US Politics Mega-thread - Page 2642

I guess that's raising conciousness, but I guess I lean towards online interactions generally being futile. Like this thread, which I'll probably soon give up on.

That's true, I guess I should have considered the grassroots activity. I suppose I was wondering why the athletes weren't doing much but a few things apply:

1. They're just people, they can say what is right or wrong without being activists about it.
2. They're busy playing their sports.
3. They probably have no idea what to do either.



So this is kinda what I was getting at. We've seen a number of social movements pursuing equality in the last century. Most of them have achieve their nominal equality. For example, women and black people have equal legal rights to white men. However, there is a ton of inequality and prejudice remaining, both systemic and personal.

This causes an issue in that there are no obvious large-scale goals to be accomplished. For example, in Feminism, the ability for women to do everything that men can do was a large goal that was mostly nominally accomplished by the end of the 70s. A large goal unites a movement, and coalesces people into that movement, giving it strength and purpose. Now there are plenty of smaller goals for feminism to accomplish in terms of pursuing equality, but they tend to be smaller and not as obvious. Examples:

1. Governmental support for childcare(which tends to fall on women)
2. Rape and sexual assault in the legal system
3. Equal treatment in the workplace
4. End of discrimination against homosexual people

The issue with these goals is threefold.

First, they tend to be less obvious. You won't tend to have a strong opinion on how people are treated as the victims in sexual assault cases unless you've been through it or have heard a vivid story about it. It doesn't interact with most peoples' day-to-day experiences.

Second, it can also be hard to picture yourself in the relevant scenarios. It is especially hard for a lot of men who have never felt powerless to picture themselves as a victim of sexual assault, whereas they can much more easily picture themselves getting (falsely?) accused of sexual assault. This makes it harder to unite support for a cause.

Third, the changes can be hard to accomplish in totality. Homosexual people can now get married, mission accomplished! But equal treatment across society is still a long way away. It is no longer about winning a court case or getting a law passed. Now you need to win hearts and minds. If you want to see how hard that can be take a look at the US in Iraq.

Tying this back into the conversation, this is the point that BLM has hit - it's accomplished the major legal goals. Discrimination on ethnicity, redlining, etc. are now illegal - but they still clearly happen every day quietly.

Compare the concreteness of a goal like getting the Civil Rights Act passed vs. a goal like achieving equality for Black people in the US.

A lot of white people are pretending that since the CRA got passed racism is dead, or since Obama was President racism is dead. Those people are idiots.

But even to non-idiots, it can be hard to see what needs to be done. 90% of Americans go to schools that are 90%+ of their own ethnicity. Housing is similarly divided. Most Americans simply do not interact with someone outside of their ethnicity. So for White Americans, it's also a far-removed problem. People tend to vote for things that matter to them and apply to them, rather than what is actually good for the country. You'll see people spend 1000x as much time talking about, you know, how deregulation will save the economy, than housing in South Side Chicago or the drug game.

Since most Americans are not Black, and since most aren't urban, and most don't interact with anyone in a different social group than themselves, it won't be high-priority for them to talk about or think about these issues. It's no longer so much an explicit racist approach that is devaluing Black and poor lives in America. It's now moved to a more impersonal, less overtly racist approach(though there's plenty of overt racism).

So while some people may recognize it's a combination of personal and societal failings, given the structure of the country I don't think this is something you can expect to change on its own. As it stands all that will change going forward is that the legal, large-goal discrimination moves further into the rear-view.

The current status quo is an abomination, yet it doesn't seem like it's going to change on its own. What can be done to change it in a large scale? This is where I don't understand what you want done.

You seem to want some spontaneous enlightenment for white people across the country, but that's just not going to happen. How do you change it?


Nice! I have pretty much no communal involvement. I don't even know my condo neighbours' names. I did do some Big Brother Big Sister a while back, but don't any more. I don't particularly donate much, or get politically involved(though I read a fair bit of politics). As you've probably gathered, I'm pretty much one of MLK's moderate white liberals.

As my previous quote reply was asking, what is the large societal change required? "Give me liberty or give me death" - but what is the liberty?

I have the same general opinion of anarchy as you. Sounds cool, but ultimately just won't work. Way too vulnerable to internal and external threats. Libertarianism(an-cap style at least) has the same issue.

I have major issues with communism - I do think it could work below the Monkey Brain level (below groups of ~200 people, which is how we did live before civilization) but I don't see it working for larger communities, or with disparate supply chains or whatever. I think you need a lot of centralization to orchestrate complex organizations, and that tends to lead to centralization of power, which leads to abuse of power and authoritarianism. This is exacerbated when economic power is centralized as well. How do you picture communism's end-state working in the US?

On a related note, it's possible that with expanded automation over the next ~50 years the existing capitalist system could eventually be supplanted by communism organically if scarcity is generally overcome.