EPTOn September 30 2016 06:29 oBlade wrote:
Presumably, it means the culture of white people.
Presumably, it means the culture of white people.
It doesn't exist.
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Plansix
United States60190 Posts
It doesn't exist. | ||
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Wegandi
United States2455 Posts
On September 29 2016 23:48 KwarK wrote: Also for Wegandi and Nettles, Gary's tax plan was to end state and corporate tax and implement a nationwide sales tax. Then, to counter how completely regressive this would be, he'd issue an unconditional fixed dollar prebate to everyone which would offset the impact of the tax in the poor while still leaving the rich paying close to the original percentage. So if you're going to argue that benefits are the problem, maybe take a look at the libertarian policy which most closely resembles universal basic income, albeit with a few tweaks. Didn't you see me say I wasn't much a fan of Gary? Just because one resides in the LP does not necessarily make you a libertarian (The party went to crap in a hand basket when they nominated Bob Barr over Mary Ruwart, but whatever). Also, just because one is a "libertarian" doesn't make everything they advocate for libertarian. Milton Friedman was the main advocate of a guaranteed basic income for instance, even if he was great on so many other fronts. | ||
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TheTenthDoc
United States9561 Posts
On September 30 2016 06:29 oBlade wrote: Presumably, it means the culture of white people. But white people have about as much of a uniform culture as black people. Which is to say, they don't have one. The elderly black women that go to Southern Baptist churches and the inner city gangsters don't share a culture anymore than I share a culture with the Amish. | ||
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LegalLord
United Kingdom13775 Posts
On September 30 2016 06:19 Plansix wrote: Then make better arguments. If you arguments are mistaken for racism, then maybe look at them to A: Make sure they are not super racist and B: Can the argument be presented differently so not to make it look just like racism? You have come to the root of the problem. My culture is not white. I'm 3rd generation Swedish America. My fiancee is second generation American Italian Catholic. People who talk about “white culture” are not talking about anything I’m interested in defending or think has merit. The problem here is the ever-expansive definition of racism. At times it reaches a point where any argument that could be construed as even indirectly tied to race becomes racism. So if it isn't racist it becomes racist. | ||
KwarK
United States42009 Posts
On September 30 2016 06:25 Plansix wrote: No, not really. That is like claiming France, England and all of the US have the same culture. It is a throw away term that means very little. The west all do share a series of common traditions. There are variations, of course, but I think western culture is absolutely a thing. A moral philosophy founded on freedom, love thy neighbour and do unto others as you would wish them to do to you, a social philosophy built on the American and French revolutions and equality at birth, an economic philosophy built on the free exchange of goods and labour, a political philosophy built on representative democracy. Obviously they're not the same but to use a shitty analogy, not all dogs are the same but any mutt, no matter the proportions in its ancestry, is immediately recognizable as a dog. The western nations are all mutts with differing proportions of different breeds in them but they're all immediately recognizable as western nations. | ||
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oBlade
United States5294 Posts
Of course not, neither does black culture. | ||
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Plansix
United States60190 Posts
On September 30 2016 06:34 oBlade wrote: Of course not, neither does black culture. Yep, glad we got there in the end. You are learning and should be proud of your progress. | ||
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Plansix
United States60190 Posts
On September 30 2016 06:33 LegalLord wrote: The problem here is the ever-expansive definition of racism. At times it reaches a point where any argument that could be construed as even indirectly tied to race becomes racism. So if it isn't racist it becomes racist. As someone who is regularly able to have these discussions with all sorts of people and avoid being called racist, that it isn’t a problem. The problem is poor communication skills and listening skills. | ||
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oBlade
United States5294 Posts
On September 30 2016 06:36 Plansix wrote: Yep, glad we got there in the end. You are learning and should be proud of your progress. So we're both in favor of skipping black history month. | ||
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TheYango
United States47024 Posts
"White culture" referring to "Caucasian American culture" would be the analogue except that's usually not what white supremacist groups are going for. Their supposed anti-immigration line is usually fine with Western European immigrants despite "White European culture" not being all that much more similar to "White American culture". If the argument is cultural similarity/compatibility, it's kind of a bad one to divide on racial lines because even racially homogeneous groups can have vastly different cultural principles. Hence why the "cultural conflict" argument ends up just appearing to be a front for plain racism. | ||
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Plansix
United States60190 Posts
On September 30 2016 06:38 oBlade wrote: So we're both in favor of skipping black history month. Nah, its great. We need all the history months. But we only have 12 and 11 are devoted to white history. And Taco Trucks on every corner. Number one reason to vote against Trump. That needs to be our future. | ||
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Grumbels
Netherlands7028 Posts
On September 30 2016 06:38 oBlade wrote: So we're both in favor of skipping black history month. You can't distinguish between garden variety mainstream western culture, with all its cross pollination from cultural mixing, and whatever is "white culture", whereas something like black culture is defined in contrast to the standard culture. White culture is just the culture, it is not separate from it. On the other hand you can talk about minority cultures in this sense because they fall outside the mainstream. I am not an expert on black history month or whatever, but it is probably because most history lessons were about white people in Europe, so it was brought in as balance. | ||
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xDaunt
United States17988 Posts
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TheDwf
France19747 Posts
On September 30 2016 05:54 xDaunt wrote: I get your point, but (and to the extent that you're doing this) labeling critiques and defenses of culture (including criticisms of multiculturalism) as racist is reductive, boring, and -- quite frankly -- dangerous. Oh no, it has to be done in certain ways to be typical of the “revamped” racism. | ||
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TheDwf
France19747 Posts
On September 30 2016 06:17 Slaughter wrote: Discussing "white culture" is pretty problematic, especially in the US. What are people talking about when they use this term? Personally, I never stumbled upon that expression. | ||
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Sent.
Poland9108 Posts
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TheYango
United States47024 Posts
On September 30 2016 06:45 Grumbels wrote: White culture is just the culture, it is not separate from it. On the other hand you can talk about minority cultures in this sense because they fall outside the mainstream. So how do you reconcile the fact that a White American would probably share more cultural values with an African American than with a White European? The lines dividing what is and isn't the "mainstream" are totally arbitrary. And dividing them based on race doesn't really make much sense. | ||
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oBlade
United States5294 Posts
On September 30 2016 06:40 TheYango wrote: "Black culture" usually is meant to refer specifically to "African American culture". I believe African-American means black to almost anyone who hears it. You would get looked at odd if you put Elon Musk in an African-American culture museum, or a black culture museum (and such centers do exist). On September 30 2016 06:45 Grumbels wrote: You can't distinguish between garden variety mainstream western culture, with all its cross pollination from cultural mixing, and whatever is "white culture", whereas something like black culture is defined in contrast to the standard culture. White culture is just the culture, it is not separate from it. On the other hand you can talk about minority cultures in this sense because they fall outside the mainstream. You can separate it, because something being the most prominent, by virtue of having the most people, doesn't make it identical to the average. When you say you can't conceptually separate white culture from Western culture, or from American culture, you're tacitly suggesting nonwhites didn't add anything to whatever that concept refers to. | ||
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Wegandi
United States2455 Posts
On September 30 2016 06:33 TheTenthDoc wrote: But white people have about as much of a uniform culture as black people. Which is to say, they don't have one. The elderly black women that go to Southern Baptist churches and the inner city gangsters don't share a culture anymore than I share a culture with the Amish. Much of western culture, law, institutions, language, etc. is rooted in a Greco-Roman lineage. I think people who make arguments that we have greater differences than commonalities amongst western nations are wrong. Yes, you are right though that "White culture" is a really stupid term that has no specificity. It's the difference between Pat Buchanan and the racist people at Daily Stormer. It's the difference between wanting to maintain that lineage and not wanting say...a caste system or Chinese Legalism to become a dominant strain (just random examples, but you get the point). It's one thing advocating for that and another advocating based on the color of ones skin. Lumping them together is not a persuasive argument (and I'm generally not that fond of cultural arguments to begin with, but I hate even more the ease at which racist is levied as an argument to end arguments with people they disagree with /shrug). | ||
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KwarK
United States42009 Posts
On September 30 2016 06:40 Plansix wrote: Nah, its great. We need all the history months. But we only have 12 and 11 are devoted to white history. And Taco Trucks on every corner. Number one reason to vote against Trump. That needs to be our future. For as long as the United States has been a nation the world has been in the grip of the predominantly white European powers. Racists will say white people did all the important stuff that happened in the last few centuries because they're white. People who know history will say it's not that simple. However I think it's not unreasonable to say that recent world history is white history, by and large. The emergence of world history required events and decisions to take place on a global scale and that, in turn, was built on the western European civilizations. Events have happened in a way that makes a dude like Jesus relevant to the dominant world moral framework in a way that, say, Confucius isn't. Not because Jesus is more important or better or anything else but simply because Christian philosophy underpinned the culture that took over the world. It's not about white history vs non white history, the shit that white people did really did turn out to be more important, at least recently. From, say, 1600-1900, black people were a bit of a footnote in both western and world history which presents a problem. If we teach history as a series of important events that say how we got to where we are then black people pop up as an economic asset, rather than as a contributor to history. Even if we teach it in a way that encompasses the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade we're still assigning black people the role of victims in history, rather than actors. I think it should be more like women's history where right at the start you say "There is very little women's history because for most of history women were actually kept illiterate so we very rarely get to hear them in their own voice, when we hear of them at all we hear a male voice telling us what he thinks of them. And even when we do hear of them, those we hear of were exceptional and provide us very little information about the lives of most women. This is unfortunate because as we can see from our own time there is no reason why women would not have been capable of making great contributions to events, had they been allowed to. It's terrible to think how much progress has been lost in the name of sexist repression. However it is what it is so now let's talk about what men did when they weren't busy repressing women." | ||
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