SSCReader
1d ago
Well it depends who you are talking about, in general ADOS want it to help ADOS so from their perspective it is not helping the people it was "meant" to help. Which is the perspective I was taking.
If you mean that the people implementing it never meant it to help ADOS (or perhaps never meant it to primarily benefit ADOS at least) then you might be on firmer ground. But then you'd have to address why they wanted to help rich Nigerians or what have you, but not ADOS. I think I might suggest they meant it to look like it would help ADOS as part of a sop towards previous discrimination but were not too bothered if it actually did or did not.
SSCReader
1d ago
And if you were a black parent to a black child, how much of a cost would you say you and your people have borne only to end up (statistically) at the bottom of the ladder?
Words and laws do mean things. They mean what the people interpreting them thnk they mean, no more and no less. Just as "all men are created equal" didn't stop race based slavery because all men didn't really mean all men.
I completely agree that two wrongs do not make a right. If we could wave a magic wand and be done with race based issues, I would. But we don't live in that world. And in this world the sins of the fathers appear to be visited on the children whether we want it or not. Our options are constrained by human pyschology and the dynamics thereof.
I'm ok with headwinds for my kids, they'll be fine either way. My bigger concern is that Affirmative action et al doesn't actually primarily help the people its meant to help. I'd take a much more narrowly tailored version if I had the power.
SSCReader
1d ago
And her granddaughter's (or great-granddaughters) peers not only believe that, they have scientific studies PROVING that white physicians are killing black babies.
Don't confuse what white progressives might say and what black people believe. They may be allied politically but they are very different groups. As far as I can tell approximately zero of the younger group believe that. In fact they don't believe a white doctor tried to kill their great-grandmothers/great aunts baby at all, last time it came up they expressed a great deal of skepticism, because they can't even conceive of experiencing that level of personal racism.
What is commonish is the idea that white doctors may still be slightly biased in the ways they treat and diagnose black mothers (particularly around pain management) but that is very different from the belief that they are outright murdering black children for racist reasons. And they may be right about that, when my wife was in hospital, I had to intervene several times because they were not taking her levels of pain seriously at all.
That's an improvement! From outright murderous racist doctors to doctors can be biased in how they deliver treatment is a downgrade in levels of racial resentment/belief! Time is on your side here.
Heck even in the Floyd riots many (most?) of the rioters were in fact not black. If we look at Rittenhouse, of the three people who he shot, none of them were black. If you watch the videos of that night most of the people we see are white. Michael Reinoehl and Aaron Danielson, both white. More people were killed in the LA riots than the Floyd riots, even though one was much more widespread.
Whatever people say, the facts on the ground do not appear to validate the idea that things are worse. Interracial marriage rates are increasing, which is a key measure of integration. "Since 1980, the share who married someone of a different race or ethnicity has more than tripled from 5% to 18%"
As for timescales. Look I'm Northern Irish, we're still beefing about King William vs King James in 1690 and whether the Brits can be blamed for the Norman invasion of Ireland in the 1170's. Give it another couple hundred years and see where you are. You're young yet.
SSCReader
1d ago
But the resentments of blacks alone, along with the sympathy for those resentments among one party of whites, will keep those convulsions going indefinitely.
Well that's the question isn't it? From Founding to the Civil Rights movement was near 200 years. It's been about 80 since then. Timescales for nations are measured in centuries. In 120 years will those convulsions still be ongoing or not? Or will American blacks and whites have banded together to fight our AI overlords or an alien invader, or Chinese communism or just all be rich, fat and happy on automated cruise liners in space?
It seems clear to me, having significant contact with black Americans that the level of fear and anger in younger generations is significantly less than in older ones. Even my wife's grandmother on her deathbed recanted her ban on "dating out". And she had lived through Jim Crow in the South before migrating North and believed a white doctor had tried to kill one of her children in the womb.
SSCReader
1d ago
Tiers of justice, ceding the commons to the lowest common denominator, deciding that racism (or sexism) is good so long as you target it at the right people, restricting the right of association based on certain protected classes but not other categories of those classes, so on and so forth are also bad. Less so. Does that make them reasonable prices to pay for moral improvement? Does that make a functional multicultural society? All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others?
Maybe, that's the point. It might be once it committed to slavery that America had no good outcomes. Either genocide or hundreds of years of racial animosity and war or affirmative action and critical theory. As you say the best option would likely to have been not enslaved a bunch of people. Once you do that as Jefferson noted, you have no good options.
So it might be that (hopefully not!) the price that must be paid for moral improvement is what you see today forever. Or it might (and hopefully will) decline over time. How long the racial wound of slavery and discrimination takes to heal is an open question. The question is given we can't change the past, is this the best option we have of those available to us? From Founding to the Civil Rights movement was what 200 years give or take? So maybe roughly 200 years is what it will take to heal. Would 200 years of the things you don't like now worth 200 years of what black people had to go through in their 200 years? Or is that too great a moral price to pay?
There is no objective answer to that, really. I'd sway to the idea that yes that would be a reasonable price to pay. But that is also predicated on the fact, I think being a white man in the US is pretty good even with whatever headwinds being faced. So I don't really view it as much of a cost at all. I'd choose to be white over than black in a heartbeat from a flourishing point of view in the US right now and I don't see that changing particularly.
But how much of a cost (if any at all) anyone person is willing to bear for the mistakes of Americans past, is going to be invariably a very personal thing.
SSCReader
1d ago
How is that racist in any way? If i say Japanese people in Japan are the ones who can enable immigration into Japan thats just a statement of fact.
Anybody who wants to complain about the level of immigration in Japan (whether too high or too low) is complaining about decisions made by Japanese people.
Remember we're responding in the frame of a person who thinks Indians, Mexicans and the like are replacing white people and therefore wants to take action and pointing out his own people (from his own framework!) are the ones primarily doing the things he does not like.
I have no clue how you think pointing that out makes me racist.
SSCReader
1d ago
This plus the Faculty were two of his major inspirations according to Coogler himself.
SSCReader
1d ago
I think that's fair. The coda is a little at odds tonally, because vampirism goes from this horrible thing the main characters are willing to die to fight off, to being portrayed as not that bad after all. But Buddy Guy is a great choice for an aged Sammie so it's hard to complain too much.
SSCReader
1d ago
so it really is "black culture being absorbed into white mainstream society and being altered and taken over as belonging there"
Possibly. Except Remmick makes an offer that if the black people join him willingly, they will be able to get rid of bigotry and racism entirely. He knows the Klan (because he turned a Klan member) are planning to kill the twins the next day anyway and he calls them bigots. So another way at looking at it is that Remmick is offering a pan-American assimilation. Blacks, Irish, Octaroons (like Mary), White Klan members, Chinese, all one big happy bloodsucking murderous musical family, in a way mainstream society will not tolerate. So an assimilation yes, but not into mainstream white society. (Note: Vampires are a little odd here because it seems that everyone they feed on is turned into a vampire, which seems like it should leave any area overrun with vampires in fairly short order, and the Klansmen vampires seem totally fine with the black vampires so parts of the personality seem subsumed, while others remain, vampires are not racist apparently!). Remmick wants Sammie's powers so that he can see his people again, as Sammie can bring forth the spirits of the past and future through music, and because Remmick is a pre-Christian Irishman (They steal his fathers lands and forcibly convert him apparently) his people and culture no longer exist, he can only see them again through Sammie.
Coogler said he made the vampire Irish because they too had suffered oppression which may also lean towards that idea. Now of course Remmick is happy to turn everyone forcibly to get what he wants but he does seem (as do the others he turns) to see it as a gift.
It's a reasonably good movie with great music, so I would say it is worth a watch overall. My wife didn't like the sex scenes though for what that is worth.
SSCReader
2d ago
And if you can persuade more people to vote for the reasons you do, then you potentially affect change. Unfortunately most voters are short termists, so most politicians are short termists.
I did some consultancy work for Reform at the last election, so I have nothing against them per se. I quite like Nigel Farage personally (as politicians go). But I heavily suspect you'll find that even were they to form a government they might not do as much as you'll like about immigration. Even for natural Reform voters the economy featured highly in internal polls. Nigel knows that.
SSCReader
2d ago
But white people don't have the power to enable it
The people with power are mostly white. Ergo white people DO have that ability. Not necessarily ALL white people (though see below). If a subset of white people is the problem, then that is an intra-racial issue.
As for the other I'll refer to my previous answer. White (all voters really) voters repeatedly show they rank the economy over limiting immigration. So if limiting immigration and spending billions deporting immigrants hurts the economy (and even Trump agrees it will) then they have different goals both of which cannot be fulfilled and repeatedly they show by flip-flopping that they prize an economy that makes them wealthier over really limiting immigration.
If white voters in the US REALLY wanted to limit immigration above all else they do actually have the power to do so. They just have to repeatedly vote for the people who want to do so, even when the economy is bad. Instead of flip-flopping. But there aren't enough people who do that. It isn't that they don't have the power it is that when it comes down to it they have other priorities. That they don't doesn't mean they can't.
Again compare to Brexit. The Tories (or a subset of them) were the ones mainly driving Brexit. Boris gets rewarded by becoming PM, but then as the economy starts to struggle as Brexit headwinds kick in, they vote out the Tories. The lesson politicians correctly take from that is that giving people what they say they want should be secondary to maintaining a strong economy, because a weak economy means they lose power no matter what else they deliver. Short term politicians are driven by short term voters. And most voters are short term.
This isn't a lack of power, it's a lack of cohesion. Too many voters prize economic wellbeing over anything else. Doesn't matter if in opinion polls say they want less immigration with a 90% majority. What matters is how many of them will stick to that in face of a poor economy. If every single white person voted for a Republican every 4 years come rain or shine, recession or boom they have the power to curb immigration. But to date they do not. It ISN'T a power issue at all. They have the power, they just use that power for other things they value more.
I'm also not sure what you mean by advanced racism in the first place, but hopefully my answer here has helped clarify?
SSCReader
2d ago
"Even assuming I agree, that only goes for Blacks. How does it go for Indians, Jews, Asians, Arabs, Mexicans and every other nationality colonizing America and carving it's founding stock out of it?"
Coils initial post I responded to was about white people specifically starting to choose to hire white people only (among other things) and discriminate against other races, I pointed out that had been done before and led to where we are now. He then countered that the founding stock was being carved out by other races (quoted above). At which point I pointed out that only white people generally have the power of enabling that to happen, so the issue is not with Indians or Mexicans and so forth. He then countered that actually white people voted against more immigration but the government gave it to them anyway, at which point I countered by pointing out most of said government was white as well.
So the race of the people making decisions is very relevant in the conversation we are having. Anyway you slice it, it is white people who are carrying out the agenda he doesn't like. And it is them he needs to persuade/stop if wants that to change. No point targeting black or Mexican communities, they don't have the power to force affirmative action or immigration if the mainly white ruling class doesn't want it.
SSCReader
2d ago
If the rule brought you to this, of what use was the rule?
I mean America is pretty great in my opinion.
Moral improvement should have costs surely? If being moral was easy and cheap then everyone would do it. If you want to be moral you are explicitly making decisions that are worse practically, because if they were better practically you wouldn't have to be moral to choose them. Being moral mean soften looking at the most efficient choice and not making it. You risk your life to dive into the river to save the child and so on and so forth.
The ancestors of America brought the wolf in (as per Jefferson), they could later have chosen to be immoral and kill/deport all the wolves. Or moral and have to contend with what enslaving a race means for race relations and the future when you let them go. They chose the latter. That means their descendants have to deal with that choice, for better or for ill. Being immoral is often better practically. But it isn't what America was founded to aspire to. I don't think that's a nasty lesson in as much as a lesson about reality. Choices have consequences. Being better than you were does not immunize you against previous choices. It's easy to go back and think we should have just killed them all. It probably would be easier. But morality isn't about being easier it's about being better, however you measure that.
"Jefferson wrote that maintaining slavery was like holding “a wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.”17 He thought that his cherished federal union, the world’s first democratic experiment, would be destroyed by slavery. To emancipate slaves on American soil, Jefferson thought, would result in a large-scale race war that would be as brutal and deadly as the slave revolt in Haiti in 1791. But he also believed that to keep slaves in bondage, with part of America in favor of abolition and part of America in favor of perpetuating slavery, could only result in a civil war that would destroy the union."
America you will note, managed to not have the union destroyed, not have a full scale race war and has not as yet been destroyed. And part of the reason for that is because efforts were made to make up for slavery. The Civil Rights Act, Affirmative Action and the like were promises to ADOS that they didn't need to resort to a race war to get their place in America. The white guilt you speak of as a mental illness was vital in charting a course that has made great strides.
Is it perfect? Not at all. Racial resentment did not vanish. Black people are still poor compared to whites. But assuming you think genocide is bad, the outcome has to be measured against that. Not against perfection.
SSCReader
2d ago
Can you expand on this? I said white people were making the decisions, Coil said the call was not coming from inside the house, I pointed out that the politicians were also primarily white (the house in question). Being white was the house we were talking about as far as I can tell.
SSCReader
2d ago
David Cameron could have reduced non-EU immigration to literally zero and still have hundreds of thousands of EU workers coming in every year to flood the labour market.
Precisely! That's why Brexit will allow us to control immigration was such a blatant lie. We could always have done so. And that article also notes my view. I think he misrepresents it though. It is not that British workers won't do those jobs it is because they will want more money which will then make those services and products more expensive thus slowing growth. He comes close to it here: In reality, the demand for work is potentially infinite: it’s like trying to fill a bottomless well with buckets of water — the more you throw in, the more you need to keep throwing.
What he is talking about is expansion, more immigrants, means more jobs, means more GDP, means the line goes up. That is the driving factor.
I can tell you from direct experience David Cameron and Boris Johnson have barely a committed ideological bone in their body. They aren't allowing more immigrants in because of some love of global Britain or for other elites. They aren't committed enough to anything to sacrifice for that.
SSCReader
2d ago
Right, but those politicians are white themselves overwhelmingly right? 75% of Congress is white. Its not black people or Asians or whatever making those choices. They don't have the numbers or power. If you want to say elite whites are making different choices than non elite whites want then perhaps you have a point. But its still white people making those choices.
And even there i'll point again to the discrepancy that haunted the Tories, people say they want less immigration, but they also punish any party that oversees an economic downturn.
If you want politicians to really drop immigration you have to show you will vote for them when the economy tanks. And mostly people don't. That was our finding when I worked for the Tories. All our modelling showed that doing what people said they wanted, would lose us votes. Same with Brexit, as soon as the economic winds started to bite, voters turned on the Tories. What lesson does that teach your politicians?
We get the politicians we deserve. People may say they want lower immigration, but they are not prepared to pay the costs that involves. I'll bet dollars to donuts that in 2028, if Trump really has made a dent in numbers of illegal immigrants and the economy has suffered that Republicans lose, even if they did what most people wanted. And politicians learn that lesson.
More people rate the economy as their most important political issue than immigration. Therefore spending billions on immigration enforcement, driving up costs of food, cutting other programs for Americans to pay for it, is a losing proposition. Thats why even Trump was going back and forth on enforcement for illegal farm workers.
Its not that the call is coming from inside the building. Its that there are 300 million calls all saying contradictory things, reduce immigration, make my food cheaper, make American goods, make me able to buy a truck and a TV, and so on and so forth. Trump to his credit, is trying to stick to some of these, but even he admits it will make things worse in the short term.
That means you need to persuade people in 2028 to vote Republican even if, especially if! the economy sucks. If they do, then you are creating a new signal. If they don't then they are telling politicians what their revealed preferences really are.
SSCReader
2d ago
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Yup, but this isn't medication, or mental illness. This is a choice. You may not like the choice, but that doesn't make it mental illness.
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If anyone is carving out the founding stock, it is the founding stock themselves. Indians, Mexicans and whatever else can't do anything they are not allowed to do. The vast majority of your political apparatus is white. This isn't colonization or invasion. It's invitation. And it is invitation largely because of the white guilt felt by large numbers of your fellow white Americans. You can't fix that by making them do the same thing they felt the guilt about in the first place. If you think it is a problem (and it legitimately might be!) then you have to resolve it, not repeat the actions that led to it. Unfortunately this is one of the dividing issues your nation has faced since its founding. It was called out at its founding this was going to be a huge problem in fact. The Civil War, Civil Rights movement, wokism is all downstream of the choices your ancestors made.
I don't see a good answer, with the possible exception (and even this is shaky) as you point out as going all in for blacks. Affirmative action for blacks only, reparations for blacks only, attempt to help your fellow white Americans extirpate their guilt by focusing on the main group that was harmed so others don't get pattern matched in. But that guilt is the foundational issue you are going to have to deal with. Letting immigrants in is asymmetric. It takes much less effort to do so, than try and get rid of them afterwards. So you have to find a way to make them stop wanting to. To make them stop feeling guilty about being so privileged and about how that privilege was used against yes primarily black people through American history.
I don't think you can do that, by going back to the same behaviors that got you here in the first place.
SSCReader
2d ago
What if they preferentially hire whites the same way Indians favor Indians, or Jews favor Jews? What if they aggressively subsidize and import white residents the same way the federal government bombs small Midwestern towns with Haitians or Somalians?
I mean they did right? Even more than that actually. This is something white Americans already did. It's how you ended up where you are now. Do you think trying it again is going to work better? You have affirmative action and white guilt, people trying to make things up to black farmers and the like because this is what happened before and white people decided, actually this makes us feel pretty bad when we look at in comparison to our theoretical national values.
Whites had the nation you are envisaging and even more than that. Then they decided they didn't like it. Black people didn't have the power to change it. White people themselves did.
The things you complain about are already the tat for white peoples tit! (so to speak!), to try and make up for slavery and Jim Crow and so on and so forth. Instigated by white people themselves!
They already did the "What if?" You know how it ended.
SSCReader
2d ago
Like, how would a nightclub make sense financially in rural Mississippi (?), specifically for black people which were mostly sharecroppers and low-wage laborers? And the Twins should know this, since they worked and/or were in close-enough proximity in this sector.
I mean this part is roughly historically accurate. Clarksdale did have a number of juke joints, it even has festivals to this day celebrating them. It's one of the important stops on the Mississipi Blues Trail for just this reason. Many of them did struggle financially as their clientele were mostly poor black sharecroppers, but they did also have a mostly captive clientele, blacks weren't allowed in white establishments, so something was going to spring up to cater to that segment. The population of the city itself then was about 10,000 but it had significant cotton plantations around it and those workers wanted somewhere to drink and so on.
"Classic juke joints, found for example at rural crossroads, catered to the rural work force that began to emerge after emancipation.[1] Plantation workers and sharecroppers needed a place to relax and socialize following a hard week, particularly since they were barred from most white establishments by Jim Crow laws."
SSCReader
16d ago
I think that the Thirty Years War is the appropriate comparison because it too was about which value system, Protestant or Catholic, was to be the sole value system, regardless of parental wishes.
Absolutely, which is why the time to do that would have been at the founding. Trying to do it now would be a huge mess to say the least.
The only thing I would disagree with is that power honey pots are inherently bad, they do attract wasps, but to do anything requires power, so wasps must be planned for and tolerated. The optimum amount of government power is more than you think, because otherwise the honey pot will still exist and will be exploited by wasps anyway. At least if the hive is in charge you might get something useful done while the wasps are grifting.
SSCReader
16d ago
the forced passivity feels more akin to foot-binding or raising a vegan cat than religious beliefs.
My grandparents were raised in a super pacifist offshoot of Christianity, you also have Jainism and the like. Passivity is also part of what people get to indoctrinate their kids into. And of course I am sure the other way round, you can put your kid in boxing and martial arts at an early age if you want.
It's possible the US would be more cohesive if public education was centralized and everyone was taught the same value system, and parents were not allowed to go against it. But I'm not sure it would be the US at that stage, quite.
I kinda feel the same way about my sister in law (who is Catholic and has huge problems with Catholic guilt which she incessantly complains about), raising my nieces and nephews in Catholicism. I think she is causing them significant damage. But if my brother is ok with it (he like me is an atheist) then I keep my mouth shut. People get to raise their kids in ways I find stupid and damaging.
The alternative is you giving swords to their kid secretly, me telling my nieces and nephews that God doesn't exist and is made up, and so on and so forth. But that's not likely to be any better I don't think in the long run.
SSCReader
17d ago
But this isn't like some parasite was controlling his brain, his mental illnesses, if they existed, were just as intrinsic to who he was as his good qualities. I don't see how this is different from me saying "I'm really a nice guy I'm just suffering from untreated assholeism"
With bi-polar though for example, being on medication can literally turn you into a different person. My exes mother had bipolar and on medication she was a sweet Christian lady who baked cakes and wouldn't hurt a fly. Off it she was a foul mouthed, paranoid who lacked impulse control and used to beat her kids with metal coat hangers.
Which was the "real" her? The difference between a mental illness and just being an asshole, is an asshole can choose to not be so. With a mental illness you can't.
SSCReader
17d ago
If we're going to allow people to teach their kids there is an invisible man in the sky who judges them, then you're going to have to allow this. You can brainwash your kid into almost any belief set.
Personally I'd take banning this in exchange for banning exposing kids to religion until they are 18, but I don't imagine that would be too popular.
SSCReader
21d ago
Sure, but that is not a 0% of pulling through as a going concern. The population could drop 80% as you point out and you can still be a going concern. The US might not be a super power any more and it might take a long road to recovery, but even what you are describing is not a zero percent chance of pulling through.
Depending exactly how a civil war breaks out and where the fighting is concentrated, the damage could be greater or lesser. It could be 3 states vs 20 with the rest sitting it out. There is simply no way that we can say 0% is the correct figure with something so nebulous.
Yeah the implication seems to be 5th century or earlier. He doesn't specify who it was who stole his fathers lands or make any claim about how widespread it was, so could be a Christianized vs non-Christianized neighbor dispute for all we know. I think if he were just pre-Norman or Tudor it wouldn't quite fit the way he talks about it because it's the Christian bit he is stuck on specifically. But as you say who knows how much research effort was put forth.
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