If you’d like constructive responses, paragraphing would be useful, and providing citations and links to specific examples of the problems that you are describing, so that people understand and can either agree with or refute them, would be appreciated. Your first post has a lot of rhetoric, but not a lot of solid facts to support it.
Also, your post has a bit of an insulting tone (In not sure if the malice is directed at this community or the American electorate in general), which is not usually productive to finding solutions. If you could make the effort to be a bit more respectful, it will help lead this discussion down a more productive path.
Again, welcome, and I hope you continue to express what is, here, an uncommon viewpoint, and thereby bring some more diversity to the viewpoints in our discussions. Just, please, do so in a more productive manner, so that the discussion does not degenerate into insults, helping no one.
I think there are more than a few boingers who have never talked to a single Trump supporter in their lives. I’m not in that company, and my guess is that neither are you.
Much of what I hear from the Trump supporters I know is that the Obama administration has been characterized by “more coddling for the banks and the 1%, more freebies for the poor, and fuck-all for middle class job growth” and that Hillary will be four more years of the same.
The fact that Obama has been the only American president to have not one single year in which economic growth has been as much as three percent does a great deal to reinforce this perspective.
To the extent that the Democratic party governs under the assumption that economic growth is a bug rather than a feature, it will continue to lose working class and middle class support to current and future Trumps.
(a) Marxism has a strong appeal to those who believe that their personal knowledge about how the levers of economic power should be manipulated is much greater than that of the aggregate knowledge of the population at large. Always a mistake - see the Ukrainian famine, the Chinese famine, and the incipient Nicaraguan famine.
(b) Marxism also offers a marvelous opportunity for a thug regime to conceal itself behind a veneer of happy talk about equality and social progress. Liberals in non-Marxist countries buy into this again and again, and like Charlie Brown, they keep lining up to kick the football even though it’s being pulled away scores of times.
Wow, are the Ilegals and the Mosslims really in cahoots? I had no idea! And if they’re going to work together to demand that I bow to Islam while my child’s job is being stolen, why won’t they be doing the same thing to Canadians? So confusing…
Then don’t be. I no longer call myself white. After reading Coates, Nell Painter, and Baldwin, I no longer wanted to be saddled with the machination of ‘white’. It’s not real.
I have always though that the appeal of Marxism among westerners relies on each person’s feeling that they are special, which seems to be a common western trait.
So each Marxist in the west believes in their heart that once the revolution comes, they will be made Commissar, instead of picking turnips on a collective farm.
Why do you believe that those supporting a collectivist paradigm instead of an individualist paradigm are secretly ultra-individualist?
I believe it is virtually impossible to even discuss collectivism in America fruitfully, because there has been a powerful and sustained effort to undermine any option but the model we have presently. In fact, it is so taboo, that you are usually dismissed out of hand as a childlike idealist at best, or a sinister agent of some nebulous conspiracy. Is global capitalism working? Is there another economic model that might work better? These are not forces of nature. That’s the big lie. That the market is some primal force that we must accomodate despite it’s flaws. These are human-made systems doing what humans design them to do.
It’s identity politics at work. Where you assign blame to an entire group instead of individuals. Why on earth should a white person feel ashamed of being white for the actions of other white people?
Because ‘white’ is a socioeconomic construction. It’s a fabrication. You are not white. You ‘behave’ white. And ‘white’ behaviour has been historically and consistently quite bad. Races do not exist.
And on the other end of that spectrum, there’s that wonderful critique of Objectivism from Bioshock: “They come to Rapture thinking they’re gonna be captains of industry, but they all forget that somebody’s gotta scrub the toilets.”
I think you are confused. I am pretty sure that you are going by an interpretation of the conclusions of the AAPA Statement on Biological Aspects of Race. The conclusion is that there are no “pure” races, because of the potential to interbreed.
My son is minoring in Forensic Anthropology, and I happen to have one of his textbooks at hand. It does discuss the idea you mentioned, and it’s origins. On the other hand, it offers the following pragmatic advice:
“Forensic anthropologists are keenly aware that neither the medical examiner, the judge, the attorney, client, nor the sheriff would appreciate a lecture on the history of the race concept in Western thought. These professionals want to learn if the skeleton on our table is a person of Black, White, Asian, or Native American ancestry”. (Kennedy, K.A.R. (1995), Journal of Forensic Sciences 40: 797-800
What follows those remarks is a long chapter of how the Forensic examiner can use the features and measurements of skeletal remains to identify the racial ancestry of a person to within a fairly high degree of certainty. Race is a thing that exists, but that does not mean that one must use it to make pronouncements about who might be superior to whom.
Pretending that race does not exist might also put peoples health at risk. Race is often a factor taken into account when a physician determines ones risk for certain diseases.
I don’t really want to get in the middle of any argument about whiteness or racial superiority. I will not be part of any of that. I specifically want to address the statement “Races do not exist”.
That’s why I’m only sort of “libertarian-ish”. I’m perfectly happy with a number of points on the spectrum between “what we have now” and “no government at all”.
They state this because disturbing ancestral graves is a thing of importance and these digs and artifacts should be done at the permission of tribal authority.
The textbook I was using is specifically about the study of the human body to determine identification and causes of death in criminal or accidental cases, not excavation of historical objects or remains. Of course some of the techniques can be used in both fields. I think that it is a stretch to assume that medical examiners and forensic anthropologists are all just ghouls who want nothing more than to desecrate ancient Indian graves.
There are people who do that, but it is a different group of people.
