US Politics Mega-thread - Page 4219

On June 18 2024 21:41 WombaT wrote:
Perhaps the overall debate was a car crash, but I think there’s also a rather large grain of truth in Gladwell’s contention. I may check it out in time but generally I’m not a massive fan of debates in this era as they end up adversarial and not especially enlightening, and it sounds like this is the direction this one went.

Although where the various ‘isms’ come in I don’t think often comes in the ‘I look down on people from x group’ forms of bigotry. It’s the pulling the rug out of a familiar, understood order of things and a shifting into something different and unfamiliar, would be my best estimation.

Something people are either not especially comfortable admitting, or an unease that they themselves haven’t identified or can articulate.

If I hand picked a bunch of folks, I imagine very few would dislike women per se. But I assume there’d be a non-negligible amount who say, felt uneasy having a female boss, or their female partner earning more than them.

To take one minor example, as a big soccer football fan you can read comment thread after comment thread complaining about the relatively recent phenomenon of female commentators and pundits, with various justifications.

Some of which I don’t think are necessarily lies or untruths, but I think ultimately what lies behind them at the core is ‘this is a traditionally male space and I don’t l like it not being so’

On June 19 2024 00:23 Salazarz wrote:
The way that forum post is worded is not particularly nice, but I don't think that's necessarily a discriminatory or misogynist or whatever -ist position, to be honest. I don't usually enjoy female vocals in rock music, I don't think that's sexist in the slightest, and it's not that different from the commentator issue... I think?

On June 19 2024 04:08 Sadist wrote:
It could be a preference? He didnt say they couldnt hit notes or they were crappy singers. He just said he didnt like the sound of their voices.

On June 19 2024 04:56 BlackJack wrote:


How does that work? I "prefer" a white male doctor over a black female doctor. I guess that's okay because it's just a preference?

Preferring one thing over another is what discrimination is. All you did was change the word to feel better. People do this all the time. "I only like to date Asian and White women." A lot of people consider this okay and justify with "It's not racism, it's a preference and preferences are okay." Except it is racism. Excluding someone from your dating field because of their race is racism, period. Using mental gymnastics and synonyms doesn't change that.

There's lots of discrimination all over society that we just accept as normal. Do you know how many couples would not hire a male nanny to look after their young children? Perhaps for good reason. Men are statistically far more likely to sodomize a child than women are. In light of that, hiring a female nanny over a male nanny is a rational thing to do if you want to maximize your children's safety. But that's still quite literally sexism. Just nobody really cares about that form of sexism - which is one of my main beefs with SJWs, the logical inconsistencies and double standards are so profound but they still feel so self-righteous to brow beat everyone that doesn't follow their arbitrary rules.

I take pride in saying that we are a loud people. (Is it a coincidence that one of J.Lo’s biggest hits was “Let’s Get Loud”? I think not.) We love our music. We love to dance. We love being Puerto Rican.

On June 19 2024 05:45 Sadist wrote:




You are way offbase here. The question in your preference is "why" if you think its because someone is genetically inferior because of their race thats one thing. If you dont like higher/typical feminine voices on songs thats something else. People dont like every male singer.

I think this is a bad faith attempt at a gotcha.

On June 19 2024 06:26 Elroi wrote:
Thanks for sharing that debate, BJ. I thought it was really interesting and I wasn't even particularly annoyed by the race card thing, because Murray and that other guy handled it quite well.

I think it is clear that MSM has become more unreliable and biased. I think it is simply the result of tighter regulation of what can be said and thought in general. Everything indicates, for example, that we are self-censoring much more now than we did, say 30 years ago. That erodes the public sphere in general and the free press in particular.

Btw, I make a little mental note every time I notice this kind of regulation of politically correct discourse. For example, I read a hilarious essay in The Atlantic the other day, where a Puerto Rican woman talks about her experience at an Ivy League school. She recounts how she and the other people of color around her were constantly admonished by the white students to be quiet, to not play music, to not stay up late at night and party etc. She was really bothered by how the white students made her feel like she didn't belong because they "loved silence" while she was culturally inclined to prefer partying and listening to music:


Now imagine the same essay written by a white student complaining about how all the black students disrupted their learning because they were up all nights partying and listening to music. How white people are culturally more inclined to like silence and studiousness and black people on campus make them feel uncomfortable. Would that be acceptable (even though the content of the essay is basically the same)? No. I think that kind of informal order of discourse, to cite Foucault (lol), is becoming more prevalent everywhere.

On June 19 2024 10:51 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:


Not to mention female employees and female presidents!

I agree with your general point about how hard it can be to distinguish between preference and prejudice. Is there a clear distinction that someone can make? Does it have to do with how much harm is being done? How conscious the discrimination is? Does preference become serious prejudice if it's a protected class (sex, race, etc.)? Does prejudice become a mere preference if there's some sort of special justification for it? I honestly have no idea.

Random thought: Are heterosexuality and homosexuality inherently prejudicial? I'm attracted to women, but not men. Is that sexist? It's not like I can be educated out of my sexual preference, or that I have any control over it, but perhaps these definitions of prejudice and preference are too vague to pin down. Perhaps the difference is simply "if the perspective is socially, culturally acceptable, then it's merely preference. If it's considered taboo and unethical, then it's prejudice".

Above all else, Our politics initially sprang from the shared belief that Black women are inherently valuable, that our liberation is a necessity not as an adjunct to somebody else's may because of our need as human persons for autonomy. This may seem so obvious as to sound simplistic, but it is apparent that no other ostensibly progressive movement has ever consIdered our specific oppression as a priority or worked seriously for the ending of that oppression. Merely naming the pejorative stereotypes attributed to Black women (e.g. mammy, matriarch, Sapphire, whore, bulldagger), let alone cataloguing the cruel, often murderous, treatment we receive, Indicates how little value has been placed upon our lives during four centuries of bondage in the Western hemisphere. We realize that the only people who care enough about us to work consistently for our liberation are us. Our politics evolve from a healthy love for ourselves, our sisters and our community which allows us to continue our struggle and work.

This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else's oppression. In the case of Black women this is a particularly repugnant, dangerous, threatening, and therefore revolutionary concept because it is obvious from looking at all the political movements that have preceded us that anyone is more worthy of liberation than ourselves. We reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough.

We believe that sexual politics under patriarchy is as pervasive in Black women's lives as are the politics of class and race. We also often find it difficult to separate race from class from sex oppression because in our lives they are most often experienced simultaneously. We know that there is such a thing as racial-sexual oppression which is neither solely racial nor solely sexual, e.g., the history of rape of Black women by white men as a weapon of political repression.

Although we are feminists and Lesbians, we feel solidarity with progressive Black men and do not advocate the fractionalization that white women who are separatists demand. Our situation as Black people necessitates that we have solidarity around the fact of race, which white women of course do not need to have with white men, unless it is their negative solidarity as racial oppressors. We struggle together with Black men against racism, while we also struggle with Black men about sexism.

We realize that the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy. We are socialists because we believe that work must be organized for the collective benefit of those who do the work and create the products, and not for the profit of the bosses. Material resources must be equally distributed among those who create these resources. We are not convinced, however, that a socialist revolution that is not also a feminist and anti-racist revolution will guarantee our liberation. We have arrived at the necessity for developing an understanding of class relationships that takes into account the specific class position of Black women who are generally marginal in the labor force, while at this particular time some of us are temporarily viewed as doubly desirable tokens at white-collar and professional levels. We need to articulate the real class situation of persons who are not merely raceless, sexless workers, but for whom racial and sexual oppression are significant determinants in their working/economic lives. Although we are in essential agreement with Marx's theory as it applied to the very specific economic relationships he analyzed, we know that his analysis must be extended further in order for us to understand our specific economic situation as Black women.

On June 19 2024 10:51 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:


Not to mention female employees and female presidents!

I agree with your general point about how hard it can be to distinguish between preference and prejudice. Is there a clear distinction that someone can make? Does it have to do with how much harm is being done? How conscious the discrimination is? Does preference become serious prejudice if it's a protected class (sex, race, etc.)? Does prejudice become a mere preference if there's some sort of special justification for it? I honestly have no idea.

Random thought: Are heterosexuality and homosexuality inherently prejudicial? I'm attracted to women, but not men. Is that sexist? It's not like I can be educated out of my sexual preference, or that I have any control over it, but perhaps these definitions of prejudice and preference are too vague to pin down. Perhaps the difference is simply this: "If the perspective is socially, culturally acceptable, then it's merely preference. If it's considered taboo and unethical, then it's serious prejudice."

On June 18 2024 15:44 BlackJack wrote:
Matt Taibbi made an opening statement and among other things said that Walter Cronkite was twice voted the most trusted man in America and back in the day the mainstream media used to report the story and let the chips fall where they may, whereas now they find out what their viewers want to hear and work backwards to find the story, i.e. Right wing stuff on Fox or Left wing stuff on MSNBC.

On June 19 2024 16:26 Severedevil wrote:

Let's bask in the absurdity for a moment. A grown adult made that claim? Out loud?

...and it's even the same guy who wrote https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/before-the-media-lionized-martin-luther-king-jr-they-denounced-him-629494/ so he certainly knows better.

On June 19 2024 16:26 Severedevil wrote:

Let's bask in the absurdity for a moment. A grown adult made that claim? Out loud?

...and it's even the same guy who wrote https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/before-the-media-lionized-martin-luther-king-jr-they-denounced-him-629494/ so he certainly knows better.

My father had a saying, "The story's the boss." In the American context, this means
that if the facts tell you the Republicans were the villains in a political disaster, then
you write it that way. If the facts point more to the Democrats, you write that. If
they're both culpable, as was often the case for me when I investigated Wall Street
for almost 10 years after the 2008 crash, you write the story that way. We're not
supposed to thumb the scale. Our job is just to call things as we see them and
leave the rest up to you. We don't do that now. The story is no longer the boss.
Instead, we sell narrative in a dysfunctional new business model.