The Maelstrom of Violence

[pbrower2a]

(09-01-2017, 03:20 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: I can sympathize with blacks and homosexuals who have been stereotyped and the victim of prejudice.  You can say that it isn't my fight.  I don’t have a duty to go out and correct these things.  However, quite arguably, I have a duty not to be part of the problem.  (See Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience for the logic.)  If I have stereotypes and prejudices I feel an urge to stifle them, not to act on them to the best of my ability.  It is akin to tribal thinking.  One route to self improvement is to avoid vile stereotypes and the accompanying prejudice.

It's "There but for the grace of God go I". If a difference is involuntary and harmless, then I am in no ethical position in which to disparage the difference. One does not choose one's ancestors and thus the genetic traits that suggest that (in America) that one's ancestors included chattel slaves. Religion usually reflects the culture in which one was brought up. One can reject the Catholic Church, but one cannot fully reject all of the subtle patterns of thought that are part of a Catholic childhood. One is not evil fr being a dwarf. Being caught in a house fire? The scars could remain with you for the rest of your life.  Until there is some discovery of a cure for spinal cord injury, we can assume paraplegia and quadriplegia permanent.

People can make destructive, harmful choices, and we can judge those. Criminality, drug addiction, and alcoholism are obvious enough. But nobody chose African origin in South Africa under Apartheid, and nobody chose to be classified as "Jewish" and thus damned to extermination under Hitler. Racism and religious bigotry might be just under the cautious cover of a personality, but when they are released in fullest virulence they can make life pointlessly miserable -- or damned. Nobody would ever see me as black, but on the Web I fit at least three stereotypes of "Jewishness".

I have experienced gay-bashing... and after that experience I decided to stand for homosexual rights so that people would have less of an excuse for doing evil to real or imagined homosexuals. The problem wasn't that I did not have the means with which to convince the angry bigot that I am straight. (It's really simple -- male homosexual porn does not excite me, and I am not going beyond that). I do not exude crude masculinity, so the bigot must have thought that because I am a sissy in contrast to him that I must be gay. I quit making gay jokes.

Quote:This is not a universal urge.  There are neo confederates and neo nazis among others who will play with prejudice and embrace tribal thinking with glee.

I certainly do not want in that tribe. But I do not want to belong to the tribe of pedophiles, either. Or car thieves. Or alcoholics.

If it is ethnicity, I am about half people of British and Irish origin and about half of German-speaking peoples (Germany and Switzerland). That's not much of a unifying identity except as "white". So what? Female beauty needs not look like me to be attractive.  There might be some comfort in my cultural identity, but that also imposes boredom.

Quote:I’m a boomer, however.  Boomer hatred is common.  There are many people here who have boomer stereotypes and exercise boomer prejudices quite openly.  This is often not though as important as racial, cultural or gender stereotypes,  but it is comparable. Some people build stereotypes and exercise prejudices.

As a Boomer I see some of the patterns. Of course I like to see myself as cultured and principled and with a capacity for vision. But if I have had ruthlessness, arrogance, or selfishness the elites (especially among my generation) have extirpated those. Boomer elites in politics, ownership, and management have treated even their generational peers harshly. There are people who believe resolutely that the rest of humanity are proles and peons to be treated badly for the gain and indulgence of elites as if such were the Will of God... and the harsher the view of the Will of God, the harsher is the person holding that view.

People like me did not prevail, and those who did prevail in my generation would be perfectly happy if I were to disappear.

Quote:I’m not totally innocent of this.  Thing is, part of being a blue boomer suggests trying to fight such things as prejudice and stereotypes.  Still, there are thing I do think of the younger generations.  Much of them fall under the category of “they do know know, they were not there.”  They have not felt the lynchings, bled over the coat hanger abortions, or carried a live draft card.

That takes some of the edge off the stereotypical thinking of the young, but it doesn’t help at a detailed level if someone is locked in, unwilling to listen, if someone lacks the imagination to figure it out.

I am as young as one could be to remember news reports of the dead-end resistance to desegregation. I remember seeing a nearly-new Ford Galaxie being pulled out of a Mississippi swamp and figuring that something really bad had happened to three missing young men. Soon afterward the bodies were found.





We still have video that can create genuine memories for people who were not there. So it was with newsreels of the exposure of Nazi concentration camps. If I find law and order essential to life. liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, I find brutality and exploitation inexcusable.

Quote:I should be known for saying there are reasons for major cultures, subcultures.  They didn’t appear from nowhere.  The world views and values behind the cultures once were accurate, once produced favorable results.  There are places still where the old cultural memes still produce favorable results and are very well thought of.  Just watching the ‘debates’ here can show you that if you’d care to listen.

The fault with tribal thinking is not that it recognizes people as tribes different in their own rights and for benign causes, but instead that there is one's own tribe and everybody else as a sort of tribe of lesser value. 

Quote:And generational gaps are quite akin to cultural gaps, political gaps, racial gaps, or gender gaps.  Humans are quite good at stereotypes, hatred, tribal thinking and hating the other guy.  I’d suggest that getting involved in any of them involves you in identity politics.  It is very human to divide between Us and Them, seeking to oppress Them in one way or another.  Simply, if you think you are joining an identity conflict without joining an identity conflict, think again.  Examine the mirror closely.

Time is as much environment as anything else. Time establishes what technologies are available and what institutions are in operation. Something so obvious as "black" means something very different in Virginia in 1947 and in Virginia in 2017. Being gay in America once long meant being confused with pedophiles -- but a same-sex male couple that has a child might ferociously defend that child from any pedophile.

I may be wise enough to recognize that oppression does great, unconscionable harm. Add to this -- I can be jaded of my own 'group' as defined by ethnic origin. Someone else's culture might have something attractive to offer.

Need I be Japanese to appreciate this?

Quote:I see Kinser as quite legitimately fighting racial and sexual problems.  That’s not directly my fight.  Doesn’t mean I won’t pull the verbal equivalent of a trigger if someone wanders into my sights.  Even then, if Kinser wants me to not fight his fights, I won’t.  That doesn’t mean I don’t have opinions and won’t voice my opinions on the matter generally.  Kinser is hardly the only one with such problems, his isn’t the only approach, he hasn’t the authority to enforce that his approach is to be the only one.

I do not have Asperger's syndrome. It has me.  I would rather be black or gay than live under a circumstance that has messed my life up about as badly as addiction or having an IQ on the borderline of mental retardation. I would not choose addiction or a low IQ, the former because of its consequences to others or the latter because, as little identity as I have outside of Asperger's, my intellect largely defines what I am and can enjoy.

Asperger's has messed up my ability to attract a wife. Yes, I would have likely married out of the ethnic background I was brought up in just to get some esthetic and intellectual enrichment.

Kinser has problems that make his homosexuality and blackness trivialities. He is an extremist, and you probably remember him in his Stalinist incarnation. I see a fanatic, and it is the fanaticism and not the shallow veneer of beliefs that make him so upsetting.

Quote:And I’ll be muttering about his not having been there, he didn’t know what was necessary, he didn’t see the problems of the time.  That’s the real essence of generational prejudices.  Every generation is apt to pick up different lessons learned.  It is better to try to learn the other generation’s lessons than to practice stereotyping, prejudice and hate.

There usually is something behind any stereotype, and when one understands the cause one can excuse the difference.