intern them. Do you recall what party Hoover belonged too? I do and you're not going to like it.
Strom Thurmond started life as a Democrat and he was certainly racists (unless you don't consider joining the Clan a statement of racial intent). Did he give up his racism once he became a Republican? Perhaps if he had always been a Republican he never would have been racist and joined the Clan, or if he had stayed in the Democratic party he would have remained a Clan member racist? Even Democrat Byrd dropped the clan thing officially later in his career, so it's all a little confusing.
Oregon was Republican in 1861 and they proudly supported the North against the South because they did not want any of those slave owners bringing "dem' N*****" into their state. In fact, they actually wrote into their State Constitution that no black people were allowed in the State. I always thought that was racist, but they were Republicans, so that can't be. Can you believe a god fearing, apple pie eat'in back the blue Republican would do such a thing? Do you suspect they were closet Democrats since only a Democrat has ever been racist?
There clearly has been, and still is, a lot of racism in U.S. society. The fact that it's not purely racist (e.g., only white people are free and everyone else has to be a slave) doesn't disprove that basic fact. Nor does the fact that many white people in the U.S. also struggle economically imply that there are not racial imbalances.
What we need is a society that respects everyone and which seeks to alleviate suffering, regardless of race, gender, etc. That's not a popular viewpoint with either major political party, though.
A society that alleviates suffering will never exist. Ever. Never has, never will. And those that tried to maximize the *alleviation* of suffering of its people (e.g. Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, Kim's Korea) only ever maximized overall suffering.
We can seek to move toward a goal even if we believe it's impossible to fully achieve. We can't alleviate all suffering, but we can try to alleviate or prevent much man-made suffering. Anyway, my point was that I don't believe humans will achieve a world without selfishness, so I agree with you on that point.
The goal should be to minimize suffering on a societal level; not by fiat, but by individual generosity. The state cannot do what individuals are best suited to do.
> There clearly has been, and still is, a lot of racism in U.S. society.
"Clearly" and "a lot" are totally subjective, and in most cases subjective terms can be exchanged with their opposites while maintaining the same degree of objective truth.
It's possible that there is a small amount of racism in the USA.
It's true that didn't provide evidence for my assertions, but it's easy to find and I'm not writing an essay on the subject. The presence of racism in U.S. history is so well-known and well-documented that it's not worth debating. As for the present, it's easy to find articles about redlining in real estate, racial bias in processing job applications, etc. Of course, these days there's also "reverse racism" coming from the liberal side in many areas.
> it's easy to find articles about redlining in real estate, racial bias in processing job applications, etc.
So the mere existence of those articles "clearly" means there is "a lot" of racism? In May 2021, I'm pretty sure banks and insurance companies want to make money more than they want to be racist. It would be surprising if they hadn't found some non-politically-correct correlations, leading to policies you call "clearly" racist and I would call profit-maximizing with unfortunate racial side effects.
No, it's the content of the articles and the results of the studies that provide evidence, just as in scientific articles.
One example is experiments where identical resumes were sent to companies using different names for the applicant, in which people with typically "white" names received better responses than those with typically "black" names. It goes the other way, too. I have a friend who is a Sephardic Jew with a Spanish name, born and raised in the U.S. who had applied for a job at a certain university department. He phoned the chairman to talk about his application and as soon as he said "Hello, I'm ...", the chairman said "That sounds promising!".
As for your example, you seem to assume that the correlations (maybe you mean banks treating black people as worse credit risks?) are not in fact due to the complex of policies you suggest are driven purely by practical business considerations.
I looked at this article, and can imagine applicants who talk about race are rejected because business don't want racial drama at work. That is not racism.
If you take two identical crimes committed in the same jurisdiction under the same prosecutor and look at sentencing, White women consistently receive the lightest sentences and Black men the most regardless of criminal history.
Remember, we are not talking about different places, different crimes or different criminal histories. The only variable is gender and race
There is something called a "Navigation score," which is a closed sourced algorithm used it determine bail. Judges love it because they are techno-morons who think science means fair.
The Navigation Score consistently reflects this same disparity in setting bail for different genders and race.
To the extent we use terms like systemic racism, things like this is where it applies.
Most of us see women as less threatening than men, so your first example can be explained without racism and a disaparity in sexes is not unreasonable.
Presumably "Navigation Score" uses past outcomes for people with similar characteristics to determine bail. Just because you don't like whatever correlations the algorithm finds doesn't mean it's invalid. Do you think the programmers hard-coded in a penalty for being black? That would be grounds for a major lawsuit.
I agree that closed-source software is poorly suited for applications like bail-setting that require transparency. Neverthless, I would trust commercial software vendors more than academics or activists with a social justice agenda.
> "There clearly has been, and still is, a lot of racism in U.S. society."
Yep, 100% correct. Lots of racism from the Democrats towards everyone. Racist towards whites, especially if male, racist towards blacks who don't tow the democrat line, racism against asians who oppose race based discrimination in Universities and so on. Lots of racism thanks to the historic party of racism and KKK, segregation, Jim Crow. The only way to get rid of this racism is by destroying the democrat party.
Titania is my Hero(ine) - depending on whether gender modification is discriminatory or if gender neutrality is preferred. Given that gender is a choice...
If you're asking how I would go about achieving a society that respects everyone and which seeks to alleviate suffering, I don't have a solution. I decided a long time ago that there is no solution, though I tend to be pessimistic about such things.
However, I do think we as individuals should strive to behave in a way that moves us toward that goal. I don't actually have much hope for the human species (I think we'll likely nuke ourselves into oblivion sometime within the next 500 or 1,000 years at the outside), but I am hopeful about the future state of the cosmos, as silly as that may sound to some.
I've come to the same conclusion George Orwell did on this topic. Not only do I have no solution, but people really aren't interested if it's going to cost them anything and this goes well beyond just race.
Sure, we will do the performative stuff if it doesn't cost us too much and it's not inconvenient, but at the end of the day we all want to buy our Chocolate and Poultry for as cheap as possible regardless of what that means in human lives or farm conditions on the other end. We protest the Iraqi war over oil, then get in our air conditions suburban and drive home to our 10,000 square foot home we keep like a meat locker in the summer and a furnace in the winter.
Oscar Wilde famously had a character in Dorian Gray state "I would do anything to get in shape, anything at all except eat right, exercise or go to bed early."
That generally captures our attitude towards marginalized groups. We are for equality as long as it doesn't cost us anything important.
An American individual has the right to be a racist. Said individual is NOT free to initiate the use of force against an individual, including those of different race.
Time and continued racial mixing will end racism in individuals, naturally.
Of all the human foibles out there, racism doesn't even make my top 5. I know, it's all we are supposed to care about, but you need to ignore a lot of other human flaws if you are going to make that your #1 concern. As long as they have no institutional power to set policy for others, follow your own bliss.
"Time and continued racial mixing will end racism in individuals, naturally."
Yes, we will be sure to come up with entirely different ways to divide and marginalize people between groups.
You can take the monkey brain out of the jungle.........
Bear in mind that the population of the United States is predominantly white (even without including Hispanics, who are often white but have Hispanic names) and is far more diverse than other economic groups. Asians, to a large extent, are in the medical field, in the case of Indians, and high tech. Furthermore, many whites live in rural areas where wages are much lower. As for us being "racist," that's a political opinion used by Democrats to attract votes.
I understand but it makes it hard to accept the critical race theory nonsense. How did people from India succeed in those competitive fields if we are racist? Seems like discrimination would keep them out?
Sadly, one of the three judges ruled in favor of the Biden discriminatory carve out.
Even if one agreed that it is ok to use racist discrimination to redress prior historical discrimination (in other words, you will be punished because you are white because 100 years ago other white people, completely unrelated to you, did something bad to black people who may be completely unrelated to those who will benefit from the discrimination against you. Got that? And according to the SCOTUS, that's ok), the Biden carve out is so flawed it should have been over-turned anyway.
This kind of thinking can so easily lead to practices like we find in Halifax, Nova Scotia where one of the city council positions can only be voted on by black people. Think it can't happen here? Think again.
"Alright, the n_____s can join up, but NOT the Irish!" paraphrase of Hedley Lamar henchman in Blazing Saddles, a send-up of racists and racism that would not clear today's (over) censors.
Last year California voted to repeal the "anti discrimination" amendment. It passed the house and senate but fortunately FOR NOW failed in the election (43% still voted to repeal it). Just read who the supporters are and who opposes it:
Also this "asian" lawsuit against universities also often lumps in south asian (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal etc) into the "asian" category as convenient because Indians and Pakistanis are also quite high achievers, so they get discriminated against too.
If people woke up to the fact that they are actually voting for racism while crying about racism, then the world would be a better place.
The 9th was never as liberal as people imagined, but the recent change had more to do with the retirement after 32 years of Alex Kozinski than anything else. He was a big supporter of the Bill of Rights, You know, your 4th amendment right against illegal search and seizure, your 1'st amendment right to free speech and your 5th and 6th amendment right to a fair trial. He would also openly criticize prosecutors who lied, cheated and hid evidence in order to get a conviction against someone who was wrongly convicted of a crime.
Here was his take on the 2nd amendment:
“All too many of the other great tragedies of history – Stalin’s atrocities, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Holocaust, to name but a few – were perpetrated by armed troops against unarmed populations. Many could well have been avoided or mitigated, had the perpetrators known their intended victims were equipped with a rifle and twenty bullets apiece, as the Militia Act required here. If a few hundred Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto could hold off the Wehrmacht for almost a month with only a handful of weapons, six million Jews armed with rifles could not so easily have been herded into cattle cars.
Glad we finally got rid of that monster. That Bill of Rights was such a nuisance. It's good to now have judges on the 9th willing to completely disregard it.
Thank you, M. Areslent. But I go by decisions rendered. I am ignorant of process. Perhaps you can tell me why the Ninth Circuit previously had more decisions reversed (I believe by far, but am I wrong about that also?). Really I should know, for all the spouting I do, but was it Mr. Kozinski's fault for the choice of review perhaps? Didn't other retired justices have an effect on the direction of the Ninth (An outlier among the curcuits, I believe.)
And what aspersions you cast! Tell me please which 9th circuit judge(s) considers the Bill of Rights a nuisance?
And what do the police, or the support of them, have to do with the courts per se?
Decisions rendered are meaningless without looking at the process and what the court was being asked to decide, which is what made the ninth such a popular whipping boy for loud mouths with no understanding of the law while judge Kozinski was the presiding judge. Let me give an example:
A police officer decides he doesn't like a guy for whatever reason, perhaps he stole his girlfriend. The cop goes to this guys house, claims he smells marijuana and uses that as an excuse for a warrantless search of the place. During the search the police officer finds an illegal gun and arrest the owner. the trouble is we learn later that the resident does not smoke marijuana, never has and has no marijuana in the house, or anywhere else.
This is called "Fruit from the poison tree," meaning the police found a crime, but did it by lying and violated the 4th amendment to do it. Happens all the time. The court is asked will this conviction stand?
On Perry Mason the answer is no, the evidence was obtained illegally so the crime will not stand. In real life, judges often ignore the 4th amendment and invent some excuse why what the police did was fine regardless of who they did it. Think drug dogs, which are essentially a free pass to violate the 4th amendment.
Judge Kozinski was the guy who refused to play along, which means he was pilloried by loud mouths with no understanding of the law for "letting a guy get away with owning an illegal gun!"
Because this is the exception, judge Kozinski was often overturned for following the Constitution when being reviewed by judges that did not.
We have parallel construction, Qualified and Absolute Immunity, Terry Stops, Good intent for cops, Civil internment, mandatory minimums and a dozen other court decisions that are clear violations to the the Constitution designed to place restraints on what the police can and cannot do. Judge Kozinski would not play along. He continued to defend the Constitution when all the judges above and below him were more interested in defending the rights of the police to arrest someone over the rights of citizens under the Constitution.
I consider it a mark of honor to judge Kozinski and a public shame to the higher courts that he was overturned so often for enforce the Constitution against the State.
I would suggest that Justice Donald have a short conversation with Thomas Sowell on how and why certain groups succeed, and why even if you "spread the wealth" to specific minorities, in the end it will make no long term difference.
My guess is you have never read any of his books. If you had you would not make such statements. You are one of those cliff notes tribal flunkies. You are disgusting.
Democrats have always been, and continue to be racists. It is shocking to me that ANY bill this racist was passed. It is shocking to me that any judge with the faintest familiarity with the constitution could uphold it. We are in REAL TROUBLE. It seems the elites want a race war. It will not be pleasant.
We are in real trouble already: Last year California voted to repeal the "anti discrimination" amendment. It passed the house and senate but fortunately FOR NOW failed in the election (43% still voted to repeal it). Just read who the supporters are and who opposes it:
Also this "asian" lawsuit against universities also often lumps in south asian (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal etc) into the "asian" category as convenient because Indians and Pakistanis are also quite high achievers, so they get discriminated against too.
If people woke up to the fact that they are actually voting for racism while crying about racism, then the world would be a better place.
How ironic that the racial justice seeds sown throughout the Obama administration to supposedly create a garden of opportunity for historically oppressed people have instead resulted in a quagmire of reverse discrimination and ever-increasing racial and ethnic divisions.
If we agree that any system will have flaws, then the obvious choice is to err on the side of equal treatment.
If I knew that one business was given special money because of the owner's race or gender, and their neighbor was given the shaft because of their skin color or gender, well, I'd go to the place that got screwed over by racism. I won't support that. I think these government programs will backfire.
Uber and a bunch of WOKE companies did this last year. Uber, Apple etc created specific sections in their apps of "Minority owned businesses". Guess what this tells me. Go somewhere else which isn't being treated superiorly.
Every since the day President Biden was on TV talking about an EO that was to give special privileges to certain races based on ‘equity’ I have struggled to understand the sanity & legality of it. All I’ve ever known is that it was illegal to discriminate against people based on their race and or sex. That made perfect sense to me. I’m not an intellectual just a common person and I’m grateful to see the way this Judge decided this. It’s simply my opinion that equity is the opposite of equality. As far as I know our Constitution was based on equality. People called President Trump racist at times, but I never knew of him supporting any legislation that blatantly specified racism as the measure of assistance to anyone in the country. I hope the decision stands!
The fact that you're even asking might be suspect. I suggest you immediately read white fragility and place a lawn sign in the front of your house stating "This House Believes Black Lives Matter, This House Believes no one is Illegal and on and on" Good luck my friend.
I think many on the woke left purposefully substituted equity for equality, because they don't want the latter. Of course, as with their effort to redefine racist to fit CRT, they don't mean equity as defined for hundreds of years in the sense of fairness.
Yes. The word equity is very dangerous and the language police will ensure it becomes the law of the land. It is already being aggressively adopted by government and corporations.
It's not simply your opinion that equity is the opposite of equality. It is a fact. The word equity sounds similar to the word equality (this is why it's a Trojan horse.) And so, according to all the liberals who never bothered to interrogate the distinction between equity and equality, only MAGA hat wearing racists could be opposed to equity. The Good People believe in fairness, don't we?
"As far as you know" -- and again, you'd be correct -- the Constitution is indeed based on equality. But CRT doesn't care about the Constitution. Its explicit goal is to dismantle the system. No system, no Constitution. Easy!
This court decision gives me some hope, but it's only round one of a long battle to come.
Democrats are, and always have been, racist to the core.
They are the party of slavery, of Jim Crow, segregation and the KKK [1, 2].
When they lost the plantations, it took them awhile to recover, but starting with LBJ [3], they implemented what we in the reality-based community call The Quadruple Whammy, that has destroyed the black family, resulted in mass incarceration and unemployment of blacks, and created generational dependence upon government that has translated into an enormous constituency.
- Welfare, which penalizes marriage and rewards fecundity out of wedlock.
- Government "education", where the majority of graduates are illiterate and innumerate.
- Minimum wages, which price unskilled and uneducated blacks out of entry-level jobs.
- The War on Drugs, which has caged untold millions of blacks.
And of course, one might add that Dems have destroyed pretty much every city they've seized control of. Just look at Baltimore, Detroit, and Chicago where their ridiculous "gun control" nonsense has resulted in a never-ending murder spree in the black community, with many of the victims children. [4, 5]
The blinding hypocrisy of listening to Dems sanctimoniously blather on about "systemic racism" is just nauseating, when the combination of their policies has kept blacks uneducated, impoverished and imprisoned.
It defies belief that anyone, but particularly blacks, would ever vote Democrat. Malcom X knew the truth: “The white liberal is the worst enemy to America, and the worst enemy to the black man." [6,7]
And here we are, again and as usual, with Dems favoring people based upon race. The racism is eternal, the only thing that changes is the race.
This is why many of us call the GOP the stupid party, but the Dems the evil party.
*******
[1] Here is a picture of Biden in solidarity with Robert Byrd, founder of a KKK Klavern:
[3] I'll have them n****rs voting Democratic for the next two hundred years.
~ Lyndon B. Johnson, speaking to two governors about his true motivations regarding his support of civil rights legislation, while aboard Air Force One, as described in Ronald Kessler's book, Inside the White House.
[5] But of course, Dems have no problem killing children. No more proof is needed than President Corn Pop nominating the psychopathic David Chipman to head the ATF goon squad. This monster was involved with the Waco massacre where the Feds killed some 82 people, including 25 children, burning them alive.
Not to mention, and perhaps you did, their utter contempt for Trump's base, and their willingness to define millions of people as racist, xenophobes, homophobes and sexists, based solely on their support for Trump in the 2016 election. They are using these "deplorables" to call the riot at the capital an insurrection, and further an authoritarian agenda under the guise of liberalism. I've seen people who have been republicans their whole lives become republicans for Biden because they hated the face Trump put on their party, as well as their elitist hate for his base. Yes the democrats have a racist past and one that was on display during the Clinton years, with Biden's crime bill, and the Welfare reform act. The democrats pretend to be liberal, ergo, give racial and women preference while at the same time they blatantly sideline the liberals in their own party, and pander to the corporate world that feeds their campaigns and whose agenda they push, yet they can still get people to believe in their righteousness.
Even their hijacking of the term "liberal" to describe themselves. The word comes from the latin "liber", which means free.
Democrats are authoritarian socialists - what Mussolini termed "corporatist". This is close to the exact opposite of freedom - government taxing and regulating pretty much everything, and abridging fundamental rights like speech, association, religion and self-defense.
Calling the Jan. 6th riots an "insurrection" is just more leftist bullshit. The Trumpists were unarmed and had no intention of toppling the government. Now the Dems are persecuting the participants in blatant violation of due process.
These people are the mortal enemy of freedom and prosperity.
After the democrats assault on Trump I'm no longer a registered democrat, and if I'm honest long before Trump I came to mistrust the party. Biden, I never liked. They proclaim to be liberal, since they support gays, and abortion, etc, but if anything they sideline every liberal in their party. What they did to oust Trump, all the lies, the deceit, made me really loathe them. I'm surprised sometimes at the degree of my antipathy towards them.
I am no fan of Trump and did not vote for him, but during his campaign and presidency I was routinely accused of being a "trumper" by my Dem friends and family for daring to question the endless stream of ridiculous bullshit leveled against him.
What I find particularly and darkly amusing is that in 2016, so many of them believed (and many still do!) in the utterly preposterous fairy tale that Trump was Putin's stooge and that together they rigged the election, but now any mention of election "irregularities" is completely verboten.
Same here, and in my case the verbal attacks on me by two family members and a childhood friend caused a total breach in those relationships, and all because I didn't vote for Clinton, and wasn't all over Trump with their elitist hate. I found most left wing sites to be dysfunctional in that regard as well. People believed in Russia-gate, which was no more then a mindless acceptance of lies spewed by the democrats and their buddies on CNN, MSNBC and pretty much everyone on the so called left. During the whole four years Trump haters seemed to adopt an authoritarian mindset that accepted everything and anything they were told, and that includes those that pushed those lies.
If only my soon to be ex husband would at least try to understand any of this lol. He's a die hard, true blue no matter what, Democrat. And I apparently am your worst nightmare as an American citizen for not being one lol.
What the media and the establishment have done to the fabric of families and friends is unforgivable. The divide they're purposefully and continually created has lead to great grief for us all. And that was and is their entire goal. Because without unity, with numbers, we have nothing to fight them with.
Democrats only care about the gays and blacks who support them. They don't support Clarence Thomas, they don't support Candace Owens, they don't support Dave Rubins or Rick Grenells or even Glenn Greenwald. Those are all "uncle toms" to them. They only use these "minorities" as pawns to be used for votes and then disposed off when finished.
At one time the democrats were a reliable source of support for the working class, and unions, although that type of support doesn't have a long history, but it was there for a while, but since Carter, or before, they gave up their support for both. I know that blacks and other people of color are simply used to support the idea that they are the party of the people, all people, no matter their sexual preference, no matter their race, no matter their gender, or transgender choice, and I know it's all BS. Yep, pawns in their pockets to continue with their self serving careers.
Best irony is from this article where the judge who shut down Biden's racist policies was a brown Indian dude who also happened to be the first put forward by Trump. Somehow the racist orange man wasn't racist towards this judge.
At about 0:27 to the end you can clearly see two black men in the audience, one of whom has a big grin as the woman takes a selfie.
Why, it is almost as if they were shoving her out for some other reason. And I guess it is a mystery why they were using "racial slurs" against only her, and not the other blacks in the audience.
There are only two possibilities here:
1. You did not actually watch the video you posted, in which case you are a fool.
2. You did actually watch the video you posted, in which case you are a liar.
You leftists are so full of shit. This is why you are the laughing stock of thinking people everywhere.
Instead of being an independent observer you seem to be totally reliant on the interpretation of a biased news reporter. Unfortunately many people fell into that trap and let reporters with an anti-Trump agenda interpret reality for them. I say biased because of his claim that she was being pushed by Trump supporters, and I observe just one man dressed in uniform pushing her. She doesn't look unhappy about it either, in fact she looks rather pleased. No doubt she now has a video clip she can post and hope it goes viral with expectations that people like yourself will interpret it in the same way, racist. How about, she's being a pain in the ass, ergo her ouster. I see two young black men who are standing peacefully in line and no one is ousting, or disturbing them. Further proof of my interpretation, not yours.
when I started reading this, I was thinking "what's his point, which side is he taking?"
I realized after reading through to the end, that this is what old-school reporting used to look like at places like "The New York Times, a former newspaper."
He extracts the key points that judges on both sides of the argument made, and presented them cogently.
Leaving his opinion to the end : 'this is just the start.'
I do have a beef about folks when they say "the pandemic caused businesses to be shut down." The state - not the virus - made decisions to shut down businesses. They designated certain businesses as 'essential,' with little exposure into the decision making process.
In my state, the gov decided that the state run alcohol stores were 'essential.' But not locally run bike shops which'd have tuned up old bikes, gotten folks outside and exercising.
Government is the problem, not the solution
Hey now.
If you don't like the problems government creates, just wait until you see their solutions.
or the pitchforks
Most feared words in the English language: I'm from the govt and I'm here to helps!
What cuts a piece of bread into 5 pieces? A government machine designed to cut bread into 40 pieces.
Funny how those government machines are supposed to cut uniform, "equal" slices. They always seem to come out ruthlessly UN-equal.
a tiny violin plays in the background.
Bullshit.
You're right. The most feared words: Silence is Violence. Be an Ally. This is not about you.
CIA to start preaching critical race theory to torture brown people soon.
😂😂😂😂
IT's easier to squeeze Amazon, Target, WalMart and other big boxes than asking for donations from tens of thousands of small businesses who don't give huge $ to political candidates. Target's revenue was up nearly 50% last year.
I don't begrudge them for making hay, but Governor Walz should have to account for the thousands of dead businesses in MN that he killed, let alone the 6000 dead Minnesotans, most of whom died in nursing homes that he himself had full authority over.
There's a reason why Amazon, Walmart, Bezos etc are all pushing for $15 minimum wage and leftists are too naive to see the long game. They think Amazon, Walmart are pushing for it because they really care about the poor workers lol. No, it's because that's an easy way for them to get rid of small business competition and undervalue the skillset of those who were previously making $15 and get the value of their work cut in half overnight.
To a large degree you're right. But if states had implemented better minimum wages to begin with this might not even be a topic of discussion. Cost of living is lower in some areas, but Amazon/WalMart/Target penetrate them ALL. Hence they are still stealing labor from small mom'n pop SBs even in remote/rural areas. Nothing in your comment addresses that issue just like nothing in the GOP's platform dating back to when WalMart shut down 90% of small town America's small businesses starting in the mid 90s. Something has to be done and states aren't doing it. What is the right's solution to this? Allowing "the free market" to decide is exactly what sent all the manufacturing (and tech) jobs overseas and allowed the big box chains to ruin small town America. Again, what's your answer?
The jobs wouldn't have been "sent" overseas, if it hadn't been "allowed" in the first place. Our government has been in the enthrall of global corporations since the end of the Cold War. They all want their invites to Davos.
Not only was it “allowed” it was encouraged by many fiscal policies.
Yes. Minimum wage laws ARE crony-Capitalism.
Cokhead Newsom has to answer for the more people who died in my county of suicide than of covid.
I imagine if the states did shut down liquor stores its lockdowns would have lasted maybe 4 days. Lot of drinkers in this country.
Yeah, it followed where the people allowed it to lead. that's why places like Marin County, California, are still in lockdown.
Good points all. In my state (CA) - specifically LA county (where, thankfully I do not live) outdoor restaurant dining was banned, but outdoor dining on location movie sets was okay. Tell that wasn't a political decision made for the privileged folks.
Tell that to Sweden.
You mean the socialist Sweden that went broke when it ran out of other people's money and reinvented itself as a capitalist economy. The Sweden that decided to let individual choice determine response to Covid instead of govt lockdowns in most other "democratic" western states?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Sweden
"Sweden is a competitive and highly liberalized, open market economy. The vast majority of Swedish enterprises are privately owned and market-oriented, combined with a strong welfare state involving transfer payments involving up to three-fifths of GDP.[28][29] In 2014 the percent of national wealth owned by the government was 24%.[30]
Due to Sweden being a neutral country that did not actively participate in World War II, it did not have to rebuild its economic base, banking system, and country as a whole, as did many other European countries. Sweden has achieved a high standard of living under a mixed system of high-tech capitalism and extensive welfare benefits. Sweden has the second highest total tax revenue behind Denmark, as a share of the country's income. As of 2012, total tax revenue was 44.2% of GDP, down from 48.3% in 2006"
Here in the USA that would be called "socialism" by a lot of brainwashed fools.
The one with the horrendous death rate and no better economic outcomes than its neighbors.
Just like businesses started closing in the US for lack of customers before any lockdowns.
You cling as desperately to your tribal dogmas as any lib. Your god isn’t real either.
That last one is an area where I found the Swedish example especially instructive. They did not wear masks and left all their businesses open, but despite that had a 90% drop in business.
I actually did not support the quarantine, (I do support non government mandated masks and vaccines) but I find it fascinating that when people don't feel safe they self quarantine. It should have been obvious, but since where I live it was required the debate was all about the requirement, but what the effect of Covid-19 would be on business even without a mandate.
Totally hypothetical at this point but I think people would’ve gotten over the fear as other people who weren’t afraid kept going on with their lives and did go out. Without the lockdown mandates, I think it’s very possible fewer people would’ve resolved to just sit in front of their TVs/social media where they were absolutely assaulted with fear & panic, and as a result they would’ve been much more receptive to the notion that the sky didn’t fall.
Apparently Democrats greatly overestimate the odds of getting sick from COVID and the percentage needing hospitalization. I find it interesting to compare the US to various countries in Europe and the UK, where I have family and friends and follow their news closely. Because the COVID news wasn't driven by partisan hysteria, while people wore masks when asked and in required areas, they were also very quick to stop wearing them when it wasn't necessary. By contrast, in the US even vaccinated people deem it morally right to keep wearing masks because its for the "good of society", adding an entire political-moral-virtue signaling dimension to the COVID pandemic that doesn't really exist in other countries.
Put it this way, when people got upset that COVID cases and deaths sharply plunged in Texas after the governor ended the mask mandates, we know there is a problem.
well did Sweden actually do very well?
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)00885-0/fulltext
I usually get the argument that Sweden has a relatively small population when the subject is social safety nets and M4A, but their COVID approach didn't work out too well for a lot of people, relatively speaking with population considered (about the same population in a nation the size of Houston or LA - or even smaller). So which is it?
Not to confuse you with the facts, but as of 6/11/2021, deaths (the only meaningful Covid statistic) per 1 million population: New York 2,766 Texas 1,796 Sweden 1,431
It is always comical to read comments by atheists. What religion do you imagine MountainMan believes in, bigot?
Are you a bigot towards atheists? (From previous excellent posts, I don't believe you are, M. Charles. Just pointing out here that one atheist's denigration of another's beliefs should not tar-and-feather other atheists, who have absolute respect for differing beliefs. My problem with atheists is they tend to be Authoritarian Socialists.)
Translation: You prefer authoritarian corporate capitalists and their cronies in power. Definitely NOT labor or the average, ya know, little guy like most of us are.
I tend to not bother engaging with atheists, but Sevender's comment seemed judgmental. I imagine he supposes MountainMan is Christian and he either dislikes Christians or anyone who doesn't believe in the disproven theory of spontaneous generation. I'm a Taoist, myself; so I guess I don't really care.
Opinion polls in Sweden support the government.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2022_Swedish_general_election#Political_parties
You're half-right. Sweden did emulate its neighbors' economic outcomes. But it also emulated their death rate, in the end.
The ultimate winner of the COVID wars was the US, which did the only truly meaningful thing: produce large amounts of vaccine.
No, I think he means the formerly socialist Sweden that now has a "mixed economy", which is what the vast majority of American "socialists" really want - kind of like a return to our own system in the 50s and 60s, but with universal healthcare and improvements in access to education. Regardless that it's a mixed capitalist economy, what most indoctrinated Americans would say if they were to look at Sweden is that it's "socialist" (despite the fact that it isn't by European standards). Free universal healthcare, a strong social safety net, relatively high taxes, free education (mix of private and public), etc. Do you disagree with that opinion?
Even though Sweden's school system is often called 'private' (also called 'free') it's still 100% taxpayer funded through universal vouchers, and there are in fact still government (local) run schools. Forgive me for getting down in the weeds on this, but I research education, so that's one area I'm particularly interested in.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/is-sweden-proof-that-school-choice-doesnt-improve-education
The jury's still out on whether their system works, but in some areas there have been declines - say, math fluency.
"In 2000, Swedish students performed well-above average on an international test called the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). By 2012, they were below average in math, reading and science. Sweden had the steepest decline of any participating country over that time period. (There were 65 participating countries that year.) In 2015, the scores rose to meet international averages, but Sweden’s performance remains far below what it once was. The drop has prompted a flurry of debate in the country about what led to the decline and whether the growth of free schools is to blame."
Back to that country's handling of the COVID pandemic, one must keep in mind the nature of their healthcare system. It's a de-centralized, but still universal and mostly taxpayer funded system that provides excellent preventive and specialty medicine. This is another topic on which the jury is still out, but Sweden was likely factoring in the broad reach and free availability to all Swedes of access to medical care if needed due to COVID. The other factor was likely the unique mix of libertarian attitudes and the collective belief that one's fellow citizen would do what's "right" to stop the spread. Such implicit trust in both the government (both regional and national) and one's fellow citizens doesn't exist in the USA like it does in Sweden. And trust me, I know I'm sounding like a broken record here, but again the jury's still out on how successful their policies (or lack thereof) have been. They did (perhaps still do) have one of the highest infection rates in the EU.
https://news.yahoo.com/swedens-third-covid-wave-ebbing-122540814.html
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)00885-0/fulltext
As far as vaccinations
Sucks that there's no edit feature on Substack. What I meant to say was highest infection rates in the Scandinavian countries, but still lower than many EU countries who *did* implement lockdowns of various sorts. Hence, my third use of "the jury's still out" on how well it really worked.
"Infection rates" is a meaningless statistic because it is driven among other things by testing. More tests = higher infection rate, all else being equal.
Although still subject to error (intentional and unintentional), "deaths per 1 million" is a much more meaningful statistic. As of 6/11/2021, deaths per 1 million population: New York 2,766 Italy 2,101 UK 1,874 USA 1,845 Texas 1,796 France 1,686 Sweden 1,431 Germany1,075
Sweden’s HDI value for 2019 is 0.945— which puts the country in the very high human development category—positioning it at 7 out of 189 countries and territories. The US is in spot 17. I have never been to Sweden but traveled extensively in the US. I am surprised the US is even in spot 17.
http://hdr.undp.org/sites/all/themes/hdr_theme/country-notes/SWE.pdf
Tell it to Florida and Texas.
Scandinavian countries: super low population, super low corporate income tax, super high personal income tax of 60% for anyone making 1.3x average income of $60k, 25% sales tax on everything, homogenous population with limited immigration, rich with oil extraction, relies on USA for defence. Sweden never shut down businesses for COVID.
Leftists proposal: super high corporate income tax, lower personal income tax, "what do you mean I need to pay sales tax!!!???", SHUT DOWN ALL BUSINESSES OR YOU WILL KILL MY GRANDMA, no fossil fuels, open borders where no one is illegal, illegals get free shit in a country with 35x the population, shut down defence.
> "Scandinavian countries tend to levy top personal income tax rates on (upper) middle-class earners, not just high-income taxpayers. For example, in Denmark the top statutory personal income tax rate of 55.9 percent applies to all income over 1.3 times the average income. From the American perspective, this means that all income over $65,000 (1.3 times the average U.S. income of about $50,000) would be taxed at 55.9 percent."
> "However, depending on the structure, a VAT can be a regressive tax because it falls more on those that consume a larger share of their income, which tend to be lower-income earners."
> "While Scandinavian countries raise a lot of revenue from individuals through the income tax, social security contributions, and the VAT, corporate income taxes—as in the United States—play a less significant role in terms of revenue. All Scandinavian countries’ corporate income tax rates are lower than the United States’ rate."
https://taxfoundation.org/bernie-sanders-scandinavian-countries-taxes/
The DNC is like the parents of a high school kid who just want to be cool so they say "Yes" to any request their constituents make.
Ive actually been to Sweden, have you? Stockholm is a nice place but there are still homeless people sleeping in those incredible streets just a few blocks from the statue of Gustav
And that homeless problem got worse in last few years because of the refugee crisis created thanks to the regime change wars.
Dont forget the rape epidemic they buried.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6095121/Eight-10-stranger-rapes-Sweden-carried-migrants-study-reveals.html
This is what I don't understand about "leftists". I come from one of those South Asian countries where girls and women are advised not to go out alone at night. It's fucking unsafe, I know how fucked up things are there. Yet leftists who claim to care about "women" don't want any limits or background checks and are pro illegal immigration.
Remember when Trump mentioned 1/3rd of the migrant women in the caravans are sexually abused on their way to the border and media "fact checkers" said false because 1/3rd implies 33% when the real number is 32%?
Maybe because they are not real lefties, but a billionaire-financed cosplay lefties? A real lefty knows that uncontrolled immigration benefits the capitalists because it depresses the cost of labor plus injects strife between the workers to they fight each other instead of those who exploit them. Nothing exactly new there, even Karl Marx wrote about it in those terms. Also immigration breaks down social solidarity - another useful feature exploited by those who find social democracy and social safety net too much drag on possible neoliberal profits. The uncontrolled immigration into former social democratic strongholds in North Europe and Germany for example caused much damage to fabled social safety nets there, which benefitted the richest.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/11/14/what_happened_to_california_republicans_141729.html#!
Pretty easy to see why the DNC supports illegals. They win elections with them. And with state elections for big states like CA comes national legislating abilities.
"In my state, the gov decided that the state run alcohol stores were 'essential.' But not locally run bike shops which'd have tuned up old bikes, gotten folks outside and exercising."
I never understood this. Does the owner of the bike shop not have a family to support?
It always makes me uncomfortable when government starts identifying some people as essential and other as not essential. That never ends well.
"Uncomfortable"? Like when some goon is about to apply some "pressure"? What you describe SHOULD be scaring Americans beyond belief.
NO private-sector paying work is un-essential. MOST public-sector work IS, including,of course, the choosing of winners and losers in the labor/owner marketplace.
If you read that last sentence again, I wasn't talking about an activity being essential or non-essential, I was talking about people.
100% this. Only thing anyone could have done differently is told people to take this opportunity to get healthy and start working out, losing weight and eating healthy, avoid smoking etc. But that would be called fatphobia and offensive in today's "big & beautiful" world. This is even more crazy in places with socialized medicine - where everyone pays into everyone else but is not allowed to present criticisms.
The executive orders from governors are what closed businesses. I know this for a fact because half the businesses in my area have big fucking signs up saying it and showing the order.
Indeed. The former newspaper ...
Below the halfway mark: 'The court explained this 𝖎𝖗𝖗𝖆𝖙𝖎𝖔𝖓𝖆𝖑 approach in the context of striking down the law's gender preference.'
But, it is a good article and there are merits on both sides of the argument.
The government had to be shut down, no FOIA requests were processed for example, but the UFO departments at the pentagon and FBI were operational and declaring UFO's real.
The state of Illinois had just made pot legal, so all the new pot shops (owned by political class) had to remain open as essential, but churches had to be closed.
These "relief" checks are literally the crutches the government hands out after it breaks your legs.
The bigoted rhetoric of Judge Donald is a perfect example of why the door to unconstitutional bigotry and racism should never have been opened in the first place via affirmative action. The cancerous notion that we should judge people differently based on the color of their skin is something that every decent, moral person should reject and abhor. The fraying fabric of our society is destined to be completely torn apart as more racists and woke zealots, like Judge Donald, find their way into positions of power.
It's why the chosen leaders in any Institution that purport to have Moral Authority with their constituents need to have a clear and convincing passion towards staying focused on their True North.
Once you get sucked off your perch at the top of the mountain by miscreants and malcontents, there's only one place to go.
Down..down..down.
We'll see if any of them are capable to stopping the free fall and finding their way to the top of the mountain again.
Watching Big Tech suck the hind teet of Joe Biden is rather disturbing in a number of ways.
I think the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment would take care of just about all of these programs, ultimately. Let the Left hem and haw about amending that out of the Constitution for once.
"nor shall any State ... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws"
I agree with your point. Judge Donald's argument was not well-reasoned.
There remains the question of how to address systemic racism, which has caused tremendous suffering in the U.S. (and elsewhere). "Reverse racism" won't work. Ending racism would seem to require morally elevating the human species as a whole, but how on earth can that be achieved? We seem to be moving in the wrong direction.
>There remains the question of how to address systemic racism, which has caused tremendous suffering in the U.S. (and elsewhere).
There remains the question of whether in 2021 "systemic racism" exists in the USA. Many, including myself, would argue that it hasn't existed for ~60 years when the last Jim Crow laws were purged from the books. All sorts of people have been left behind in our crony capitalist system. Trying to lump these people together into arbitrarily created groups and pretending that the plight of one poor suffering person is worse than the plight of another poor suffering person because of some "historical injustice" is worse than useless, its counterproductive. We as a people and as a society should strive to truly be "color blind" - the opposite of what race baiters and identity fetishists making up the racist "antiracist" movement seek. We should implement universal programs that offer aid and assistance to all people in need, no matter what circumstances landed them in dire straights or what their skin tone. By definition, class-based assistance will disproportionately benefit those who suffer the lingering effects of "historical injustices" - along with everyone else in need of aid.
The most "systemic racist" policy we have is the war on drugs.
Why are the "leaders" not ending the war on drugs?
Why are they starting a "war on guns" that will be just as racist as the war on drugs?
I think it's because they aren't interested in helping, they just want more control.
I have been screaming this since Floyd was killed and everyone started saying lets defund the police. You want to stop people from getting killed by the police? end the goddamn war on drugs! My god American's have given away almost all of the protections afforded by the 4th Amendment in the name of stopping drug use along with billions, probably trillions, of tax dollars to incarcerate people. Humans have been using drugs since the dawn of man and I find it highly doubtful that Biden's drug czar, what a title, who wouldn't want to be a Czar?, will be the one to end it but he and his cronies will surely profit from it. An ounce of pure heroin's street value greatly exceeds the price for an ounce of gold, if drugs were legal that price would drop, why legalize what is effectively very pricey gold that you can farm year after year?
*affectively very pricey gold....
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/biden-s-atf-nominee-exposes-administration-s-anti-gun-agenda/vi-AAKuSpK?ocid=msedgntp
A few years ago I had the pleasure of seeing Wes Moore speak on a couple of occasions, about a year apart. At the second event, I had the opportunity to meet and speak briefly with him. He is a very impressive person. Not once in those two speeches did Mr. Moore ever utter the words "systemic racism". In fact, he felt the issue needing to be addressed was a lack of "social capital" among certain ethnicities.
https://www.socialcapitalpartnerships.com/wes-moore
I agree with what you just wrote, in case that wasn't clear from my previous comments. With one exception, though - I do believe there is still systemic racism against black people and other groups in the U.S., though not in the sense of it being codified in law. That's not to say that the situation isn't better than it was sixty years ago in some ways.
On the other hand, the Biden policy that's the topic of this article is an example of systemic racism that was codified in law (or policy).
If you look at it from the perspective of 1% - it is extremely productive. Creation of arbitrary groups, handing them this or that token favor, pitting them against each other is exactly what they want to prevent any sort of solidarity that would challenge them down the line. It can come down even to simple mundane electoral policy - it is difficult to envision a political candidate today who could cross much of these imposed race/identity lines - unless of course an empty suit candidate with nothing but platitudes sold heavily by MSM.
That is all by design - creation of arbitrary groups some of which get more or less "candy" from the ruling class, and pitting them one against the other is the goal. The more such arbitrary groups can be created the better. Even the pretense is sometimes enough to create animosity. The latest example is talk about "reparations" - a completely bogus, unfair and illegal idea, yet it works so well to split poor / working class Blacks from everybody else.
"Systemic racism" is code for unequal outcomes, but only when that outcome favors white people. Correct?
I keep wanting to know what we are talking about with the word "minority".
Do we mean globally? Because last I checked, Asians were the majority there.
Do we mean within a country? Not all countries are majority white, are they systemically racist towards every other race then?
Do we mean within a state? Look at CA and lets talk racial makeup.
How about within a county or city? In the Bay Area go look at the racial makeup there and tell me who the majority is?
How about at a company? When I worked at a Korean company I was one of 4 non-asians there.
Just want to be sure we are setting baselines and rules here for what minority fucking means.
I know one minority for sure that no one can dispute. Only white males have given up their power and asked for more diversity. We have NEVER seen that in any of the other countries around the world.
No one is clamoring for mixed-race Koreans to be better represented in Korea. No one is bitching that more white people aren't in charge in Nigeria.
just want to make sure we are all on the same page here
That's certainly not my definition. I interpret the term in a straightforward way. As one example, I consider the Biden policy discussed in this article to be racist, whatever his administration's motivations may have been.
Yet mysteriously the solution to “systemic” racism is for whites to “do the work” usually led by smug white women.
A lot more people would do the work if they just admitted that it is just putting up a yard sign.
That seems easier than what I thought - generous cash donation to a group of their choosing
Not always at the point of a gun, but boy howdy it feels that way at times
And yet, Nigerian-Americans out earn Appalachian-Americans. How is this related to race again?
A dirty secret of systemic racism is that it doesn't exist with first generation African immigrants. Every year there is some story about the half dozen kids that got admitted to every ivy league school and it's always the same story. Nigeria, Ghana, Zimbabwe...never Philadelphia, Baltimore, Detroit.
https://youtu.be/qsy1YfJx2vg?t=84
This has been covered already by Bill Burr.
We need to find a new term. I agree with you there is systemic racism, but people always assume I mean it in some weird woke way I did not intend so I now avoid the term, but it would be good to have something.
Liberals keep appropriating perfectly good terms for their own nefarious purposes (including the word "liberal").
Affirmative action initially meant that firms and colleges need to act affirmatively to reach out to minority candidates to expand the size of the talent pool. Everybody could agree with that. Today, affirmative action means racial preferences; few can agree with that.
Ain't that the truth.
Combined with the dogma that leads to 1,000 word memorized response whenever a word triggers someone and it's a wonder we can still communicate at all.
The current administration and its followers has divided our people and, every other word that comes out of Washington is “racism”. It’s more exhausting as was Trumps flamboyant behavior yet not one Republican has the courage to criticize them in a big way. I often wonder if this 6T new infrastructure bill will include a Gulag. After all, it will be cheaper to beat the opposition into submission and get a cheap labor.
She is part of the Elite. So are the Obamas. So are the Clintons. So is anyone who went to an elite law school or rose to the very top of the federal Civil service. These programs are quite lucrative for those members of the Elite who come from the appropriate minority populations. These programs don't help the less connected members of those same minority populations.
Like George Carlin said "There are two groups and you aren't in the good one".
Shouldn’t we define systemic first. The system is racist. Which system. Economics, cultural, political? The whole thing. The US. NATO, the world? Is there any part of the system, however you define that, that isn’t racist? Is the system human created? Is it autonomous? I really don’t think that term can be refined so everyone understands it the same way. And if people are talking in different languages (believing only their definition of the word) then no one can build a consensus and resolve any problems.
How about the vast majority of the world where people will never see a white person in real life.
Right. How do we incorporate other nations/cultures into systemic racism? Or are only the Anglo groups capable of racism? I dislike twisting words, grouping them together and ending up with some bastard word salad that means nothing. So many questions, so little clarity.
Pat: That's a good point, also made by others here. I tried to clarify in other comments how I was using the word "systemic", but one of Merriam Webster's definitions fits fairly well: "fundamental to a predominant social, economic, or political practice" (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/systemic). At least that distinguishes it from "legally codified". To further clarify, I was referring to the U.S.
It's sometimes easier to discuss these things in person.
It seems to me that you would say the "system" is automatically "racist" if 51% of the population is white. Is that the definition of "systemic racism"?
So your statement would be; in the United States, our social, economic and political systems are predominantly racist?
Because the society, economy, and political systems are built by whites, run by whites, acted within by whites, etc. so they must be racist?
WOKE thought leaves us with a quandary. It has been said that punctuality, hard work, efficiency, and even math is evidence of white racism. If that is true, then success, integrity, intelligence, logic, and society itself is inherently racist. It is not a large jump to say that non-whites value tardiness, laziness, sloth, and the lack of thought or introspection. Therefore, the WOKE ideology is completely racist and those who accept its tenets believe that blacks are inferior and ill-equipped to survive in modern society.
We address systemic racism by changing the system slowly over time, as we have been doing.
And we further recognize that the mere presence of racially diverse outcomes is not evidence, on its own, of racism.
"Systemic racism" where there is scant evidence of actual racist acts (unequal outcomes is no proof of racist acts!!!) is simply evidence of a refusal to accept the cumulative impact of individual differences in effort, talent, etc.
I agree with your second statement, but there's plenty of evidence of racism causing inequality in the U.S. (among other places).
Your first statement is reasonable on its face, but it seems to assume that the "we" who will change the system will be free of prejudice. The state of affairs discussed in this article shows us how hard it is to achieve that goal.
A worthy goal that is hard to achieve should not be abandoned in favor of a less worthy goal.
If you mean that we should not use racially discriminatory policies in an attempt at remediating the effects of past racism, I agree with you.
If you mean something else, then I misunderstood you (maybe I need more coffee).
What I meant is your statement seems to say that it's ok to abandon hard goals because they are hard. I do not agree
Enjoy the coffee : )
Oh really? Perhaps you can document racism in college admissions, for example. Unless of course you want to include racism limiting Asian and white admissions at elite universities like Harvard and favoring admission of less qualified blacks. Of course you will respond that racism accounts for the lower grades and test scores of blacks. And that unseen and unmeasurable racism accounts for lower test scores because racism requires a single answer to the question what is 2+2? Anything to avoid individual responsibility.
I'd suggest you read the autobiographies of of Clarence Thomas and Jackie Robinson.
Except that "systemic racism" is a myth created by social "scientists" (I should know with a PhD in sociology!) to try to explain "unexplained variance" in outcomes for blacks v. other groups. If you refuse to include variables like group IQ differences in your models then observed differences must be due to some unmeasured variable. Let's call that unmeasured mythical variable "systemic racism." Voila. Almost like "proof" of manmade climate warming.
Real world example. Disproportionate number of blacks in prison. Since we can't include higher offense rate for blacks in the model, only possible explanation must be "systemic racism." Much easier to find "poof" of systemic the simpler your model. The more you add independent variables (age at first arrest, prior convictions, etc.) the more racial differences disappear. That's why "proof" offered by Democrats often comes from two variable models. Black students more likely to be suspended. Must be due to SR. More blacks in prison? Must be due to SR. More blacks in poverty. Must be due to SR. So easy to be a liberal Democrat!
Because in the US it is haram to mention class (poor people might get fancy ideas!), all the social pathologies stemming from extreme inequality, lack of social mobility, and gradual erosion of middle class that becomes more and more indebted and insecure are all lumped under "race".
It can be just as inaccurate and unhelpful to blame all of the ills of society on "class" (the Marxist approach) as it is to blame them on "systemic racism."
Let's start with an objective assessment of America. There is a lot more social mobility and a lot less "extreme inequality" than critics on the left grant. That's why millions would risk death to get here. I'll grant the erosion of the middle class especially the decline in family wage industrial jobs, but the average low income American today enjoys a higher (and more secure) standard of living than those in the "middle class' (whatever that means) of the 1930's.
Personally, I found the huge growth of govt and bureaucracy at all levels and the consolidation of media the greatest to our democracy today.
I am definitely not suggesting that class is the only to blame, just pointing out how curiously absent it is from conversation. I think that is "by design" because talking more about class (which cuts across racial and many other divides, including much of the "identity" sub-groups) could lead to some concept of solidarity which is something the owner class (30 million Americans owning 70% of the wealth of nation) would definitely like to prevent.
As for social mobility in the US, it is not that great, not even among top 25 in the world.
http://reports.weforum.org/social-mobility-report-2020/social-mobility-rankings/?doing_wp_cron=1622666337.3325340747833251953125
The main reason immigrants (esp. Central America) flow into the US is that their lives and livelihoods are under threat in their own countries. US policies (esp. NAFTA) that devastated small farmers (making their farms source of debt not income), "war on drugs" and of course support for various right-wing juntas that unleashed death squads and even outright genocides on indigenous peoples (Guatemala never really recovered from that) are strong factors. Of course, once in the US, everybody wants some of the "American dream" to happen, but data shows it is harder and harder to make it a reality.
Agree that class needs to be included in any comprehensive model. My head just about explodes when sociologists, policy makers, etc., who know better, revert to two variable models to make political points. Classic example is claim that women make 72 cents on the dollar compared to men. Anyone spending more than a half hour looking into it knows that is total BS when time in labor force, etc are added to the model.
"Race" is an especially interesting (problematic? useless?) variable. Is it self identified or defined by how others view you? Is it something in the genes? Or is it a proxy for subculture? What about "half blacks" like Barack Obama? Does he count as 0.5 black in your statistical model? What if a person is 1/4 black but identifies as white (or Hispanic)? Which analytic basket do we throw them in? Is an adopted black baby raised by a white family in a white neighborhood really "black?" Are African blacks who move to the US as adults and speak with a British accent scored the same on the "blackness" variable as native born descendants of slaves?
Why don't we start with defining what success would like by consensus? Definitions of success are shockingly lacking in politics because then we could hold people to them.
Reason is racist.
Sadly, I know of people who believe that.
I know, and sadly, they tend to agree with your argumentation re: race-based remedy.
I'm not sure what you mean. I oppose race-based remedies such as Biden's policy (the topic of this article).
But you believe in systemic racism. Which is provably false.
Nigerian-Americans and Ghanian-Americans out-earn White Americans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_United_States_by_household_income#Detailed_ancestry
If structural racism is related to *race* alone, then this could not possibly happen.
Unless there, in reality, is very little systemic racism. The hard battles have already been fought and won. All that is left is the racist race-baiters like BLM and Sharpton-types.
This won’t end well.
You are an eloquent advocate if White Supremacy ...
If you wanted to inspire a white identitarian reactionary movement, you could hardly do worse than close or restrict everyone's methods of livelihood by force and then only compensate non-whites.
It's almost as if the powers that be *want* such a movement. We've all been warned that far right white supremacists are the biggest danger in the U.S. today. They've even barricaded the capitol to protect against it.
They would fucking LOVE it if a real movement emerged. They're already gearing up to launch a war against "domestic terrorism." I think Glenn wrote about this a couple months back.
I wonder what makes them so convinced that their armed forces will shoot their fellow citizens?
Soldiers who don't follow orders would be an outlier if I'm not mistaken.
Orders to shoot fellow citizens are not likely to be obeyed. This isn't Stalin's Russia.
I would like to think that you are right but I wouldn't put money on it.
I would. I've had the discussion many times with real officers. They are afraid to issue the order. They aren't sure what would happen. They could get shot.
You just need to develop a stereotype which stigmatizes them as other, done in every war. The purge of extremists and the institution of Critical Race Theory into the military ethos is a good start. Also the Jackson State and Kent State shootings are illustrative. How about the long history of the Labor Movement. In the battle of Blair Mountain bombs and poison gas were used. And then can we really dismiss the Civil War out of hand.
The Nazis also tried to do the same to their army. It didn't work, and they tried harder than most. The atrocities were mostly committed by SS members. They had a real problem even with the Gestapo types, who were originally German cops and ultimately begged off of Einsatzgruppen service. For that matter, the Imperial German army (okay, mostly Ludendorff) tried its best to indoctrinate annexationist sentiment, also a nonstarter. You don't think these US soldiers haven't been hit with endless EEO and sensitivity training over the past 20 years? They are pretty close to immune to indoctrination. Look up SHARP training. They're still fucking and raping each other anyway. And using racial slurs.
Anyway, i've deployed with this army to various parts of the globe over the last 15 years and they obviously aren't who you think they are.
Nor were we in Stalin's Russia when the National Guard fired on unarmed students at Kent state, OH.
They claimed they were fired at. There is an interesting and plausible story associated with that. Anyway that is the reason the guard is not issued ammo for crowd control nowadays, and why the Nixon administration, of all people, assessed the guardsmen totally in the wrong within a few months. They understood when you start shooting at your populace, they start shooting back.
Or colonial america circa March 5, 1770, right?
Dont hold your breath is my advice.
Comparing the behavior of British impressed soldiers - the literal dregs of Great Britain - to actual Americans is not a fair comparison.
If it's guardsmen, as it is likely to be, you'll have a bunch of weekend warriors.
But it did happen (orders to shoot were NOT obeyed) in the rump Soviet Union. Remember when Boris Yeltsin jumped on that tank to address the crowd? The tank driver invited him.
Must read from 1941: Who Goes Nazi?:
https://harpers.org/archive/1941/08/who-goes-nazi/
I'm not taken in by that. Evans' work on the Third Reich (3 volumes, but the first two are more poignant in this regard) speaks to a lot of reasons why Naziism only worked in Germany and not elsewhere. The Nazis were not innovators - the components of their worldview and program were threads drawn from Bismarckian Germany and sometimes even the distant Prussian or Medieval German past. It wouldn't have worked in France or Russia and certainly not in the US.
That's not to say that there aren't future totalitarians in our population, but you'll be hard pressed to find them in the military. The nature of the lifestyle and leadership focus tend to push those people out.
The first step is to convince them the target population is evil or subhuman.
Was David Koresh really a pedophile? I don't know, and I don't think the soldiers who destroyed his compound knew that either.
i think the military/State will fail utterly in that first step. Koresh, as with any individual, is easy to defame. A free people are never evil/subhuman, and the military, at ALL ranks, are not that gullible.
When a U.S. military squad is ordered to fire on a large group of Americans, I believe you will see not just non-compliance, but open defiance and defection.
I think you're right about that, large scale military combat is very unlikely. My concern is that any sort of violent reaction, even at a small scale, will be used as a justification to peel away 1st, 2nd, and 4th amendment protections.
Particularly in the past year, we've seen state governments testing the boundaries to see how far they could push; shutting down churches while businesses were open; Congresspeople pressuring tech companies to silence political opponents; we've seen people vilified and subjected to lawfare for brandishing weapons on their own property when surrounded by mobs; we've heard the mockingbird media squawking about the "threat" of rightwing domestic terrorists; the feds building a theatrical militarized fence around the capitol to protect it from the supposed threat.
Will they send the military to shoot down millions of Americans? No. Would they use any sort of rightwing identitarian movement as a pretext to come down HARD and strip away more rights? You betcha. From reading rightwing message boards, there's a strong suspicion that the feds are trying to provoke them into action; and if no such action is ever taken, there will eventually be a false flag.
Maybe that won't happen; I hope not; but we can see how the chess pieces are positioned on the board.
You don't need violence to have a revolution anyway, and the military need not be involved. The template for revolution in the US would be Euromaidan.
It could have happened, say, if Trump won in 2020 plus we had a more dire financial crisis caused by the pandemic at the time. It would have looked like massive street protests mobilization, resulting in the media and elites deciding to "re-form" the gov't without Trump involved. There would have been resistance and aftershocks for years, but little to modest real violence. In the literature on revolutions there is little bloodshed when average age of population >35, and US is 38.
Read the "Look inside" pages of this, this is the classic academic work on the topic and very enlightening as to what is needed for a revolution and that we weren't that far: https://www.amazon.com/Revolution-Rebellion-Early-Modern-World/dp/1138222127/ref=sr_1_1
"When a U.S. military squad is ordered to fire on a large group of Americans, I believe you will see not just non-compliance, but open defiance and defection."
If you go back and look at what people were saying in 1861 it was the same. One senator said that when the Civil War was over, he suspects he would be able to clean up all the blood spilled with his handkerchief.
I would have agreed with that until recently that we had moved beyond a time when soldiers would open fire on civilians, but we have been fed a steady diet of "your political tribe is not human" propaganda over the last 10-15 years that this has changed my thinking on this.
I think a guy from the Mississippi, or Texas National Guard would have as much trouble opening fire on a group of Seattle and Portland protestors while screaming "take that antifa and George Soros!" at the top of his lungs as a North Korean soldier would have killing an American, which is no trouble at all.
National Guard in particular had no special qualms firing at and killing unarmed US civilians, here is one example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings
In the Civil War it was so true that they had to draft a bunch of foreigners - noncitizens - to serve in the Union army. 43% of the whole force over the conflict was first generation immigrant. Another 10% were former slaves. So white Union citizens - comprising something like 80% of the entire country minus slaves, were represented at the rate of 47% in the Union forces.
If you are getting the impression that the Union didn't have its heart in it, you'd be right.
In fact, I think that is SO true that that truth in itself will stop the occurence well before it gets close to reality.
I'm very serious about this: we are reaching the point where we may lose the ability to even have dependable armed forces. The growing gap in this country is between the elite and the folks who primarily currently make up the armed forces. That's, for example, why you saw heavy participation from veterans in the Capitol riot.
As the gap grows, though, in particular the gap in support for the wrong kind of overseas deployments (and formerly trusting vets who now know that their deployment to Iraq was a total scam are among the most disillusioned), we may earnestly lose the ability to recruit for the armed services in this country.
We've gone from "thank you for your service" to "f you for your ideas".
Two risks: one a loss of ability to recruit overall. Two, a more thorough extension of the light purges already happening, and/or recruiting being effective only from pools of a less fit pool of remaining willing folks - taking a job working for woke elite for $ but without the passion and patriotism that offset the need for higher compensation in our historical armed forces.
The contemptuous attitude towards our armed forces where I am originally from is awful. But that has been going on for 30 years or more. It's analogous to the Red/Blue divide - the vast majority of soldiers come from the red side. The only large-scale recruiting from blue areas I ever see are minorities within cities, who are looking for a ticket out. Sometimes a few PTI cases. One guy I know had a bust for dealing weed back about 15 years ago and the PTI condition was him enlisting. Since we're being more selective about who is inducted nowadays, that might not happen today.
Anyway, most soldiers never see how bad the attitude is in places like NY/NJ or CA. They don't come from there and their bases aren't anywhere near there usually.
Killing an maiming brown and black people in far away lands is increasingly the only remaining social climbing opportunity for brown and black people at home. You have to hand it to the Empire, it is really set up as a self-licking ice cream.
They don't need to be near it, because these days it's coming to them, courtesy of the current administration: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/house-republicans-critical-race-theory-training-in-military
The police in most metropolitan areas that were damaged by last summer's riots stood by and watched it transpire at the order of their political masters. Why do you believe soldiers will behave differently?
Actually that kinda proves my point. The police stood aside for their own interest. With no backing from city hall, why risk lives, career and even freedom. Soldiers will feel the same way.
Well, nothing deflects so well from the real divide in the society than injecting some racial strife between the lumpen proletariat. It would be truly scary if they united and realized who is their real enemy - https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distribute/chart/#quarter:119;series:Assets;demographic:networth;population:all;units:shares;range:2005.2,2020.2
Whats really important I guess is demonizing capitalism even though you live in a capitalist country.
Do some more class warfare and tell us how bad it is was that some people made $.
The real problem isn't the people with $ its the people with power doing what the people with $ say.
Is nobody living in a capitalist country allowed to criticize capitalism, or is just me? Kind of proves my point: as soon as "class" is mentioned, thought police jumps out and tries to shut you down, even on Substack comments section where we are supposed to have freedom of speech? In any case, much more consequential people engage in class warfare, and by their own admission with great success too:
https://www.fairobserver.com/region/north_america/peter-isackson-warren-buffett-kurt-andersen-anand-giridharadas-american-billionaires-business-news-73915/
As far as "some people making some money", that is a bit of an understatement too:
https://innotechtoday.com/billionaire-wealth-growth-during-covid-and-the-top-pandemic-profiteers/
Its the greatest trick the rich ever pulled, making the poor think having money is a terrible thing.
Take your class warfare bullshit and pound it in your fucking ass you piece of shit. I am tired of people moaning about someone else's success as somehow indicative of why they lack it.
Maybe it will be another one of these fuck the donkey intelligence racist scams they are known for.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Thomas_Rowe
Maybe so. The folks on 4chan are sure convinced the intel agencies want to goad right wingers into violence.
100%
Yep.
The demand for racism far outstrips the supply.
" . . . the ‘way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.’"
I've always felt this way ("If you want a color-blind society, be color-blind"), but just yesterday I read somewhere this very sentiment is an example of systemic white supremacy (along with having a conscience and principles and a strong work ethic).
These days what ISN’T an example of white supremacy? For a party claiming to want to heal racial divisiveness, no one is doing more to racially divide this country than are Dems and leftists.
Yeah it still weirds me out how such a 180 was done against the “color-blind” crowd, people who are so clearly inoffensive and yet have been villain-ized as enablers of white supremacy.
Certainly bad news for Jimi Hendrix, who espoused that view:
“I don't look at things in terms of races. I look at things in terms of people. I'm not thinking about black people or white people. I'm thinking about the obsolete and the new. There's no colour part now, no black and white.”
For people like me who grew up idolizing Hendrix and really digging songs like Sly & the Family Stone’s “Everyday People”, this idea of color-blind harmony being a covert tool of white supremacy is truly baffling.
All true. And it makes people of good faith want to tell them all to fuck off.
As my woke daughter tries to explain to me; it's no longer about equality, it's about equity so being color-blind won't cut it.
Wouldn't it be more direct for her to simply ask you for a larger allowance?
And when you give it to her, tell her, "Now you can go vote with your money. By the way, I'm tapped. A job would get you some more voting money, that is IF your white privelege doesn't get in the way."
Human empathy is a serious wildcard.
Oh, yes…only whites have a conscience and a strong work “ethic”.
According to the materials used by White Men as Full Diversity Partners (https://wmfdp.com/ ) in their training for white male leaders at major corporations like Lockheed Martin, those are indeed insidious aspects of white male hegemony. Since WMFDP are both college-educated and making bank consulting to huge multinationals, I can only defer to them on these points.
Take it up with KenDiAngelo.
As I noted above, ultimately, it's a complicated issue and while any form of racial discrimination feels icky, formal race neutrality has always had a way of favoring a specific group and increase inequality. Personally, I don't think people who fail to at least acknowledge this are operating in good faith or find that racial inequality is an urgent issue. That's the start of any convo for me: shit sucks and must be addressed and if you're gonna advocate for race neutral stuff then explain how it addresses racial inequality.
That’s not how the burdens work here. The government must show that the preferential treatment is necessary and narrowly tailored to address specific and intentional discrimination. It failed to do so here.
I know the burden. I wasn't talking about the opinion, more about values. This decision is correct and the law is unconstitutional. My point broader: the prohibition against racial discrimination (absent compelling state interest etc...) was enacted in a specific context for a specific reason (slavery and Jim Crow). But like I said, the point of recent social movements is that rigid race neutrality (even w the narrow exceptions) hasn't worked to resolve long standing issues of racial inequality. PERHAPS TODAY, progress, equality, or justice demands some or more discrimination favoring certain non-white groups.
Everyone who replies with "but the constitution" or "the 14th amendment" is completely missing my point.
The long-standing issues of racial inequality were resolving themselves right up until the point where the government starting taking a more active role in social engineering.
There is nothing wrong with inequality. The more we remove barriers to equal opportunity, the more inequality reflects effort.
Ironically, in a perfect meritocracy inequality would still remain, it would just reflect genetic differences.
Agreed. Gross inequality is not great and usually a sign that something has gone wrong in the system but to borrow from Thomas Sowell, who seems to have a lot of fans on this board, it would be strange if groups of people having different cultures had identical outcomes.
"Perfect" meaning there are no cheaters involved? Thousands of years of human history say there's no such animal. There will always be some (hopefully small) number of people who look at the world as a zero-sum game and who care only about making sure they get as much of the pie as they can by any means they can. May as well talk about perfectly rational human beings.
As a dedicated Jungian, I believe in racial traits and in the collective unconscious. I've read the much-maligned BELL CURVE and, having heard comments by LeBron James, it is hard not be be a racist. That being said, immigrants to the USA from Africa are often successful, hard-working, and literate. A friend who is a retired college professor once asked a black Somalian student how he became so proficient in English and an acknowledged scholar. The young man replied that he chose not to associate with black students born in the USA. Values and success are associated more with family values than anything else.
Or luck, the public mitigation of which will ALWAYS result in MORE unfairness. (Yes, MORE than the unfairness of bad luck.)
It would reflect differences in character, which may to some extent be genetic.
Gotta keep ‘em down to buy their votes.
So mean. Let's call it cultivating customers.
I can agree with the notion that a mandated "race neutrality" can result in problems being overlooked and ignored.
The problem is that there is never going to be a perfect, ideal world. Even under the most egalitarian societies there were still elements of inequity in some form, and it's because humans are not and have never been and will never be completely equal. Keeping the impossibility of any kind of perfect society, the real question should be what is the cost of "race neutrality" versus "race consciousness"? Which approach leads us to a better world?
Ultimately, the whole racial inequity argument is problematic because it's not really about race, is it? It's about black Americans. It's specifically about black Americans. It's difficult to make wide sweeping arguments on "race" when so many other racial groups are quite successful and doing quite well. Even the whole Latino experience is mainly mirroring the typical immigration experience, Latinos as a whole occupy the same niche in American society the way the Irish and Italians did a century ago. Construction workers today, the boardroom tomorrow. As we speak the second and third generation of Latino Americans are rapidly moving into the professions and managerial classes.
I'll be the first to acknowledge the black American experience has historically not been a good one. The history of the United States is ridded with systematic oppression, culturally and politically, against black Americans. It is the national shame. At the same time, the past 50 years has seen enormous gains in the position and acceptance of black Americans. Staggeringly enormous. Despite all the gains, including the first black president, we do still have many lingering disparities. And, interestingly enough, despite the major civil rights and economic gains, there's been distinct steps back in certain cultural areas (marriage rates, out of wedlock rates, two major factors that play a key role in building up wealth and stability). Black men still disproportionately interact with the police, on the other hand, black men still commit a disproportionate amount of crime.
If we want to have a frank and honest discussion about the history of black Americans and their treatment by the larger American society (which, frankly, has been going on my entire life and I'm in my 40s, we were already extensively discussing redlining and Jim Crow and the Civil Rights movement when I was at school in the 1980s), we also need to have a frank and honest discussion about the role of merit (why do some black Americans succeed while others remain mired in poverty), and, absolutely, cultural factors and to what degree are these cultural factors ingrown or a direct byproduct of racism.
The whole current dialogue on racial equity is only allowed within very narrow parameters with whole fields of questioning and topics firmly off the table. Which is why it's become so difficult and fraught with tension - we are just not allowed to talk about many factors surrounding black America.
And regarding your comment "but the constitution" or "14th amendment" also tells me you are missing a key point too. These are key ideals and promises that have been extraordinarily successful for a very long time. It does not mean they were faithfully carried out to perfection. The Civil Rights movement itself was very much based on the Constitution and forcing proper adherence to the 14th amendment. When you weaken the principles of the Constitution and the 14th amendment to allow "positive" discrimination you also risk allowing other forms of discriminations to flourish because the original principle is weakened. What is the difference between privileging one racial group, regardless of the merits of the argument, versus privileging another racial group? As long as any privileging exists, the argument against any other forms of privileging weakens. And that's the risk you take.
This will always be a hard sell, if using persuasion to advance it, and spectacularly counterproductive if using the force of law to establish it. There is hardly a better way to incubate an army of future white nationalists than to tell the current generation of whites to suck it up and accept discrimination because it's your turn, oh and also, discrimination is bad so you better not do it to anyone else.
Julien is the racist though. This isn’t about future racism as white nationalism, this is about current racism in the firm Julien practices.
Justice requires equal opportunity, but equal opportunity does not guarantee equal outcomes. If it did, I'd be challenging LeBron James for a spot on the starting five.
The Pilgrims arrived believing in sharing the product of their collective labor. Many starved that first winter. Only when individuals were allowed to keep the harvest they produced did they produce more than enough for the entire colony.
This fundamental truth has been repeated around the world for 400 years. We even see it in fables (grasshopper and the ant). We can deny it just like we can deny the laws of gravity. But jump off a cliff and you still hit the ground.
😂 Yes they were taught to farm by Calvinist Capitalist Pokanoket day traders.
Your point is that you don't have an answer and you are willing to participate in racism to see if you can find one - that is the entirety of your point and it is, frankly, repugnant.
The government cannot engineer outcomes, sustainably, but it can do its stated job and not support or promulgate racism. You have no evidence that you can create equality out of inequality, in fact all of human history shows the opposite, but PERHAPS TODAY will be different.
I get it. But a majority culture is not going to enable minorities without backlash. It's why Jews operate the way they do around the world - historically, they could never be secure as a minority that a pogrom was not right around the corner. So you save what money you can and keep your distance from the majority culture.
Let's do a thought experiment of a Jewish minority trying some of the measures tried today. What might have been the response of the local population, almost regardless of where we are talking about? I suspect there would be even fewer Jews in the world today.
After doing that thought experiment,, what do you think the chances of race agitators of today not bringing unforeseen horrors onto their fellows later?
Let's do another thought experiment and we no longer do a Census where it asks for your race.
Look, we're a "Mutt Nation" now with mixed marriages creating 60% of America's DNA.
Does anyone with an IQ north of 83 believe that slicing and dicing us based on melanin in our skin think this is healthy for a nation founded on All Men are Created Equal?
That's our North Star.
Equality.
Show me where we don't have equality of opportunity.
Show me where slavery is the cause of black on black violence in America that's accepted and normalized for the political left?
Show me where slavery has anything to do with 82% of babies born in Minneapolis to single black women and the resulting 50% graduation rates from high school?
Where does slavery say that teachers and police have to solve the problems that the black culture has caused?
The power of the Collective is only as strong as its weakest link.
Anyone have any doubts what the weakest link is right now in our American Collective?
"Show me where we don't have equality of opportunity."
College admissions and government contracting...
> Where does slavery say that teachers and police have to solve the problems that the black culture has caused?
Slavery would have wiped out Black culture. Traditions, family ties, ancestral values are all gone.
Taking the question off the census won't solve the problem, I assume you realize that. The issue is how people self-identify.
Why would you assume that different racial groups would have identical outcomes? That’s not even true within white racial groups.
Explain your point. What is unequal? The opportunities or the outcomes?
Please stop cutting and pasting. It makes you look like a paid trill hired to disrupt Substack.
Please go to hell. I did this exactly once and no one made you a moderator of this place. Kindly address the arguments or fuck off.
Was there an argument? You said that neutrality has always had a way of favoring a specific group, that anyone who disagrees is not operating in good faith, and that this is the start of the convo for you (which I took to mean that there can be no further conversation unless we at least agree with you on this). That's not an argument. It's a way of insisting that we start the conversation on your terms.
Neutrality must really favor Japanese Americans, a wealthier group than white Americans.
It even favors Caribbean and actual Africans over native-born blacks. It's like personal choice matters or something.
There is an essential divide between what you are suggesting and how I see things (yeah yeah, probably more white supremacy). We can certainly agree that racial discrimination was and is a thing, and certain ethnic classes of people have been disadvantaged in the past and present and that ought to be rectified. No argument at all.
But where you (presumably) and equity activists differ from me is they are thinking about aggregates and I am thinking about individuals. You can say, "black Americans as a group are disadvantaged," and that would be correct. But you cannot say, "this American is disadvantaged because he is black."
The problem with affirmative action and race preferences as government policy is they ignore this central fact. And more insidiously, by waving a flag of racial preferences they don't actually accomplish anything close to the stated goal of racial equity; these days it's the flag-waving that seems to matter most.
Yesterday Freddie deBoer wrote about this with regard to the SAT and college admissions. Activists are attacking the SAT because they claim it reduces minority admissions (assuming of course we discount Asian-Americans as an officially oppressed ethnic minority). deBoer's point is not only is that not true, but if minority admissions are less than what they ought to be it's because of conditions earlier in the lives of minority students that make their SAT scores lower (because, as deBoer insists, the SATs really do an excellent job of what they are designed to do).
He doesn't get into details, but I understand exactly what he means: instead of dreaming up racial quotas for universities and job placements, why not emphasize skills for life success throughout primary education, for all children, regardless of race? Isn't that what disadvantaged communities need more than quotas? But that's hard work and anyway the NEA and their cheerleaders in government have made it clear children and their success is of decidedly secondary interest to them.
(BTW, deBoer would probably be horrified by my invoking his name in this discussion. I believe but do not know he is probably a proponent of affirmative action in many areas of society. But I thought his SAT argument provided an interesting basis for emphasis on the importance of early education for all children, regardless of race).
So yeah, perhaps "the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race" is a little naive in the grand scheme of things, but as government policy I still believe it is sound (and fair), and better for the disadvantaged individuals we all want to help.
If you decide to launch a program aimed at enhancing outcomes in, say, schools located in high crime districts, CRT activists will try to block it even if it overwhelmingly benefits poor black children. Reason: Because it doesn’t benefit rich black children.
" formal race neutrality has always had a way of favoring a specific group and increase inequality. "
Proof please.
So... equality is inherently unequal?
Here's how equality works.
Every system and ecosystem in nature has a hierarchy.
In each hierarchy you can stack into 10 deciles from top to bottom.
In these hierarchies, nature never knows when something from the bottom decile is going to fight it's way up top, buf if you live in Georgia..you know that kudzu made it to wrap itself around your big beautiful oak tree.
In these hierarchies (including humans), we sort out by IQ, height, weight, muscle structure, and left vs. right brain propensities. Some people are born with grit, others have to learn it.
No matter, because in these hierarchies, you will always have Oppressors and you will always have Oppressed. If you move the bottom 10% up to the top 10%, all you've done is replace Oppressors with new Oppressors.
If you accept natural law, then you'll realize that if you're born with a low IQ or if you're 5'6"...you're not going to be playing for the Lakers and you're spouse it not likely to be 5'10" because that's just the way nature works.
Maybe if you're 5'6" with bad hair you develop a social media company instead while you look at any NBA full roster and you might find 1 team with 3 or more white players..that's nature...and equality..and merit at work.
If you want to challenge natural law, now you're thinking you're God and that, mon ami, is where we part company.
What you describe is not equality, it's the inequalities inherent in our species (as in other species). Equality in this context refers to equality of rights. The whole point is that we can and should transcend our animal nature, and not blindly accept "natural law" as our sole guide.
Needless to say, transcending our animal nature is difficult and, in many people, unnatural. As you point out, humans naturally organize themselves in hierarchies. The point of "wokeism" in corporations these days is not to eliminate hierarchies, but to change the distribution of race, gender, etc. within the hierarchy. The idea of eliminating or greatly reducing the degree of hierarchy is, of course, not even discussed and, I suspect, doesn't even occur to the corporate leaders. Our species still has one foot mired in its primate past.
And I trust no one - absolutely no one - to make these hierarchies and make them law. I would rather take nature over CRT Wokism "nurture" insanity.
Nature leads to more REAL equity AND fairness.
OK, I'll bite: What are those "inequalities inherent in our species"?
I was referring to the kinds of individual differences TrueNorthMN pointed out, in intelligence, physical abilities, temperament, etc.
So, in essence, you don't believe in science. Denier!
In nature survival of the fittest was applicable in deriving our many species, however that is no longer really true considering the devastating affects man has had and continues to have on nature world wide. America defines itself as a democracy, which is not suppose to be based on a survival of the fittest mentality but a sense of equality for all. However that is also no longer true. since a minority or people own most of the wealth in this country and through their generous offerings place people, politicians, in positions of power who will do their biding. An oligarchy would be the better term to describe us.
The group formal race neutrality favors is the competent.
"formal race neutrality has always had a way of favoring a specific group and increase inequality."
Hmmm. This troubles you? Why? Because you just don't like the consequences of neutrality? You want to put your thumb on the scale why? Have you ever stopped to wonder why some succeed and why others do not?
It’s a non issue. You aren’t talking about inequality, your want equity. Do you understand the difference?
This is a perfect example of leftist argumentation. Argument on the merits of a position is not permissible, only discussion of how to remedy the problem is allowed.
If as an individual one believes that a certain oppressed group "deserves" more than say, those of Western European descent, well then that person can individually elect to engage with that group. Maybe I want to support African immigrants by eating at Ethiopian restaurants, whereas I don't want my taxes to fund a group home for indigent Ethiopians who are here illegally, and thus relocate to avoid such a local tax scheme. Who wins? That little restaurant no longer gets my repeat business, my taxes are no longer collected, and I may lose a neighborhood I love. Those are individual choices we make to address actual or perceived inequality. The idea of a government mandate to force Western Europeans to eat at Ethiopian restaurants to ensure their survival (have you seen the photos of grocery shelves with product tags calling out "Black-owned business"?) is anathema to everything this country was formed to address.
>formal race neutrality has always had a way of favoring a specific group and increase inequality
So the Emancipation Proclamation increased inequality?
It’s not complicated, you’re a racist. It’s pretty simple.
Did you want to provide some evidence to support your statements made as fact or are you just a shitlord?
You can also read how the earth is flat. Reading something does not make it true :)
Remember Lance Amstrong won once in court over his lies about steroids.
https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/lance-armstrong-sunday-times-settle-doping-501277
Today no matter what you say of think you can't win. They made sure of that.
Yea, I saw that as well. SMH.
Interesting to see the impact on Vermont, which affirmatively denied the vaccines to white people.
Generally the strongest supporters of purely race-based preferences fall into one of two groups: economically privileged members of the newly racially privileged groups who are in it for the gibs, and whose rhetoric always references “centuries” of discrimination because they realize their pleas sound hollow coming out of their Beemer; and economically privileged suburban white women who don’t personally know any minorities who aren’t neurologists and stand to lose nothing from the law, but love to shrilly volunteer members of their ex-husbands’ race and gender to make the noble sacrifice.
That was funny.
I agree that most of the "wokeism" we see in corporations is performative (or even worse, disingenuous P.R.).
The company where I work, like many these days, has diversity and inclusion programs and a lot of talk of equality on Slack (a popular messaging tool). In one thread, I suggested that our company donate 5% of everyone's stock options to underprivileged schools (based on school funding, not on race), as a way to help eliminate some of the inequity that prevents many minorities (and white students in some areas) from ever getting the point where they can apply for high-paying jobs. That stopped that conversation in its tracks.
I made the same suggestion a second time in another Slack thread on diversity and inclusion, and it was also met with silence.
That is going all in on calling a bluff. Impressive.
I think Freddie deBoar captured this in a recent post.
To paraphrase, black people want equality and jobs? They get Aunt Jemima removed from the Syrup bottle. White women gathering to cry about their white privileged and fragility before heading to their Pilates Class.
Eavesdropping on $5,000 Anti-Racist Dinner Parties
https://www.msn.com/en-us/lifestyle/lifestyle-buzz/eavesdropping-on-5000-anti-racist-dinner-parties/ar-AAKrz7a
That never occurred to me. It's a brilliant observation and makes perfect sense.
I think a lot of our problems could be ended or significantly ameliorated by completely getting rid of the tax code and replacing it with a simple, low rate flat tax. Low rate. For businesses on revenue, for individuals on income. No exemptions, no exceptions, no CPAs, no lawyers. Just an enforcement arm; anyone caught tax dodging pays double for 5 years. Something along those lines.
Fair tax!
https://fairtax.org/about/how-fairtax-works
The FairTax is a national sales tax that treats every person equally and allows American businesses to thrive, while generating the same tax revenue as the current four-million-word-plus tax code. Under the FairTax, every person living in the United States pays a sales tax on purchases of new goods and services, excluding necessities due to the prebate. The FairTax rate after necessities is 23% compared to combining the 15% income tax bracket with the 7.65% of employee payroll taxes under the current system -- both of which will be eliminated!
Get a Tax Refund in Advance on Purchases of Basic Necessities
The FairTax provides a progressive program called a prebate. This gives every legal resident household an “advance refund” at the beginning of each month so that purchases made up to the poverty level are tax-free. The prebate prevents an unfair burden on low-income families.
Yes, but why siphon it through an accounting of income in the first place.
No refunds. Just stop taxing what we want to encourage: work, i.e. free-market determined wages, i.e. income and saved income (property). If we want to be wealthier, why tax it at all?
Just use federal excise taxes. The mechanism (corporate point-of-final-sale) already exists.
Why tax income or wealth at all? Don't we WANT to maximize wealth creation (and the concommittant faster rise in standard-of-living)? Why tax it at all?
Why not tax consumption instead? Exempt food. 20% Federal excise tax to replace ALL income/property tax (States could do the same at 5%) should be enough (maybe phase it in around $100).
The poor have two friends, and two friends ONLY. 1) The hiring rich man (or his wealth, which is chasing rate of return, and therefore looking to hire), and 2) a small gov't. which is NOT needlessly impairing the rich man (i.e. his wealth/income), and which does NOT usurp the wealth creation of either man.
I am brown and if I lived in Vermont and saw that they were only vaccinating non-whites, I would fucking freak out simply because to me it would indicate that we are being used as lab experiments.
No need to vaccinate a state where it's entire populace (White male bald boomers with pony tales) that wake up and kick off the day with 10 bong hits then chow down on some Ben & Jerry's.
Well done!
10! What a waste. Maybe they are not inhaling?
Posers.
Interesting graph showing white Americans in the bottom third. Why are they not disadvantaged? What about poor whites? Why aren't they disadvantaged? We do have systemic racism and poor whites are the target.
The UK offers a particularly hilarious illustration. The single most economically disadvantaged group there is literally white males.
As someone coming from Eastern Europe (since 2015 in the UK) I also am shocked to see the massive levels of homelessness (and that group isn't diverse at all - white males in their 30s, 40s and 50s in 99% of the time...).
You apparently just made up that statistic.
According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, there were roughly equal numbers of white and black homeless people in the U.S. in 2019, but since the overall black population is much smaller, the rate of homelessness among black people is much higher than among white people.
It's true, and important to note, that many white people struggle economically in U.S. society, but it's not true that they are more disadvantaged than other groups.
https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/homelessness-statistics/state-of-homelessness-2020/
I was talking about the UK. And, yeah, it was a hyperbole if it wasn't clear. It's 60% in London.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/381386/london-homelessness-rough-sleepers-by-ethnicity/
I misread your first statement about what country you were referring to. This thread started with jlpp's claim about the U.S. ("We do have systemic racism and poor whites are the target.")
In any case, the statistics you cited don't really support your contention that the U.K. homeless population "isn't diverse at all" (at least not for London). The chart shows a good deal of diversity. In terms of their overall population, white and black people are about equally likely to be homeless according to those statistics.
I think it's important to note that many white people struggle economically, and many are subject to prejudice (e.g., prejudice of affluent white U.S. coastal liberals against white "deplorables"). But it's obvious that, at least in the U.S., black people and various other minorities have been subject to prejudice and have suffered greatly because of it.
Reminds me of the great Neil Innes joke: "I've suffered for my music a long time... now it's your turn."
Do you solve the problem of homelessness by attacking it as a problem of discrimination, or by attacking its economic and social roots. Seems the latter solves it for everyone and the former helps solve it for some at the expense of others.
You apparently can’t read.
I am in shock. You mean they actually made a ruling based on the US Constitution? I would like to think this is a first step to ridding ourselves of the authoritarian/collectivist/statist rot that has besieged us- but that is probably wishful thinking on my part.
In this context it's mostly not wishful thinking. There have been US district court rulings on both the restaurant program, and another for farmers and ranchers that gives preference to blacks. Those rulings have been going in favor of litigants challenging their exclusion from the programs.
probably.
Maybe?
White Male Reporter SUES Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot for only accepting interviews with black and brown reporters! Lawyer Explains Suit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3w8mVLLhb0
It is wishful thinking.
That'll never happen because American's love their Constitutional Rights. There's that is, not yours or anyone else's. They have mostly made it into adulthood without realizing it can't work that way.
?
The constitution is WHY this judge ruled correctly. The constitutional rights is what Democrats (and RINOs) are trying to destroy.
I was not responding to the decision in this case. This is what he wrote I was responding to:
"I would like to think this is a first step to ridding ourselves of the authoritarian/collectivist/statist rot that has besieged us- but that is probably wishful thinking on my part."
I don't believe in general American's care about the Constitution beyond where it protects their interest. Just one example, but have you noticed that the press is far more interested in their right to publish whatever they want than your right to free speech regardless of the fact that both rights are found in the same 1st amendment?
Ah I misunderstood your original comment then.
Yep. Press doesn't actually care about freedom of speech or the constitution. Because they are not press. They are propagandists working for the CIA.
I struggle to see where Judge Donald intellectually justifies her rationale around her decision that the government needs to act fast to remedy something she believes happened 200 years ago.
These type of people (Marxists) are very dangerous to America, particularly when they find their way to our court system.
Treat everyone equally and demand that every person born in America own their own agency.
After that, we do things based on merit.
Otherwise I'd be making $1,000,000 a year on Substack or be playing for the Lakers while Lebron James sat on the bench.
It's time for the memory of Sandra Day O'Connor to show itself to this country, otherwise this tribalism hiding in front of a very clear Marxist/Leninist movement has the potential to literally destroy the American Experiment.
While we may mock the French from time to time, right now they are to be admired. Let's look to them to solve that which ails America right now.
1) Macron himself has told Biden "You keep that CRT crap out of Europe." They invented Viva LaDifference and Liberte...and by golly...they mean it.
2) France doesn't slice and dice their population in 31 of your favorite flavors. You're either French or you're not French.
3) France's abortion laws are the model for us to use for our own resolution of these court cases. Abortion is legal in the 1st trimester and after that, you need some very compelling reasons to obtain an abortion. It doesn't make the far left or far right happy, but it solves the problem and empowers women to align their Reproductive Freedoms with Reproductive Responsibilities.
4) And let's not forget that without France stepping in.....George Washington and America itself would have died at Yorktown. We'd have 20 different nations across this North American continent, each with their own President and Army.
Let's stop this Intersectionality Bullshit.
After all, when you slice and dice it all the way down to the core, you end up with.....wait for it....
The Individual
God Bless America and God Bless those who sacrificed their lives in service of this nation over the past 244 years to make all this beauty, wonder and opportunity available to anyone who chooses to avail themselves to these opportunities.
It is a sad day when we look to the French for sanity (just joking)
Well put. I would encourage both France and the USA to acculturate all immigrants. Common language, common culture. We are all Americans. Period.
Yes, that's what makes the French a lovingly peculiar people - notwithstanding the annoyance of the minority of racists among them.
Besides showing whites doing poorly relative to other ethnic groups the graph sort of disproved the concept that POC are disadvantaged at all. Why are Indian Americans so successful if we are so rascist?
Education. Respect and reverence for the intact nuclear family.
This is a nation built by 1st and 2nd generation immigrants (legal).
You can see this when you start to slice and dice Blacks into:
Black-Americans
African-Americans
Liberian-Americans
Somali-Americans
Kenyan-Americans
Sudanense-Americans
Eritrean-Americans
Jamaican-Americans
When you begin to look at the underlying attitudes of each of these subgroups, you'll find huge disparities in worth ethic, respect for tradition, loyalty to family, reverence for Institutions with Moral Authority and a serious focus on tomorrow instead of whining about how bad their life was 10 years ago (except Ilhan Omar, she won't shut up about it).
Very true. Senator Moynahan pointed this out in the 60"s when he was a sociologist. The breakdown of black families was the real cause of AA lagging behind. But the lft does not want to hear it.
Telling people to be responsible doesn't get you some folks' votes, they prefer to be told that someone else is gonna solve their problems, despite all the evidence to the contrary.
People generally prefer having smoke blown up their ass.
There should be a name for this like "the demagogue dilemma"
Sad but true
There's no question it's much easier to be told your problems aren't your fault but due to factors beyond your control. You're not a corporate vice president? No problem, it's because society is racist. You don't do well in school? No problem, it's due to racism. John McWhorter called it the babying of black America.
I do agree that to an extent black Americans have had to face life challenges that most whites never did, but it is to an extent and doesn't explain everything or justifies all problems. The real risk of today's wokery is the way it seems to be absolving black Americans of individual responsibilities and the encouragement of the mindset can absolutely make things worse, not better.
And what caused the breakdown of black families? Laws that incentivized that same breakdown.
The democrats could use a few new Moynahans.
Yes. More thoughtful people in politics and our society would be divine.
* Democrats, not democrats.
Very true. Ground breaking report
Thomas Sowells “black rednecks and white liberals” is a very interesting juxtaposition of culture versus race. I personally am much more interested in culture then race. I believe it to be determinative.
Culture certainly plays a role, but it's difficult to discern the influence of culture versus that of the environment (in this context, a history of racism). Native Americans are plagued by poverty and alcoholism, but to reflexively attribute that to their culture or innate characteristics would be to ignore the devastating effects of the racism and violence to which they were subjected. A group's culture can be degraded by the trauma of oppression and violence.
I have no statistics on this, but my personal experience has led me to believe the "Native Americans are plagued by poverty and alcoholism" is a trope. After all, the same lack of an enzyme to process alcohol many Native American's carry is also carried by groups such as the Japanese they descended from.
Delta Force, the premiere inter-military special forces unit is dominated by Native America's despite Native American's representing only 1% of the population. They are also over-representing in receiving Congressional Medals of honor and other military awards as well as in the combat units of our military.
The plague is not the culture of Native American's, but the Native American reservation system.
There's this old myth about America's staying in their small home towns generation after generation, but that has never been true. The most ambitious have always left to seek opportunity with the less driven remaining behind. What you see on Indian Reservations is no different than you find in small towns in West Virginia and New England. Generation after generation, the talented and motivated leave to seek opportunity while those who are not remain behind.
Over several generations this creates what you now have on many reservations. It's only more obvious there because they are identified as Native American areas. At the time the reservation system was created there was a fear and a debate over this very issue, but given how things had gone up to that point it was politically impossible to not give them sovereign land in this way.
Where I grew up, some of the smartest and most athletic people I knew were of Native American decent and none of them lived, or had any interest in ever living on a reservation.
"The plague is not the culture of Native American's, but the Native American reservation system. "
.
True. A late friend of mine was a bona fide Chief from Oklahoma(he called himself an Indian but never mind. Pre-politically correct days). Interesting fellow. He pastored a Church in Alabama during the early 60s. The Klan burned a cross in his yard.
.
My friend said that if you want to see a monument to the failure of Socialism look at the reservation system.
Only Native Americans are not subjected to any racism or violence. There are not bands of white gangs going onto reservations attacking people. There is nothing keeping them on a reservation. In fact their entire existence is subsidized by the US Govt.
Which might be the whole problem. Many groups in our society are paid to stay where they are
There is little violence but a lot of racism against Natives. Weiner water soup - look it up. It's the softer edge of a lot of negative sentiment.
But we have to respond to racist attacks. Culture is most certainly more interesting, not to mention indicative, but public racism damns all, and must be responded to.
Agreed. Racism is abhorrent. All racism
Here in the UK, white working-class boys have the worst educational outcomes of all, whereas Nigerian and Indian immigrants are near the top. Jamaican, near the bottom.
This ought to be sufficient to reject the UK-based race hustlers' claims out of hand, but no. I can't even be asked to find their response to this natural experiment, it's too frustrating.
And you now have a woke Prince descended from Alfred the Great lecturing white working class chavs on their manners.
Make no mistake, the monarchy has been targeted. He’s too stupid to see it.
you cannot question the dogma in the US either. Can lose your job.
You're hinting at a much bigger point, which is that racism can be afflicted. Let's say you're a white person who just went about her business, has a couple acquaintances in her life who are black - you know, most white people. Then one day a black person tells her she's a racist. She blows it off. The next day, the same thing happens, and the day after that. She starts getting pretty annoyed at being constantly called a racist. She wonders if the black acquaintances in her life think she's a racist, but she doesn't dare ask them. But she finds herself thinking about it, a lot. Now she's on the defensive and wondering what to do about it. Does she defend herself against slander, pretend it's not happening, or react angrily and play into the hands of her accusers?
The same phenomenon is happening right now with Asians - there's a lot of talk about anti-Asian racism, when for the longest time there wasn't. Does it happen? Sure. Is it something all white people are guilty of? Absolutely not. Are we suddenly, as white people, being put on the defensive and forced to react? Bingo. And Democrats only need a small minority to react angrily to get their headlines and push the division narrative.
I'll add that the reason this has worked so well pushing anti-black racism is that for decades - centuries - blacks have been told that they are discriminated against because of race, so whenever something doesn't break their way and it's a white person making the decision, it's because of conscious or subconscious racism and no other reason.
The household income chart Glenn included makes this a difficult hill to climb for race hustlers when trying to open the narrative to anti-Asian racism. In 2020, Facebook employed more people of Asian ethnicity than whites. That's a fact. But less than 4% of their workforce is black. Is Zuckerberg - who had more influence on the 2020 election than any other private individual on Earth - an anti-black racist? I think it would be right to demand that Facebook increase it's percentage of black workers to match the national population. Walk the talk, Zuck.
Tech Companies That Supported BLM Have Fewer Black Employees:
https://www.lacortenews.com/n/tech-companies-that-supported-blm-have-fewer-black-employees
Bloomberg source:
https://archive.is/WIhSp
Black and Hispanic young women now attend college at higher rate than white young men:
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/tables/dt19_302.60.asp
Asian women now on average earn more than white men in the United States:
https://quillette.com/2020/12/22/a-peculiar-kind-of-racist-patriarchy/
The median household incomes of Syrian Americans ($74,047), Korean Americans ($76,674), Indonesian Americans ($93,501), Taiwanese Americans ($102,405), and Filipino Americans ($100,273) are all significantly higher than that of whites ($69,823)
POOR whites - the one group unlikely to benefit from affirmative action OR legacy policies - may be the single most neglected population in the USA.
both good comments. Brainwashing is shortcut term for the above. College is becoming or already is just 4 years of indoctrination in exactly your scenario.
Yes, parents of college age kids like myself are constantly "communicating" with our kids.
There’s the awkward issue of the actual race of the perpetrators of anti Asian violence.
Just writing that makes you a horrible, horrible racist. And anyway, facts don't matter.
Remember in 1941 when all those Black American soldiers interned all those Japanese American's on the West Coast?
Then there was that Black MD run Tuskagee experiment from the DHS...
Wait a minute...........
Really, if you have to go back 75-90 years... I wonder who was running the country back then. Oh yeah, it was FDR, beloved by every contemporary Democrat.
So a little history,
the Tuskagee experiments continued through the 1970's so we are looking at about 50 years. Is your argument that White people wiped out all racism among them in the last 50 years? If so that's impressive given that racism is common to all groups (except White people apparently) and goes back to literally our earliest tribal reptilian brain we still carry with us today.
I have a more realistic proposal for ya. The statute time on the release of allowable state secrets is 50 years, so as they come out we do a rolling "oh, well that was 50 years ago!" despite no proof or reason to believe anything actually stopped 50 years ago. I'm in my sixties and every few years we go through another "well that was 50 years ago," which we have been doing for the 50 years of my life I can recall such a thing.
Now the FDR as democrat thing is what I thought you would lead with. We've only had the Republican Party since 1854. Is your argument that half the country was not racist until 1854 and those are the same people who became Republicans? Maybe it's that everyone was racist until 1854 when half the country gave up their racism and joined the Republican party?
FDR was certainly a democrat and a bigot, but it was J Edgar Hoover's FBI that worked with him to illegally use census data to identify and round up Japanese and intern them. Do you recall what party Hoover belonged too? I do and you're not going to like it.
Strom Thurmond started life as a Democrat and he was certainly racists (unless you don't consider joining the Clan a statement of racial intent). Did he give up his racism once he became a Republican? Perhaps if he had always been a Republican he never would have been racist and joined the Clan, or if he had stayed in the Democratic party he would have remained a Clan member racist? Even Democrat Byrd dropped the clan thing officially later in his career, so it's all a little confusing.
Oregon was Republican in 1861 and they proudly supported the North against the South because they did not want any of those slave owners bringing "dem' N*****" into their state. In fact, they actually wrote into their State Constitution that no black people were allowed in the State. I always thought that was racist, but they were Republicans, so that can't be. Can you believe a god fearing, apple pie eat'in back the blue Republican would do such a thing? Do you suspect they were closet Democrats since only a Democrat has ever been racist?
There clearly has been, and still is, a lot of racism in U.S. society. The fact that it's not purely racist (e.g., only white people are free and everyone else has to be a slave) doesn't disprove that basic fact. Nor does the fact that many white people in the U.S. also struggle economically imply that there are not racial imbalances.
What we need is a society that respects everyone and which seeks to alleviate suffering, regardless of race, gender, etc. That's not a popular viewpoint with either major political party, though.
A society that alleviates suffering will never exist. Ever. Never has, never will. And those that tried to maximize the *alleviation* of suffering of its people (e.g. Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, Kim's Korea) only ever maximized overall suffering.
We can seek to move toward a goal even if we believe it's impossible to fully achieve. We can't alleviate all suffering, but we can try to alleviate or prevent much man-made suffering. Anyway, my point was that I don't believe humans will achieve a world without selfishness, so I agree with you on that point.
The goal should be to minimize suffering on a societal level; not by fiat, but by individual generosity. The state cannot do what individuals are best suited to do.
In fact, the State can only make some things worse, like overall poverty.
Gubmint typically makes things worse, and to make it even more infuriating they misuse our money to do it
Because that's the goal. If everyone was doing well, there won't be a need for the state/votes/wars.
Precisely!
> There clearly has been, and still is, a lot of racism in U.S. society.
"Clearly" and "a lot" are totally subjective, and in most cases subjective terms can be exchanged with their opposites while maintaining the same degree of objective truth.
It's possible that there is a small amount of racism in the USA.
It's true that didn't provide evidence for my assertions, but it's easy to find and I'm not writing an essay on the subject. The presence of racism in U.S. history is so well-known and well-documented that it's not worth debating. As for the present, it's easy to find articles about redlining in real estate, racial bias in processing job applications, etc. Of course, these days there's also "reverse racism" coming from the liberal side in many areas.
> it's easy to find articles about redlining in real estate, racial bias in processing job applications, etc.
So the mere existence of those articles "clearly" means there is "a lot" of racism? In May 2021, I'm pretty sure banks and insurance companies want to make money more than they want to be racist. It would be surprising if they hadn't found some non-politically-correct correlations, leading to policies you call "clearly" racist and I would call profit-maximizing with unfortunate racial side effects.
No, it's the content of the articles and the results of the studies that provide evidence, just as in scientific articles.
One example is experiments where identical resumes were sent to companies using different names for the applicant, in which people with typically "white" names received better responses than those with typically "black" names. It goes the other way, too. I have a friend who is a Sephardic Jew with a Spanish name, born and raised in the U.S. who had applied for a job at a certain university department. He phoned the chairman to talk about his application and as soon as he said "Hello, I'm ...", the chairman said "That sounds promising!".
As for your example, you seem to assume that the correlations (maybe you mean banks treating black people as worse credit risks?) are not in fact due to the complex of policies you suggest are driven purely by practical business considerations.
I looked at this article, and can imagine applicants who talk about race are rejected because business don't want racial drama at work. That is not racism.
https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/minorities-who-whiten-job-resumes-get-more-interviews
Given how evil people think racism is, it surprises me with how little evidence they are willing to convict others of it.
If you take two identical crimes committed in the same jurisdiction under the same prosecutor and look at sentencing, White women consistently receive the lightest sentences and Black men the most regardless of criminal history.
Remember, we are not talking about different places, different crimes or different criminal histories. The only variable is gender and race
There is something called a "Navigation score," which is a closed sourced algorithm used it determine bail. Judges love it because they are techno-morons who think science means fair.
The Navigation Score consistently reflects this same disparity in setting bail for different genders and race.
To the extent we use terms like systemic racism, things like this is where it applies.
Most of us see women as less threatening than men, so your first example can be explained without racism and a disaparity in sexes is not unreasonable.
Presumably "Navigation Score" uses past outcomes for people with similar characteristics to determine bail. Just because you don't like whatever correlations the algorithm finds doesn't mean it's invalid. Do you think the programmers hard-coded in a penalty for being black? That would be grounds for a major lawsuit.
I agree that closed-source software is poorly suited for applications like bail-setting that require transparency. Neverthless, I would trust commercial software vendors more than academics or activists with a social justice agenda.
> "There clearly has been, and still is, a lot of racism in U.S. society."
Yep, 100% correct. Lots of racism from the Democrats towards everyone. Racist towards whites, especially if male, racist towards blacks who don't tow the democrat line, racism against asians who oppose race based discrimination in Universities and so on. Lots of racism thanks to the historic party of racism and KKK, segregation, Jim Crow. The only way to get rid of this racism is by destroying the democrat party.
What this graph shows is that racism per se doesn’t clearly matter as much as people say it does. Regardless of how “racist” America is.
How would you go about that?
We could start by not accepting that everybody and everything is racist.
They probably are though. it’s just not functional in civil society to let primal tribal behaviour control our minds and actions
Man, you are right on target.
Fortunately, the inimitable Titania McGrath has compiled a partial list of the countless things that are racist:
https://twitter.com/TitaniaMcGrath/status/1386313839428386821
A smattering from the thread:
- Jesus
- Milk
- Rice
- Band-aids
- Butter
- Toothpaste
- Climate Change
- Knitting
- Breweries
- Salt
- Dogs
- Shoes
- Robots
- Baseball
- Surfing
- Mermaids
- Seatbelts
- Rocks
- Dinosaurs
Don't worry, everything is backed up by the cutting-edge journalism we've all come to expect from the MSM.
Everyone should go through the entire thread and then contemplate their role in this terrible situation.
Titania is my Hero(ine) - depending on whether gender modification is discriminatory or if gender neutrality is preferred. Given that gender is a choice...
This is gold!
A parody character does better journalism than CNN. Nice.
If you're asking how I would go about achieving a society that respects everyone and which seeks to alleviate suffering, I don't have a solution. I decided a long time ago that there is no solution, though I tend to be pessimistic about such things.
However, I do think we as individuals should strive to behave in a way that moves us toward that goal. I don't actually have much hope for the human species (I think we'll likely nuke ourselves into oblivion sometime within the next 500 or 1,000 years at the outside), but I am hopeful about the future state of the cosmos, as silly as that may sound to some.
I've come to the same conclusion George Orwell did on this topic. Not only do I have no solution, but people really aren't interested if it's going to cost them anything and this goes well beyond just race.
Sure, we will do the performative stuff if it doesn't cost us too much and it's not inconvenient, but at the end of the day we all want to buy our Chocolate and Poultry for as cheap as possible regardless of what that means in human lives or farm conditions on the other end. We protest the Iraqi war over oil, then get in our air conditions suburban and drive home to our 10,000 square foot home we keep like a meat locker in the summer and a furnace in the winter.
Oscar Wilde famously had a character in Dorian Gray state "I would do anything to get in shape, anything at all except eat right, exercise or go to bed early."
That generally captures our attitude towards marginalized groups. We are for equality as long as it doesn't cost us anything important.
An American individual has the right to be a racist. Said individual is NOT free to initiate the use of force against an individual, including those of different race.
Time and continued racial mixing will end racism in individuals, naturally.
Of all the human foibles out there, racism doesn't even make my top 5. I know, it's all we are supposed to care about, but you need to ignore a lot of other human flaws if you are going to make that your #1 concern. As long as they have no institutional power to set policy for others, follow your own bliss.
"Time and continued racial mixing will end racism in individuals, naturally."
Yes, we will be sure to come up with entirely different ways to divide and marginalize people between groups.
You can take the monkey brain out of the jungle.........
The only way to do that is to return to a sense of shared values. Right now that seems impossible.
Bear in mind that the population of the United States is predominantly white (even without including Hispanics, who are often white but have Hispanic names) and is far more diverse than other economic groups. Asians, to a large extent, are in the medical field, in the case of Indians, and high tech. Furthermore, many whites live in rural areas where wages are much lower. As for us being "racist," that's a political opinion used by Democrats to attract votes.
I understand but it makes it hard to accept the critical race theory nonsense. How did people from India succeed in those competitive fields if we are racist? Seems like discrimination would keep them out?
Finally, a glimpse of sanity from the bench. What part of "equal protection" does the left not understand?
Sadly, one of the three judges ruled in favor of the Biden discriminatory carve out.
Even if one agreed that it is ok to use racist discrimination to redress prior historical discrimination (in other words, you will be punished because you are white because 100 years ago other white people, completely unrelated to you, did something bad to black people who may be completely unrelated to those who will benefit from the discrimination against you. Got that? And according to the SCOTUS, that's ok), the Biden carve out is so flawed it should have been over-turned anyway.
This kind of thinking can so easily lead to practices like we find in Halifax, Nova Scotia where one of the city council positions can only be voted on by black people. Think it can't happen here? Think again.
My white ancestors were Irish. Do I get money for the "no Irish" signs they had to deal with? The entire premise is crazy.
"Alright, the n_____s can join up, but NOT the Irish!" paraphrase of Hedley Lamar henchman in Blazing Saddles, a send-up of racists and racism that would not clear today's (over) censors.
Btw, those no-Irish signs were put up by my Scottish ancestors. I refuse to pay reparations. (I've got Irish, too. Can I call it a wash?)
Exactly.
Sad that the law was even passed. Democrats encourage racism.
Last year California voted to repeal the "anti discrimination" amendment. It passed the house and senate but fortunately FOR NOW failed in the election (43% still voted to repeal it). Just read who the supporters are and who opposes it:
https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_16,_Repeal_Proposition_209_Affirmative_Action_Amendment_(2020)
Also Biden dropped the lawsuit against universities discriminating against asians and whites as soon as he took office:
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/03/doj-drops-suit-accusing-yale-of-discriminating-against-white-asian-students.html
Also this "asian" lawsuit against universities also often lumps in south asian (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal etc) into the "asian" category as convenient because Indians and Pakistanis are also quite high achievers, so they get discriminated against too.
If people woke up to the fact that they are actually voting for racism while crying about racism, then the world would be a better place.
The one constant in their racist history. One could say the Dems are very conservative in their views on race.
Almost certain we would have got a very different decision from the Ninth Circuit.
Ninth went rightward under DJT. The Ninth Circuit could very well have written this decision.
The federal courts/SCOTUS will be DJT's greatest legacy. It may be the only thing standing between rationality and lunacy.
The 9th was never as liberal as people imagined, but the recent change had more to do with the retirement after 32 years of Alex Kozinski than anything else. He was a big supporter of the Bill of Rights, You know, your 4th amendment right against illegal search and seizure, your 1'st amendment right to free speech and your 5th and 6th amendment right to a fair trial. He would also openly criticize prosecutors who lied, cheated and hid evidence in order to get a conviction against someone who was wrongly convicted of a crime.
Here was his take on the 2nd amendment:
“All too many of the other great tragedies of history – Stalin’s atrocities, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Holocaust, to name but a few – were perpetrated by armed troops against unarmed populations. Many could well have been avoided or mitigated, had the perpetrators known their intended victims were equipped with a rifle and twenty bullets apiece, as the Militia Act required here. If a few hundred Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto could hold off the Wehrmacht for almost a month with only a handful of weapons, six million Jews armed with rifles could not so easily have been herded into cattle cars.
Glad we finally got rid of that monster. That Bill of Rights was such a nuisance. It's good to now have judges on the 9th willing to completely disregard it.
Gotta back the blue!
Thank you, M. Areslent. But I go by decisions rendered. I am ignorant of process. Perhaps you can tell me why the Ninth Circuit previously had more decisions reversed (I believe by far, but am I wrong about that also?). Really I should know, for all the spouting I do, but was it Mr. Kozinski's fault for the choice of review perhaps? Didn't other retired justices have an effect on the direction of the Ninth (An outlier among the curcuits, I believe.)
And what aspersions you cast! Tell me please which 9th circuit judge(s) considers the Bill of Rights a nuisance?
And what do the police, or the support of them, have to do with the courts per se?
Decisions rendered are meaningless without looking at the process and what the court was being asked to decide, which is what made the ninth such a popular whipping boy for loud mouths with no understanding of the law while judge Kozinski was the presiding judge. Let me give an example:
A police officer decides he doesn't like a guy for whatever reason, perhaps he stole his girlfriend. The cop goes to this guys house, claims he smells marijuana and uses that as an excuse for a warrantless search of the place. During the search the police officer finds an illegal gun and arrest the owner. the trouble is we learn later that the resident does not smoke marijuana, never has and has no marijuana in the house, or anywhere else.
This is called "Fruit from the poison tree," meaning the police found a crime, but did it by lying and violated the 4th amendment to do it. Happens all the time. The court is asked will this conviction stand?
On Perry Mason the answer is no, the evidence was obtained illegally so the crime will not stand. In real life, judges often ignore the 4th amendment and invent some excuse why what the police did was fine regardless of who they did it. Think drug dogs, which are essentially a free pass to violate the 4th amendment.
Judge Kozinski was the guy who refused to play along, which means he was pilloried by loud mouths with no understanding of the law for "letting a guy get away with owning an illegal gun!"
Because this is the exception, judge Kozinski was often overturned for following the Constitution when being reviewed by judges that did not.
We have parallel construction, Qualified and Absolute Immunity, Terry Stops, Good intent for cops, Civil internment, mandatory minimums and a dozen other court decisions that are clear violations to the the Constitution designed to place restraints on what the police can and cannot do. Judge Kozinski would not play along. He continued to defend the Constitution when all the judges above and below him were more interested in defending the rights of the police to arrest someone over the rights of citizens under the Constitution.
I consider it a mark of honor to judge Kozinski and a public shame to the higher courts that he was overturned so often for enforce the Constitution against the State.
Good point.
I would suggest that Justice Donald have a short conversation with Thomas Sowell on how and why certain groups succeed, and why even if you "spread the wealth" to specific minorities, in the end it will make no long term difference.
Yes, let her talk to a Stepin Fetchit.
Not at all surprising that the single most racist thing I have read online all year comes from the social left.
Oh, yes…must not offend one of the right’s favourite Good Little Negroes™️.
Vile shit.
My guess is you have never read any of his books. If you had you would not make such statements. You are one of those cliff notes tribal flunkies. You are disgusting.
I agree, people are very quick to accuse someone of racism based on nothing. They will bandy that word about until it has no meaning.
If you must look down your nose, kindly blow it, first.
How profound, and vacuous. Canucks going to Canuck I guess.
Democrats have always been, and continue to be racists. It is shocking to me that ANY bill this racist was passed. It is shocking to me that any judge with the faintest familiarity with the constitution could uphold it. We are in REAL TROUBLE. It seems the elites want a race war. It will not be pleasant.
We are in real trouble already: Last year California voted to repeal the "anti discrimination" amendment. It passed the house and senate but fortunately FOR NOW failed in the election (43% still voted to repeal it). Just read who the supporters are and who opposes it:
https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_16,_Repeal_Proposition_209_Affirmative_Action_Amendment_(2020)
Also Biden dropped the lawsuit against universities discriminating against asians and whites as soon as he took office:
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/03/doj-drops-suit-accusing-yale-of-discriminating-against-white-asian-students.html
Also this "asian" lawsuit against universities also often lumps in south asian (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal etc) into the "asian" category as convenient because Indians and Pakistanis are also quite high achievers, so they get discriminated against too.
If people woke up to the fact that they are actually voting for racism while crying about racism, then the world would be a better place.
How ironic that the racial justice seeds sown throughout the Obama administration to supposedly create a garden of opportunity for historically oppressed people have instead resulted in a quagmire of reverse discrimination and ever-increasing racial and ethnic divisions.
Obama set us back decades. Divisive race hustler
Who could've seen that coming.
If we agree that any system will have flaws, then the obvious choice is to err on the side of equal treatment.
If I knew that one business was given special money because of the owner's race or gender, and their neighbor was given the shaft because of their skin color or gender, well, I'd go to the place that got screwed over by racism. I won't support that. I think these government programs will backfire.
Uber and a bunch of WOKE companies did this last year. Uber, Apple etc created specific sections in their apps of "Minority owned businesses". Guess what this tells me. Go somewhere else which isn't being treated superiorly.
Every since the day President Biden was on TV talking about an EO that was to give special privileges to certain races based on ‘equity’ I have struggled to understand the sanity & legality of it. All I’ve ever known is that it was illegal to discriminate against people based on their race and or sex. That made perfect sense to me. I’m not an intellectual just a common person and I’m grateful to see the way this Judge decided this. It’s simply my opinion that equity is the opposite of equality. As far as I know our Constitution was based on equality. People called President Trump racist at times, but I never knew of him supporting any legislation that blatantly specified racism as the measure of assistance to anyone in the country. I hope the decision stands!
Trump was many things but definitely not racist.
Whatever "racist" means today.
The fact that you're even asking might be suspect. I suggest you immediately read white fragility and place a lawn sign in the front of your house stating "This House Believes Black Lives Matter, This House Believes no one is Illegal and on and on" Good luck my friend.
My yard sign says "Not My President" "Resist Election Fraud".
Democrats constantly called him racist. I can’t tell you why.
It's their go-to insult. It doesn't have to make sense.
I totally agree.
I think many on the woke left purposefully substituted equity for equality, because they don't want the latter. Of course, as with their effort to redefine racist to fit CRT, they don't mean equity as defined for hundreds of years in the sense of fairness.
Yes. The word equity is very dangerous and the language police will ensure it becomes the law of the land. It is already being aggressively adopted by government and corporations.
Except Lizzie Warren and AOC *hate* private equity. What's up with that?
To have equity, one must enforce unfairness. No one is "equal."
It's not simply your opinion that equity is the opposite of equality. It is a fact. The word equity sounds similar to the word equality (this is why it's a Trojan horse.) And so, according to all the liberals who never bothered to interrogate the distinction between equity and equality, only MAGA hat wearing racists could be opposed to equity. The Good People believe in fairness, don't we?
"As far as you know" -- and again, you'd be correct -- the Constitution is indeed based on equality. But CRT doesn't care about the Constitution. Its explicit goal is to dismantle the system. No system, no Constitution. Easy!
This court decision gives me some hope, but it's only round one of a long battle to come.
Democrats are, and always have been, racist to the core.
They are the party of slavery, of Jim Crow, segregation and the KKK [1, 2].
When they lost the plantations, it took them awhile to recover, but starting with LBJ [3], they implemented what we in the reality-based community call The Quadruple Whammy, that has destroyed the black family, resulted in mass incarceration and unemployment of blacks, and created generational dependence upon government that has translated into an enormous constituency.
- Welfare, which penalizes marriage and rewards fecundity out of wedlock.
- Government "education", where the majority of graduates are illiterate and innumerate.
- Minimum wages, which price unskilled and uneducated blacks out of entry-level jobs.
- The War on Drugs, which has caged untold millions of blacks.
And of course, one might add that Dems have destroyed pretty much every city they've seized control of. Just look at Baltimore, Detroit, and Chicago where their ridiculous "gun control" nonsense has resulted in a never-ending murder spree in the black community, with many of the victims children. [4, 5]
The blinding hypocrisy of listening to Dems sanctimoniously blather on about "systemic racism" is just nauseating, when the combination of their policies has kept blacks uneducated, impoverished and imprisoned.
It defies belief that anyone, but particularly blacks, would ever vote Democrat. Malcom X knew the truth: “The white liberal is the worst enemy to America, and the worst enemy to the black man." [6,7]
And here we are, again and as usual, with Dems favoring people based upon race. The racism is eternal, the only thing that changes is the race.
This is why many of us call the GOP the stupid party, but the Dems the evil party.
*******
[1] Here is a picture of Biden in solidarity with Robert Byrd, founder of a KKK Klavern:
https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/herald-dispatch.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/7/20/7204c3cf-b6c7-5c97-88b5-aae3ae159940/5620c689ecf64.image.jpg?resize=1200%2C791
[2] Here is Tulsi Gabbard exposing Kamala Harris as a hypocrite and liar:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cfp_IIdVnXs
[3] I'll have them n****rs voting Democratic for the next two hundred years.
~ Lyndon B. Johnson, speaking to two governors about his true motivations regarding his support of civil rights legislation, while aboard Air Force One, as described in Ronald Kessler's book, Inside the White House.
[4] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/chicago-children-killed-by-gun-violence-highlighted-in-white-house-press-briefing/ar-BB16A0Hw
[5] But of course, Dems have no problem killing children. No more proof is needed than President Corn Pop nominating the psychopathic David Chipman to head the ATF goon squad. This monster was involved with the Waco massacre where the Feds killed some 82 people, including 25 children, burning them alive.
[6] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/8869214-the-white-liberal-is-the-worst-enemy-to-america-and
[7] Malcolm X on Liberals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjS0ZVa8oyI
Not to mention, and perhaps you did, their utter contempt for Trump's base, and their willingness to define millions of people as racist, xenophobes, homophobes and sexists, based solely on their support for Trump in the 2016 election. They are using these "deplorables" to call the riot at the capital an insurrection, and further an authoritarian agenda under the guise of liberalism. I've seen people who have been republicans their whole lives become republicans for Biden because they hated the face Trump put on their party, as well as their elitist hate for his base. Yes the democrats have a racist past and one that was on display during the Clinton years, with Biden's crime bill, and the Welfare reform act. The democrats pretend to be liberal, ergo, give racial and women preference while at the same time they blatantly sideline the liberals in their own party, and pander to the corporate world that feeds their campaigns and whose agenda they push, yet they can still get people to believe in their righteousness.
Everything they say is a lie.
Even their hijacking of the term "liberal" to describe themselves. The word comes from the latin "liber", which means free.
Democrats are authoritarian socialists - what Mussolini termed "corporatist". This is close to the exact opposite of freedom - government taxing and regulating pretty much everything, and abridging fundamental rights like speech, association, religion and self-defense.
Calling the Jan. 6th riots an "insurrection" is just more leftist bullshit. The Trumpists were unarmed and had no intention of toppling the government. Now the Dems are persecuting the participants in blatant violation of due process.
These people are the mortal enemy of freedom and prosperity.
After the democrats assault on Trump I'm no longer a registered democrat, and if I'm honest long before Trump I came to mistrust the party. Biden, I never liked. They proclaim to be liberal, since they support gays, and abortion, etc, but if anything they sideline every liberal in their party. What they did to oust Trump, all the lies, the deceit, made me really loathe them. I'm surprised sometimes at the degree of my antipathy towards them.
I am no fan of Trump and did not vote for him, but during his campaign and presidency I was routinely accused of being a "trumper" by my Dem friends and family for daring to question the endless stream of ridiculous bullshit leveled against him.
What I find particularly and darkly amusing is that in 2016, so many of them believed (and many still do!) in the utterly preposterous fairy tale that Trump was Putin's stooge and that together they rigged the election, but now any mention of election "irregularities" is completely verboten.
Same here, and in my case the verbal attacks on me by two family members and a childhood friend caused a total breach in those relationships, and all because I didn't vote for Clinton, and wasn't all over Trump with their elitist hate. I found most left wing sites to be dysfunctional in that regard as well. People believed in Russia-gate, which was no more then a mindless acceptance of lies spewed by the democrats and their buddies on CNN, MSNBC and pretty much everyone on the so called left. During the whole four years Trump haters seemed to adopt an authoritarian mindset that accepted everything and anything they were told, and that includes those that pushed those lies.
If only my soon to be ex husband would at least try to understand any of this lol. He's a die hard, true blue no matter what, Democrat. And I apparently am your worst nightmare as an American citizen for not being one lol.
What the media and the establishment have done to the fabric of families and friends is unforgivable. The divide they're purposefully and continually created has lead to great grief for us all. And that was and is their entire goal. Because without unity, with numbers, we have nothing to fight them with.
Democrats only care about the gays and blacks who support them. They don't support Clarence Thomas, they don't support Candace Owens, they don't support Dave Rubins or Rick Grenells or even Glenn Greenwald. Those are all "uncle toms" to them. They only use these "minorities" as pawns to be used for votes and then disposed off when finished.
Remember when Amazon de-platformed the Clarence Thomas documentary?
During Black History Month, no less.
That's how much these hypocritical pieces of shit care about blacks.
I believe if you asked Joe Biden, he would tell you that Clarence Thomas ain't really black. By that, he means not as black as Joe Biden is.
At one time the democrats were a reliable source of support for the working class, and unions, although that type of support doesn't have a long history, but it was there for a while, but since Carter, or before, they gave up their support for both. I know that blacks and other people of color are simply used to support the idea that they are the party of the people, all people, no matter their sexual preference, no matter their race, no matter their gender, or transgender choice, and I know it's all BS. Yep, pawns in their pockets to continue with their self serving careers.
Best irony is from this article where the judge who shut down Biden's racist policies was a brown Indian dude who also happened to be the first put forward by Trump. Somehow the racist orange man wasn't racist towards this judge.
Trump’s base DISPLAYED racism and xenophobia. Here’s an old white thug soving a black woman around… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YeYZtXHo8E
Did they now?
At about 0:27 to the end you can clearly see two black men in the audience, one of whom has a big grin as the woman takes a selfie.
Why, it is almost as if they were shoving her out for some other reason. And I guess it is a mystery why they were using "racial slurs" against only her, and not the other blacks in the audience.
There are only two possibilities here:
1. You did not actually watch the video you posted, in which case you are a fool.
2. You did actually watch the video you posted, in which case you are a liar.
You leftists are so full of shit. This is why you are the laughing stock of thinking people everywhere.
Fucking clowns, the lot of you.
Instead of being an independent observer you seem to be totally reliant on the interpretation of a biased news reporter. Unfortunately many people fell into that trap and let reporters with an anti-Trump agenda interpret reality for them. I say biased because of his claim that she was being pushed by Trump supporters, and I observe just one man dressed in uniform pushing her. She doesn't look unhappy about it either, in fact she looks rather pleased. No doubt she now has a video clip she can post and hope it goes viral with expectations that people like yourself will interpret it in the same way, racist. How about, she's being a pain in the ass, ergo her ouster. I see two young black men who are standing peacefully in line and no one is ousting, or disturbing them. Further proof of my interpretation, not yours.
Ok Msnpc
😅
Strom Thurmon…Democrat until 1964, then went Republican. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strom_Thurmond
So a long-term segregationist who changes from the evil team to the dumb team has what relevance to the core racism of the evil team?
ooooh the logic is killing me!!!!!! lol