The Maelstrom of Violence

[pbrower2a]

(09-05-2017, 07:50 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: Kinser

I guess two points.  To some extent most everyone will generalize or stereotype.  To a degree they are just different degrees of the same thing.  I call myself ‘leaning blue’ often, but I see myself looking deeper into the past and guessing further into the future than most.  Also, if anyone thinks I lean blue on gun policy, they will find the errors of the ways real fast.  While I generalize, and see that as unavoidable dealing with huge numbers of people, vile stereotyping and expecting people to live up to the stereotypes is another level.  That is highly problematic if altogether common.

I can think of more important rights than the right to bear a gun, like the right to travel, the right to change jobs, the right to refuse to do certain work, the right to make investments.... and the right to have consensual sex.

Quote:You (kinser)?  Anyone who jumps from Marx to Trump isn’t going to fit cleanly into the obvious pigeon holes.  I find myself agreeing a lot with what you say about health care.  However, it would seem you favor sharing risks and costs, which puts you quite some distance from many reds.  One of many blindnesses you have is in expecting your chosen father and party to be with you on health care.  I’m doubtful.  Not vital.  I’ll wait and see.

I see Eric Hoffer's True Believer, the sort of person who goes from one fanatical cause to another. Weak on principles and empathy?

Quote:What does it mean to be black?  I don’t mean skin pigmentation.  It’s more about the culture.  Many share a good deal of culture and life experience.  Some diverge strongly.  I don’t think I’d nominate Obama, Carson or yourself as being particularly close to any pattern or stereotype.  Anyone who jumped from Marx to Trump likely shouldn’t center any pattern or stereotype.  You’re you, which is nothing to be ashamed of, but means a lot of your opinions fit only those in your pattern or stereotype.

Black? It is too broad a category for facile stereotypes except appearance. Certain characteristics identify one as black in America, and there is nothing that one can do to not be black in America. There's some vagueness about the validity of the one-drop rule. There may be more secret and unknown African ancestry among people who think themselves white than most of us realize. It need not be obvious, but the one-drop rule has been in effect. For example, the one-drop rule establishes that the late mother of Barack Obama was black -- about 1/16. Maybe that explains some mysteries in family trees.

People have passed -- people who have won the genetic lottery that conceals any obvious African ancestry in outer appearance. I have yet to take one of those genetic tests, and if I ever do I will disclose the results. I do genealogy, and there are some mysteries... and a couple of ancestors who might have had something to hide. So what happens if I find that I am 1/16? I will still consider myself white because I have the typical ties that someone whose grandparents were English, Swiss, German, and Welsh to the 'black' culture of the American South: none at all. I can have empathy for the Civil Rights struggle, recognize the validity of black culture in America, and know that white privilege hurts most black people and see white privilege as something to do away with. But I listen to the wrong music...  

Quote:I do know the civil rights movement shifted a lot of party allegiances.  You seem to be trying to deny this and the logic behind it.  I don’t think your beliefs change reality.

Until the New Deal, blacks were heavily Republican -- Party of Lincoln, get it? In the 1930s, where blacks could vote, they went Democratic. The New Deal was not about keeping blacks in line. Most Southern states were effectively single-Party states, and the white Establishment kept blacks from voting through sundry chicanery. White and black industrial workers chose to work together to get union representation and union wages where the industry was -- up North -- and by the 1960s they agreed that the subjection of the cousins of their black co-workers who had not left the South was wrong.  

Until 1964 the Democratic Party was the party of white privilege at its most blatant in the South.

Quote:I do have a perceived problem with extreme partisans.  Ideally I’d favor a scientific world view.  One looks at reality and build a descriptive method for analyzing and understanding the world.  The extreme partisan approach is in many ways the opposite.  One decides on a method for analyzing and understanding the world, then closes one’s mind to anything that conflicts with the analysis.  A nigh on religious faith in the value of the analysis is common.  My fate seems to be to feud with the many extreme partisans that contribute to these forums, whose world views are many if linked to the individual, varied, and often extremely narrow.  Your tendency seems to be to latch onto a particular partisan world view and ignore any faults it may have.

Show the stats, and except for those that purport to claim that people are in bulk, superior or inferior because of their ethnic origins (unless there is some selection creating such), I will go with the statistics. Many liberals used to believe that poverty and slum-like conditions created crime, probably because such was a pretext for anti-poverty programs. We have found that criminal activity is a choice that most poor people avoid. Incarcerate the one-person crime waves , and street crime plummets. But the idea that poverty created crime neglected that there are good people in the nastiest slums. Do such people deserve better? Probably. Poverty is as raw deal in a culture that values only ostentatious display and not character.

I would like to see the next President treat poverty as something to address with coherent programs (Barack Obama, regrettably, could not address American poverty because he is... you know) instead of treating it as a Third Rail of politics.

Quote:You  (kinser) have lately given your loyalty to one guy.  Any reason to question this loyalty gets value locked out of your personal variation of existence.  This isn’t apt to change.  You’ll just issue a papal bull claiming what you don’t want to be so isn’t so.  Not much to be done about it.  However. not much from that perspective is to be taken seriously.

The Republicans are stuck with Donald Trump and the consequences of his mercurial style of government. We are beginning to see those consequences. I need not go into the details here. Polls that have shown a disapproval rating of 60% even if there are yet no military disasters and the economy has yet to tank indicate that he is touching multitudes the wrong way. About 45% of the American population is decidedly conservative, and some of those seeing something terribly wrong with President Trump are conservatives.

Quote:Meanwhile, if your basic loyalty isn’t that of a typical black guy, you’re not much help in building up black generalizations or stereotype.  I might not be an expert in saying what makes someone culturally ‘black’, but if building a culture or stereotype were my goal, I wouldn’t start with you.  I don’t count that as a big deal insult.  Being kinda unique can be a good thing.  It just doesn’t make you representative.

White people have been able to adopt 'blackness' in culture and appearance. The rewards are small and the difficulties are great.  

Quote:Sifting to Trump and the see saw...

Given an apparent extreme partisan worldview which gives loyalty to Trump, expecting to open your (kinser) eyes seems futile.  The only reason for hope is the ability to leap away from Marx.

But Kinser is still an extremist. The ideology may change, but the arrogance, ruthlessness, and contempt for restraints remains. I have gone from conservative to liberal, but

(1) I have always recognized the rule of law as essential to human rights. The alternative to law and order is lynchings.
(2) I have tried to avoid judging people on their origins. Melanin does not build or destroy character as might exposure to environmental lead and mercury
(3) rational processes work better than anything else, but even they have their limits.
(4) old ethical values are not to be discarded cheaply. They had reason for existence, and one challenges them with due care.
(5) as long as my country is right I am a patriot.
(6) most people have good cause for believing what they do even if such seems wrong.
(7) nobody can prove esthetics.

Quote:Trump preempted the Republican base by adapting the unraveling memes and enabling the old racism.  You won’t want to see this.  I feel a papal bull coming on.  “I don’t like it, thus it mustn’t be so!”  Anyway, I don’t see the culture being transformed by a rehash of obsolete ideas.  That makes me dubious on one level.  Then I look at the dysfunctional White House, narcissism, vindictiveness, a failed agenda, ignored promises, sexism, a split dysfunctional party, impulsiveness…  Well, part of my judgement comes from leaning blue, and that part is to be considered dubious, but I still really can’t see Trump building a policy and personality capable of shifting a culture.  While you’ve a world view that seems designed to allow you not to see it, I’m anticipating another bounce of the see saw.  What this see saw bounce will lead to, I don’t know.  Ask a blue extreme partisan.  I’m guessing they’ll tell you.  It’s all very clear in the stars, I’m sure.

 
We shall see with the electoral results. We do not need a Man on a White Horse promising to solve every problem. I see much evidence of people wondering how they could have voted for him. We have the reality of Sinclair Lewis' fictional President "Berzelius Windrip" about eighty years after he wrote It Can't Happen Here. But it did happen eighty years later, which fits the generational cycle practically a saeculum later. I can't tell you who will be the Lincoln or FDR who gets us out of this mess -- maybe it could be someone more like Barack Obama because the leadership of the Boom Generation has yet to come up with someone who offers the usual strengths of an Idealist generation and rejects the worst.  Maybe the Man on the White Horse is what we least need. We wil need an intelligent, principled leader capable of telling us what we need to do to be the people who deserve what4eveer we need but is then lacking -- victory, civil peace, widespread opportunity, or even coming to terms with an end of the industrial era. Donald Trump is simply not that person.  

Quote:Oh.  And this piece isn’t so much about shifting an extreme partisan world view.  That is unlikely.  It is more about the nature of extreme partisanship.

Reality will crush some extreme positions of partisanship.