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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   6181 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 12, 2023

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The piece of evidence in favor of this theory that I think is the clearest smoking gun is the classic Hillary Clinton quote that surely was shaped by the brightest minds in the Democrat establishment who were working on her campaign:

“If we broke up the big banks tomorrow….would that end racism? Would that end sexism?”

Now was the purpose of this to stop real progress, or just a cynical way to undercut a political opponent? Most practically it's the latter but if you look at what the campaigns represent it does kind of fit the theory. You could argue on the merits why breaking up the banks is unwise... but instead the play was an appeal to identity politics.

i recently watched judas and the black messiah, the film about fred hampton. i'm sure there was a certain degree of sanitizing on the ethics and crimes of the that-era BPP, not that i think any better of the cops they encountered. more true innocents murdered than anyone will talk about; misrepresenting events like the shootout involving jake winters and raising him as a martyr. they make the argument they're at war and i don't find the specific reasoning specious, but there's a lack of commitment, a lack of courage, at going all-in on that. if you say you're at war, your soldiers the righteous revolutionaries, the cops the uniformed soldiers of the oppressors, don't downplay it. they downplayed it. true to life, i guess.

seeing the rainbow coalition formed was very interesting. i found that part of the film the most compelling. i have nothing but contempt for the marxist/-leninist ethos, but it's easy to sympathize with those movements of the 60s and before versus 2023.

anyway, daniel kaluuya won an oscar for the performance. he was very good, in particular his capture of hampton's manner of speaking. i found this part of a hampton speech strong in the film and your comment reminded me of it.

We got to face some facts. That the masses are poor, that the masses belong to what you call the lower class, and when I talk about the masses, I'm talking about the white masses, I'm talking about the black masses, and the brown masses, and the yellow masses, too. We've got to face the fact that some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with water. We say you don't fight racism with racism. We're gonna fight racism with solidarity. We say you don't fight capitalism with no black capitalism; you fight capitalism with socialism"

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