01-13-2022, 05:46 PM
(01-13-2022, 03:50 PM)Anthony Wrote: To paraphrase something said in the Bible - at Revelation 2:9 - I know the blasphemy of those who say they are progressives, and are not.
Let's start with gun control: How soon we forget who the most vehement opponents of the 1968 Gun Control Act were - the Black Panthers; and look at who accounts for 95% of those incarcerated under the restrictive, confiscatory gun laws that are already on the books in the various states are - people of color, primarily blacks. MSNBC veteran Melissa Harris-Perry is one of the few progressives who are actually honest about this.
As with drugs, the lack of privacy that is one hallmark of poverty makes the concealment of illegal behavior more difficult for poor offenders. This is a class issue and to the extent that race and class result intertwine, such will disproportionately hurt blacks.
The Black Panthers get little political support among blacks.
Quote:Second, let's turn our attention to immigration: Every time it has been cut off, either legislatively or through the sheer force of events, African-Americans have been the vastly inordinate beneficiaries: When World War I broke out in Europe in 1914, northern employers had no choice but to "import" black workers from the Jim Crow South - a trend that continued when Congress passed two anti-immigration laws in the 1920s, in 1921 (when unemployment was 11.9%) and 1924 (by 1926, unemployment went all the way down to 1.9%, the lowest annual jobless rate ever in peacetime, causing wages to skyrocket and enabling everyone to run out and buy themselves cars and radios and get their homes wired up with electricity and telephone service for the first time ever). When World War II broke out in Europe in 1939? Lather, rinse, and repeat - and this is the way things stayed until a diabolical coalition of the economic right and the multicultural left threw the borders back open again in 1965.
America went into World War II with practically no support for open borders even though such might have been the best hope for about six million people that the Nazis slaughtered. The end of the war left hundreds of thousands of stateless people, and in view of recent events in Europe (first the Holocaust and then the Communist takeover of central and Balkan Europe where there were still significant Jewish populations; many Jews were small-business owners who had no viable role under Commie regimes), Jewish refugees became an exception. American GI's often ended up with war brides (take away the recent fascism and the German and Japanese weren't so bad after all) became another opening. A large Mexican-American population could obviously assimilate Latin-American immigrants similar in culture to them -- and did. Then there were Chinese getting away from Mao. The ideological position switched incrementally, but quickly.
Another thing -- overseas families of GI brides often found out how much better life was in America and sought to join in. That explains much of the Korean-American and Filipino-American communities in America.
Quote:Third, when the USS Liberty was accidentally sunk by the Israelis in the Mediterranean in 1967, conservative Republicans screamed bloody murder while liberal Democrats (joined by "Rockefeller Republicans" like Jacob Javits) rushed to Israel's defense. But now? The left is totally on the side of the "Palestinians" and against the Jews, despite the fact that Muslim countries routinely throw LGBT people off the roofs of double-digit story buildings while the Israeli military has allowed LGBT personnel into its ranks with no strings attached for decades.
Let's remember that Jacob Javits was a Jew. Jews wisely excoriate their own rogues, but they recognize accidents for what they are. (Really it is tough to be a rogue Jew. Jews want nothing to do with a rogue who has done bad things to fellow Jews, and mainstream Jews typically warn gentiles about them. I have seen Jewish discussion directed at youth about Jewish figures of organized crime, and that discussion is hostile. In essence one can theoretically be good at anything if a Jew; just don't be a criminal because even if one is good at it one is an object of shame and loathing.
The best way to deal with LGBT people is with kindness and acceptance. That is liberal, but it also fits such conservative values as a respect for law and order. Zionism has long had an enlightened, liberal wing that wanted Israel to be a tolerant, liberal democracy. As someone almost half German or Swiss in ancestry and having sought to connect to the benign part of that heritage I find the liberal, sophisticated, enlightened Jews much more like me than unlike me. Then again I would have to say that I have more in common with an Iranian liberal than with an American fascist.
Tough luck, violent homophobes! They are hard to distinguish from terrorists.
Quote:And finally, who signed the American-job-destroying NAFTA into law, when many Republicans opposed it?
Cheap imports from China have done more harm to Latin America than NAFTA has done good in Latin America.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.