The Partisan Divide on Issues

[pbrower2a]

(07-28-2020, 10:23 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: Thing is, some ideologues will state all A believe B.  Then, someone will respond, I am A and do not believe B.  The response by the ideologue is all A believe B.  Again.  Rinse.  Repeat.  They have created a false idea and will cling to it no matter how often they are corrected.

That's Classic X'er for you. 

In one respect there is one reality that can define one as an American: having US citizenship. It is apparently easier to get American citizenship (so long as one is not a criminal, prostitute, dullard, or lunatic) than to lose US citizenship. US citizenship has no connection to ethnicity, religion, linguistic practice, social class, or political ideology. 

I once heard someone claim that he had "Tenth Amendment citizenship". It's as if citizenship not attwained through Constitutional amendments to the tenth were somehow cheap. 

(thirteenth amendment)

Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.[1]


(fourteenth)

 Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Section 2. Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.
Section 3. No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
Section 4. The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.
Section 5. The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article

(fifteenth)


Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.[2]


It is safe to assume that any freed slave in the United States had earned his citizenship either through his toil or that of his parents. There is nothing cheap about achieving citizenship in the United States as a conseque3nce of emancipation.   

Wikipedia recognizes four ways in which to lose US citizenship

Loss of national citizenship is possible only under the following circumstances:

• Fraud in the naturalization process. Technically, this is not a loss of citizenship but rather a voiding of the purported naturalization and a declaration that the immigrant never was a citizen of the United States.[68]
  
  
  
  
• Affiliation with "anti-American" organizations (e.g., the Communist party, other totalitarian party, or terrorist organizations) within five years of naturalization. The State Department views such affiliations as sufficient evidence that an applicant must have lied or concealed evidence in the naturalization process.[68]
  
  
  
  
• Other-than-honorable discharge from the U.S. armed forces before five years of honorable service, if honorable service was the basis for the naturalization.[68]
  
  
  
  
• Voluntary relinquishment of citizenship. This may be accomplished either through renunciation procedures specially established by the State Department or through other actions that demonstrate desire to give up national citizenship.[69]
  

The first three involve persons not originally citizens losing recognition as citizens. In the first, a prime example is Feodor Fedorenko, a former citizen of the Soviet Union captured by the Nazis and then was recruited into "auxiliary police". The Nazis trained him to shoot escaping or unruly prisoners at concentration camps, and he "served" the Nazis at the mass-murder camp at Treblinka. He eventually led a detachment of collaborators who brutalized and eventually gassed prisoners at the camp, and he was involved in round-ups of Jews for transfer to sure death in camps of mass murder. 

In time he was eventually identified as a war criminal and denaturalized.  In 1984 he was deported to the Soviet Union, tried and convicted of treason and war crimes, and executed.   

The next two involve either a fraudulent statement on an application for citizenship or failure to meet a condition of US citizenship. The fourth is not over a triviality. One of the most common circumstances is that in some countries one has dual citizenship in a father's country (let us say the USA) and a mother's country (let us say Japan). At the age of majority in Japan one cannot keep both and must choose.     

Quote:In particular some of many races have what I call the ghetto ethic.  In short, drug pushers are seen driving fancy cars, wearing fancy jewelry, and are therefore to be imitated when you grow up.  Using violence to establish your monopoly is cool.  It is reasonable to assume this mentality is real, to take precautions against it.  If you can afford it, you move to places where it is not prevalent.  If you can’t afford it, you take such precautions as you can, which might include joining a neighborhood watch group and telling your kids to stay away from areas the pushers may be active.  You do not want them to catch a stray bullet.

That is rational.

The ghetto ethic is a losing proposition, but so can be following the straight-and-narrow path while consigned to the ghetto. Maximal profits in the capitalist system (this, I regret to say, is the objective of the owners and executives in most cases) depends upon as many people being as poor as is possible and in as large numbers as possible. Such is the very definition of exploitation no matter what one's ideology. Where pathological narcissism is the norm among economic elites, then exploitation will be particularly severe. It is not my desire to stumble into a Marxist argument against capitalism; much of the problem is not capitalism itself so much as it is a moral pathology characteristic of contemporary elites. Boomers remain much of the executive elite even as they approach retirement age, and Boomer executives from an early time set themselves as a small and exclusive circle that did extremely well by treating subordinates badly in a time in which the formation of small businesses was largely impractical in accordance with tax laws that favored giant, bureaucratic corporations at the expense of small-scale business.

That could change as we go from a 4T to a 1T. Maybe we will be obliged to raise taxes heavily upon economic elites just to pay off 4T deficits that result from saving businesses Too Big to Fail or covering the social costs of COVID-19. Maybe we will recognize that small business is less likely to have the means for corrupting the political process, as it cannot buy politicians or lobbyists as can tycoons and executives.  On the other side, maybe there will be businesses Too Big to Save in the event of another 2008-style crash, and people who don't want to work for near-minimum-wage pay will instead start businesses when they lose their once-plush jobs.

Maybe in a more collegial 1T we will undo the easy practice of gutting cities like Detroit, Cleveland, and St. Louis with efforts to revive them into livable places with genuine opportunity again. Such could involve huge tax credits. As I see it we are closer to the end of the 4T than to its beginning unless we have some catastrophically fcuked-up leadership (such as a second term of Donald Trump) that causes more and worse problems than it solves.         

OK, back to the urban poor. It will be far better if the jobs that were once readily available in now-ravaged cities returned or (more likely) if new opportunities supplanted those. I have seen adaptations already. On one of the few days that I had to take someone to the Detroit airport I took a side trip to see some parts of the Detroit metro area that I had never seen. I was amazed to find that commute traffic, which in most cities is going one way toward the concentrations of employment in or near the downtown central business district was going both ways. The people in the reverse commute were largely African-American. Because there is no strong proclivity for white people to reject night-shift work and blacks to do such work, and that the people leaving Detroit at the time were driving generally older and cheaper vehicles, I could only figure that black workers in Detroit are working jobs in the suburbs as in food service and retailing. Work such jobs and you will still be poor. (OK -- what if one becomes a meat-cutter? Then one has a skilled trade, and one is not likely still poor).  

The work ethic is real. All it takes for bringing it forth is the incentive of a good life, or at the least an improvement in a rotten life.   

Quote:What is not rational is thinking all people with a certain skin pigmentation have ghetto ethics and deserve to be shot.  What is not rational is believing all liberals believe a certain thing when you know many liberals who do not believe this thing.  Yet the devout conservative will insist they do.  They will cling to their false motivations tightly, thus justifying their own mindset, and making any sort of conversation impossible.

People who believe that about people of differing race, ethnicity, or religion and get to do what fits their view will commit crimes against humanity. I have a classic solution for such people: a well-tied rope and the standard drop based upon their weight. You and I can likely size up a black (or any other) person quickly and determine much about that person's social-economic status. Conversation is remarkably good for that. Smart people talk about certain things and avoid talking about certain others. A black person could be very militant about his position... but if I were black, I would likely be rather militant. 

Quote:Now, Classic is useful.  You can make an argument that opposes him ever clearer in hopes of convincing more rational people.  Convincing Classic?  Unlikely.  He is stuck somewhere between rinse and repeat.

He's almost comic in the sense that Archie Bunker was comic. But Archie Bunker at least wasn't seething with violent rage as is Classic X'er. Archie Bunker (Carroll O'Connor) is the naif who demonstrates the Dunning-Krueger effect to an extreme degree. His ignorance is excusable because he sacrificed schooling (back when such was commonplace) to put food on the table when his father died, and his rigidity of thought makes him the butt of the joke. Remember: Carroll O'Connor was strictly a dramatic actor, and he mouthed his lines seriously. He was not a funny man. The malaprop words that he used (like "groin-ecologist" for "gynecologist" were jokes in themselves and did not depend upon him mugging for a laugh).

One thing that Archie Bunker was not... was evil. Even if he was a bigoted ignoramus, his ethical values were quite conventional. He might have been a male-chauvinist pig, but at least he did not beat his wife -- and he is loyal to her. He may work on the dock, but he does not have a house full of pilfered stuff. He has only one television in his house (unless Mike and Gloria have one in their bedroom -- and they bought it fair and square), and there isn't a large liquor collection (liquor and televisions were then commonplace objects of pilferage).*   

Should there ever be an ethnic schism in America as there was in Rwanda or Yugoslavia, then I would not want to meet Classic X'er. He might not be the leader, but I could see him herding people to their doom because those unfortunate people are not "Americans" to him.  I hope that he does not have the same banality of evil in him that Adolf Eichmann... or for that matter, Feodor Fedorenko... had. Maybe he sees me as evil because if he did stuff like Fedorenko did to Chinese-Americans I would denounce him without hesitation to Chinese authorities intent on prosecuting him if I got the chance. He might think such a betrayal of a fellow American... betrayal of the ordinary decencies that we can all expect would strip me of any loyalty toward him. 
 

Quote:But lately I can repeat a question that he can’t answer and he responds by changing the subject.  You get to know his values well enough to ask what he cannot answer.  Instead he will make silly threats and repeat distractions.

Not only not rational, but not constructive.

I give him plenty of opportunity to recant and to contemplate the consequences of his beliefs. It seems so obvious! 

* If you are wondering why we have containerized freight which never get opened by dock-hands... in the old days, pilferage was common, and dock-hands often ended up helping themselves to consumer electronics, liquor, clothes, expensive foodstuffs, and other luxuries so that a load of French wine might go down from 1000 bottles to 900 between the dock in New York and the destination in, let's say, Indianapolis.