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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
@pwiegle
Coates seems to realize it, which is why his essay goes into more detail about things such as Jim Crow and the Chicago housing bills and the like, as well as the symbolic value of looking into such a thing over actually going through with it. Things which have a concrete, specific, and identifiable monetary effect on the lives of African Americans. He's thought this thing through a lot better than most people both left or right get the impression of.
Like you and Silasw said it's hard to calculate the exact financial consequences of slavery, as well as who is descended from US slaveowners, who is actually descended US slaves and who isn't and is just trying to make a quick buck (my Haitian and Jamaican friends are strongly against slavery reparations for these reasons), the fact that population growth tends to be somewhat exponential so what happens if you're descended from both slaveowners and slaves on separate branches, or if you're a 95% white guy who had a slave somewhere in the family tree? Combined with the difficulty of preserving historical documents from those times it's a logistical nightmare for everyone.
Not to mention the general unfortunate implications of Sins of Our Fathers-based payouts, which probably won't actually do anything to fix institutional racism other than giving black people a one-time financial bulwark they can try to enact change with but probably won't do any good. Plus, even the idea that institutional racism and being turned into human property can be numerically measured, in money? Ridiculous and reductive.
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The term used to be a used by moderate or more equanimous liberals to call out bad or self-destructive behavior among their peers before the right hijacked it and turned it into a general word to smear all liberalism. Shockingly similar to the term "politically correct". Don't see a big solution to that unless people are ready to venture that liberals should never ever self-police their most abusive members and perform Don't Shoot the Message because it's going to help the right in the future.
I still occasionally call people "social justice warriors" in private conversation with people who know exactly what I'm referring to, mostly because I was there at the time it used to mean something and referred specifically to people who hijack SJ issues to send death threats over shipping, fanart, or being genuinely Innocently Insensitive, people who cite a particular SJ issue giving them a free pass to be abusive in other areas (people claiming it's OK to be misogynistic and homophobic because they're black in one case, bashing bisexuality for being homophobic, bashing LGBT activism for being insensitive to people with phobias, bashing science and the value of numbers for being intrinsically opposed to women, and whatever pseudoacademic hogwash have you). None of which has stopped happening, and in many cases has intensified, but for which SJW is no longer a useful general term to call them out.
edited 3rd Dec '16 8:52:06 AM by AlleyOop
The insulting part of SJW is the warrior part, as it implies that the person is more concerned with fighting and causing harm them social justice.
Warriors commit violence, the people who are often labelled as SJ Ws are more concerned with finding a way to commit violence while feeling superior then actually bringing about social justice.
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranWell in American history, as Jamelle Bouie has observed, racism is tied to property. Slaves were both labour and capital and that played a huge part in the mentality of white supremacy.
Any time African Americans gathered wealth, like in Tulsa 1921, free whites would come and destroy it. African-American middle-class people aren't exempt from racism, heck the first Black POTUS is not exempt as can be seen in Tea Party, in the Republican obstructionism, the Birther movement and so on. The whole joke of O J Simpson's trial as TNC noted recently was that it was an example of how celebrity becomes a badge of equality. O J Simpson became the first African-American to receive the same privileges as a white celebrity.
Also it expands culturally too...think of the fact that country music/blues music/jazz music/rock and roll were all invented by African Americans whose great geniuses didn't get much in the way of royalties and licenses from the record companies and that white artists generally got a bigger deal and airtime for making music (good music admittedly) in the same style. The reason the whole "cultural appropriation" thing becomes heated is because it's lopsided because one group understands the reality and the other is ignorant: African-Americans know its tied to money and property, whereas whites (liberals and racists) see it as just a silly SJW issue.
edited 3rd Dec '16 8:53:09 AM by JulianLapostat
Reparations can be dealt with through normal redistributive practices since the top 1% is overly-white and the bottom 20% is overly-black, so a strong redistribution system would achieve the aims of reparations without having to make it explicitly racial, which would be a hard sell and would also be unfair because there are many poor whites who can't afford to pay for their (collective, systemic, and often indirect) sins and many well-off blacks who don't need a leg up.
As an Asian person I find a lot of the talk about cultural appropriation counterproductive because it's a convenient tool for non-white nationalists to enforce general cultural isolationism. The forbidding of wearing neckties in the Iranian government comes to mind, and which i could easily see an appropriation defense come up should it reach wider knowledge. As well as things that would actually financially benefit minorities if not for the cultural appropriation folks telling people not to, like the consumption of ethnic foods such as sushi and tacos by white people when many of these establishments are run by minorities hoping to sell cultural products to a wider audience, the flagging kimono industry in Japan which is depending on foreign customers to keep it afloat, watching and buying anime being exploitative of Japanese cultural media when they're dependent on overcharging otaku to survive and also in which case every damn person on this website is guilty of horribly exploiting the Japanese, or the sale and wearing of African headchains which some Hindu activists have vulgarly slammed as appropriating bindis even though there's zero religious meaning in this case and even though they don't even look like bindis.
And a lot of the more legitimate discussions of cultural appropriation have to do with things that really aren't measurable in financial aspects, such as the donning of culturally symbolic regalia such as war bonnets by non-Natives who have not done anything to earn it, or non-Jews who write the tetragrammaton wherever they please. It's not a one-size-fits-all thing.
edited 3rd Dec '16 9:08:00 AM by AlleyOop
That's the thing: the use of "SJW" by most carries an implicit meaning, that the people they're talking about don't really care that much about social injustice and are just championing these things out of an attempt to feel morally superior or to gain favors.
It goes back to what I've said a few times that a lot of the opposition to social justice is based on bigotry and inertia, but also on a really poisonous brand of cynicism that makes it very easy to justify not doing anything to make the world better, or that shames people for caring about anything or anyone other than their own self-interest.
John Conyers proposes every year a bill concerning reparations and all it asks for is making a study and an examination of what practical measures could and should be taken to tackle this issue, basically just an abstract and that itself doesn't get passed through the House.
There's no evidence that normal re-distributive practices will inherently solve anything. Remember that the New Deal worked by deliberately routing itself away from African-Americans and to poor-whites because they hated the idea that services should go to those they consider inferior.
Racism is a specific and unique problem and efforts to combat it by normal means - Forced Busing, Affirmative Action and Free-market have failed. Like in the case of Flint, Michigan one of the proposed reasons for the water crisis was that since the city had a big African-American population, nobody cared much if they got bad water. And something similar is there in the Dakota Pipeline issue where the pipe was originally going into a prominent white-inhabited town but got rerouted to Standing Rock when white people made the same complaints that the current protestors did about the oil leakage.
Or as Spike Lee said
: "I grew up here in Fort Greene. I grew up here in New York. It’s changed. And why does it take an influx of white New Yorkers in the south Bronx, in Harlem, in Bed Stuy, in Crown Heights for the facilities to get better? The garbage wasn’t picked up every motherfuckin’ day when I was living in 165 Washington Park. P.S. 20 was not good. P.S. 11. Rothschild 294. The police weren’t around. When you see white mothers pushing their babies in strollers, three o’clock in the morning on 125th Street, that must tell you something."
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The whole concept of cultural appropriation in my view is a bit of a non-issue; when cultures are in contact with one another, they tend to absorb elements of one another, often times in radically different contexts. Even cultural assimilation isn't a one way street. So long as you aren't forcing people to abandon their culture, I see no issue with minority cultures being partially or completely absorbed into the majority.
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And what does work then?
Probably. Possibly. I don't know.
edited 3rd Dec '16 9:11:31 AM by CaptainCapsase
The vast majority of the time I see someone use SJW seriously is from alt-righters or people who've bought at least partially into their rhetoric using it to describe people who give even the slightest hint of giving a shit about other people. Whatever meaning it started out with, it's been twisted to mean basically anyone who cares about social justice and won't stop talking about it on places such as their very own blogs and so on.
Conservatives have long accused their opponents of not being serious, relevant or practical. This goes back to Ancient Rome where Cicero invented the word populares as a pejorative to dismiss and malign the appeals of the ones like the Gracchi and Caesar, who supported reforms in grain distribution, land allotments and citizenship rights which the Optimate conservatives were fanatically against, Cato (fetish man for the Confederates) opposed.
You saw this also in the French Revolution era, especially in England (this is where modern conservatism began) where Edmund Burke, a former liberal, based on zero research made this absurd pamphlet on the Revolution ranting against middle-class people and "jew brokers" and that got taken seriously in the English speaking world. When pro-French English liberals like Joseph Priestley had their house and property attacked in riots, magazines literally said, "Of course it's bad but wasn't Priestley asking for it", Mary Wollstonecraft who also defended the revolution got insulted for being a woman and taking an interest in politics and of course Thomas Paine who made the first popular diatribe against Christianity's moral foundations got painted as a drunk fool (Paine was a drunk and he did do some pretty stupid things but that's neither here nor there).
In America, SJW's is part of the whole Anti-Intellectual liberal elite narrative. This was a huge thing in Mccarthyism where you had actual Book Burning. The idea was intellectuals and college-educated were mocking and manipulating real Americans and so on.
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The concept of cultural appropriation is at least intended as an attempt to control exploitative portrayals of cultural concepts by outsiders in a context that demeans them. Basically if most people can understand the concept of blasphemy and why it's disrespectful, then their awareness should be expanded to include practices which aren't primarily religious in nature.
It's not intended to prevent cultural assimilation or cultural gatekeeping, as many of the saner cultural appropriation activists keep stressing, though in practice that's often how it often pans out among younger more impressionable people who jump into it headfirst without truly understanding what it's talking about. Or again, among malicious people who found a new tool to be abusive while being under the illusion of being progressive, like the anti-Semitic Latin American activists who protested a Latina Jew ordering kosher food from a restaurant of her own culture because as a Jew she can't call herself one of them anymore, and is therefore appropriating their culture.
edited 3rd Dec '16 9:23:53 AM by AlleyOop
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I still can't get over how rich, privileged assholes throughout history have successfully conned poor people over and over again into thinking that people like underpaid teachers, underfunded researchers, and social activists who are barely able to pay rent on their studio apartments are the "elite".
edited 3rd Dec '16 9:22:49 AM by M84
Disgusted, but not surprisedThat's how propaganda works...Karl Marx defined it as the "false consciousness" of the ideology of the capital holders. They perpetuate it to keep the workers divided and acting according to their interests and turning their attention to them.
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I always feel it's a hijacking of our intuitive understanding of the Hierarchy of Needs.
"See, these people are concerned with things other then staying warm and feeding their family. They must be these elite assholes at the top of the pyramid. I might be a rich bastard but all I really want is to feed and house myself and family. I'm struggling with stuff at the bottom of the pyramid, just like all you folks."
edited 3rd Dec '16 9:34:01 AM by nightwyrm_zero
And this is why these shallow historical comparisons do not work. Comparing Crassus to Trump is about as inaccurate as you can get—and in this case you've ignored a whole lot of details about Crassus to try and force the comparison. For one thing, Crassus was actually a successful businessman by the standards of the day—he wasn't a brand, he was legitimately one of the richest men in Rome, to the point where he could outfit an army out of his own pocket. In fact, that wealth is one of the reasons he got the command against Spartacus—the Republic was nearing bankruptcy at the time, and Crassus could fund the operation himself.
Secondly, Crassus had extensive political and military experience. He'd served under Sulla in the first civil war, and played a major role in Sulla's victory at the Colline Gate. He later crushed Spartacus after numerous other officers had failed to, and was awarded a special honour because of it (being permitted a unique version of the ovation, rather than the standard). He was, along with Pompey, the dominant political figure in Rome for twenty years, and since Pompey was frequently out of the city, that made Crassus Rome's de facto strongman for much of his life. Recent works have more or less exploded the idea that Crassus was in any way less competent than either Pompey or Caesar, and have offered positive reassessments of his generalship.
As for his death, the reason Crassus invaded Parthian Persia was not in a fruitless pursuit of glory, but because Caesar's recent victories in Gaul had unbalanced the triumvirate. Initially Pompey was the military hero, Caesar the orator, and Crassus the money. Caesar's conquest of Gaul, however, granted him not only a sparkling military reputation, but also vast wealth, and this screwed up their arrangement. For the triumvirate to work, each man had to continue to be indispensable, and Crassus' Parthian operation was intended to remind the Republic of his prior victories, and rebalance the triumvirate. It was a political calculation, not a pointless attempt at personal respect. In the end he lost and was killed, but that's got less to do with mistakes on his part, and more to do with Surenas, the Parthian general, being one of the best of the era; it is highly unlikely that another Roman general, even Caesar or Pompey, would have done better. The molten gold myth is just that—a myth that shows up in much later sources; those closer to the era report Crassus died fighting when the Parthians attacked him under a flag of truce.
Long story short—comparing Crassus to Trump doesn't work. He was a ruthless, plutocratic SOB with strongman ambitions and no moral compass, but he was extremely capable, and had the kind of political and military experience Trump actively boasts of not possessing. Besides being rich and crooked (something you could say about many, many historical figures) they have little in common, and looking for clues to Trump's behaviour in that of Crassus is not an enterprise that is liable to yield results.
If you want actual historical parallels for Trump, you have to look more recently. Andrew Jackson is an obvious parallel, as are Joe McCarthy and especially George Wallace. While comparisons to fascist dictators should always be undertaken carefully, Mussolini also offers some interesting potential parallels that are a lot stronger than the one above. Neofascist figures like Pinochet can also be considered, particularly in light of how Trump's rhetoric about Muslims mirrors their's about Communism. These are all better points of comparison—though as with any historical comparison doing it at all is a flawed exercise.
How about those who think that because I'm straight, white and male, that automatically makes me a member of the overprivileged elite who got rich on the backs of poor oppressed minorities, and I should therefore pay reparations? Never mind the fact that I'm a blue-collar industrial worker driving a fifteen year old car...
This Space Intentionally Left Blank.1. What makes you think you are the one who's directly paying reparations? If and when it happens, and the only serious bill seen so far is merely an inquiry as to how to make it happen precisely to respond to issues like this. The reparations will be paid by tax money from the US budget, the same money that goes to US government veteran programs, ACA, and other measures to help American society. And healing racism and making amends will help America and benefit everyone. If it offends you that your tax money will go to this, then explain to me how you are okay with it going to wars and the bloated defense budget and so on?
2. As for how being "straight, white and male" makes you part of the over privileged elite...well that's not a question for me to answer. Just talk to black folks and listen to them. White working-class earn more wages than minorities in the same class. And African Americans in the Middle-Class, the ones who "are making $100,000 a year tend to live in the same kind of neighborhoods as white families making $30,000 a year
".
My response would be: One strawman argument leads to another. Nobody's innocent of prejudice. Each side makes ill-informed pre-suppositions about the other. Once we all set our prejudices aside and start looking for a way to fix the problem without fixing the blame, then maybe we can make some real progress.
As for reparations being paid out of tax revenue: BZZZT! Try again. The true elite will find some way to avoid paying, while the working class and middle class will be saddled with higher taxes that we can't afford.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank.

The insult's rise is directly tied to The-Hashtag-That-Shalt-Not-Be-Named link
and breitbart pushing it hard. Considering the site's rise and influence on the right it's not a surprise the insult has become the new "hippie" or "liberal" as slur.
@ye old progressives: It's not so weird that eugenics and prohibition were popular. A brighter future requires sacrifices after all. As Darwin explains the weak are holding us back. By sterilizing those to sick or deviant to fit into our greater plan we accelerate the coming of our golden age. And the bottle causes so many problems. If mens minds were clear they could see the logic of our plans.
It's way to easy for a movement to be evil if their tent is small enough. Blacks, gays, the infirm, the handicapped, they were all outside the tent. The progressive movement of days past could be described as "a brighter future for me." It took the nazis for the progressives to re-evaluate their feelings towards eugenics and race and the post civil rights days for the tent to get bigger.
Is using "Julian Assange is a Hillary butt plug" an acceptable signature quote?