The Partisan Divide on Issues

[pbrower2a]

(08-27-2021, 12:38 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:

(08-27-2021, 03:46 AM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(08-27-2021, 12:51 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote:

(08-26-2021, 10:20 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: If your white-right side has lost power, then the "American revolt" which they would mount has lost some of its potential punch too, if it occurs. 

Since the Democratic Party's power might result in raising some taxes on your wealthy heroes (but which it hasn't so far), and that's always what you think is "dictatorial" (even though it hasn't happened yet), then you must be admitting that your side could be said to function like a third-world country. In fact, observers of places like Alabama, so bigly mis-ruled by your side, is just like one of those places. Indeed, it is.

I'm not on the white right side. Dave's wise enough to figure that out, what's your problem?

Of course you are. If not you, then who?

You threaten violence rather than give up your culture of right-wing hate, and you talk of an "American Revolt" that's going to get us lefties. I would call that white-right, even if you are not a neo-Nazi or KKK specifically. The white right as I see it is the entire Trump faction and most neo-liberals and trickle-downers too (since the latter respond to the racist dog whistles of anti-welfare/anti-immigrant and self-reliance memes and rhetoric), and you certainly believe in and spout it all.

Right wing hate? I've seen far more examples and demonstrations of Left Wing hate than I've seen Right Wing hate so far. You've been peddling hate and instilling hate for how long now? How many years have I been saying that you're stupid for doing it and referring to you as a dead man? So, how far do you live from the white haters/ American haters that you and the others have played an active  role in creating and maintaining over the years? As far as violence, violence has already been used by the Left and it's now on the table so to speak. So, it's just a matter of time before the American Right starts using it too. Basically, what's good for the gander is good for the goose mutually applies and only a Libtard or blue triber would view that standard as wrong or unfair these days.

Hate? Or resistance to abuse, humiliation, and outright danger? People do not have a "right" to resist abuse, humiliation, and danger; if they are to have any dignity at all as people they must resist it. To expect otherwise on grounds of ethnicity, class, religion, or sexual identity is bigotry.  History has shown two general forms of bigotry. One is the belief that the pariahs who do better do so due to their devious, immoral, or conspiratorial ways. Nazi antisemitism operated on the assumption that the Jews were grossly immoral and posed the threat of becoming an oppressive ruling class if they were not stopped. In general I can refute that by saying that there was nothing wrong with the German and Austrian people between 1933 and 1945 that Judaism would not have solved. Asian minorities often experience that. The other racism is lowered expectations with a refusal to believe that the "lesser" people can participate fully in economic and social life (including marriage), and that any desire of the "lesser" people even as an outlier to so participate is a grave crime against the social mores. That is KKK-style or Apartheid-style racism, and if it doesn't lead to gas chambers it can excuse some vile behavior by the supposedly-superior Master Race. Note that in the second documentary one Ku Klux Klan leader said "I don't believe in segregation; I believe in slavery".   

White privilege is real. It doesn't solve every personal problem; it can't offset mental illness, criminality, stupidity, laziness, addiction, isolation, or poverty. The absolute color bar that ensured that a top-notch black professor could not teach in a "white" university or matriculate there as a student is no more. If you know something about what I have, Asperger's syndrome, then you would recognize as I do that it can mess up one's life badly. In the fantastic event that the cure for my personal problems in life could have been solved with "melanin therapy" that would have made me black, then I would have taken it. I'd rather have good facial recognition (its lack is a big social problem), have facial expressions that match my words (which makes my credibility suspect), and deliver me from some troublesome eccentricities that can make me seem an obnoxious twit, then I would. With Asperger's I am nothing more than my intellect. I would never give that up, as that is all that allows me to have any individuality at all. 

If you are a decent white person, then you do not need white privilege. If you want to pretend that you are better than some black person because you are white, then you need white privilege to salve your hurt feelings. The KKK offers that for expensive dues and certain expectations. One Imperial Wizard expects members of his Klan to buy an insurance policy from a shady outfit that he owns and operates. That insurance company does not operate as a normal life-insurance company does; it is the slush fund for the Grand Dragon who lives like a king. On the other hand you can be an extreme low-life and economic loser, even an ex-con, and feel yourself superior to "uppity n---ers" who don't know their "rightful" (that is, subordinate) place in the grand scheme of things.   

In general, people in my part of the political spectrum eschew violence except in self or national defense and as a necessary part of law enforcement. People like me may not be pure pacifists, but we all dream of a world in which people recognize violence and its threat as unthinkable. I have no problem with the underworld-style hit that Barack Obama did upon Osama bin Laden. I can imagine no viable response to the Nazi menace of eighty years ago except a resolute military response. If someone's pet dog mauls a burglar, mugger, or rapist, then good for the dog! (Just take a look at a Rottweiler and recognize that as a potential for causing death or severe injury, all that keeps if from being "the Other Big Cat" is good behavior -- yours and that of the dog. The stated position of Black Lives Matter that isn't that black people should get away with violent crimes; it is instead that police need to change their behaviors that allow them to see black suspects or even the wrong black person as a dangerous criminal.  

We are still accountable for our character. Color is not an excuse for bad behavior, and especially outright criminality. I'd say that Barack Obama was an above-average President, enough so that all that keeps him from being a model for the next effective conservative as President is that he is not a conservative. Much of his strength as President was to fill his staff with people of solid character, people who didn't take extreme and destructive risks and who automatically rejected the abuse of power even if they weren't flunkies. A conservative with Obama's character isn't going to bait liberals, will not suffer corruption, and will expect people to say HELL NO! to him in the rare instance that he be wrong. Donald Trump would have been a disaster as President if he instead offered a liberal boilerplate as ideology because he supposedly knows more than such highly-skilled and experienced experts, takes pointless risks, baits people for no apparent reason (he did this even to fellow conservatives!), supports cronyism, and over-reacts to real or imagined slights. I prefer those pols who act in accordance with the norms of Judeo-Christian morality in marital life and commerce, at which Donald Trump has failed badly all his life. Usually that is not much of a distinction in a Presidential election. I did have a problem with Bill Clinton's sexcapades... but Donald Trump goes far beyond those. 

Beware projection. Projection is the ego defense in which one attributes to real or imagined dangerous, exploitative, or destructive behavior to others that one has the desire to do oneself. In the crudest illustration a bank robber claims that "banks are the worst crooks of all". It was commonplace in "Ku Kluxistan" for white men to rape black girls and women or to otherwise exploit them cheaply for sex. People who did that could easily imagine black men seeking much the same, differing only in the illegality of even an interracial marriage. In "Ku Kluxistan" (read Black Like Me, in which a white man goes through a selected part of the South as a white man and then changes his skin color through dyes to look black) and finds out from the same white people what they do to blacks. Among things that Griffin discovered was that white men often went to bathrooms of "colored women" and put up graffiti that solicited sex with white men, and that they often discussed the fear that black men had bigger and harder penises. For the even more murderous sort of racism, everything that Hitler said about the Jews was absolutely true... about himself and of leading Nazis! 

The fascistic part of the American Hard Right is already deeply invested in violence. It has bombed mosques and synagogues. It has assassinated people. Even if the most fanatical part of the pro-Trump cult isn't as overtly racist as the KKK or neo-Nazis (as if there is any meaningful difference between Kluxers and Nazi scum anymore) it did its own "ultra-violence" on January 6 of this year in the Capitol building.  

Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. had his dream in which people would judge people not by the color of their skin but instead by the content of their character. Judging people by the content of their character can still be quite harsh. Color is not a choice unless one is John Howard  "Black Like Me" Griffin for admirable reasons or Rachel Dolezal for reasons that I don't fully understand... or people who successfully "pass" as white because they get some advantage for doing so and can. Character is a choice, and Donald Trump chose badly.