As someone (older white male American Southerner) who’s struggled with depression and low self-esteem, among other things, all my life, I’d like to say ‘Welcome to my world.’ It’s tough questioning all aspects of your very self all the time, isn’t it? Maybe now you’ll advocate for better universal mental health care as well as all the other things that help people.
Mind you, I’m not holding my breath. Their minds are just built a certain way, just like mine is built this way, and I can’t change that.
@JohnT, that was a shock to my system, not that I was unaware of some of it. I just didn’t realize the horrible depth. I’m sure all of that wouldn’t be attributed to a single source, but may I ask for references/resources so I can further explore? You don’t have to repeat any such given above, as I’ll be rereading for exactly that. Very impactful, and thank you. Anyone who reads that and doesn’t immediately dismiss it out of denial can never look at America the same way again.
To the 2nd post, @tripthicket , the only citation used is the National Institute of Health report linked to in the 5th paragraph. That is the citation which gave me not only the number of slaves existing in the United States and its colonies from 1619-1865, but also the number of hours worked by them in toto. The citation includes a decade by decade chart of the growth of the slave population in the United States both by importation and by natural birth.
The first post is largely stuff we are taught in high school, just phrased differently. For example, this is what I was taught about the Incas:
:record scratch:
What?
What we aren’t told, but we have to infer, is that the Incas no longer existed by 1912. The secondary inference left is that meeting white people (phrasing which @gandrews3367 prefers, remember) was a fatal event for the Incas. The third inference is that white people killed and enslaved them.
Which is, in fact, what happened. Who do you think worked the silver mountain of Potosi?
And the history of the rest of the indigenous peoples across the world are given the same shrift. China became modern because Britain opened it up to trade, something something opium, something something Boxer rebellion, something something Rape of Nanking, something something Communism.
But what really happened is that the British empire, and then the rest of the West, broke the Chinese Civilization, 6,000 years of continuity, via purposeful, widespread opium addiction pushed upon the Chinese people by the Western empires.
1729: 200 chests, approximately 28,000 pounds (140 pounds of opium per chest)
1820: 10,000 chests, approximately 1,400,000 pounds
1860: 60,000 chests, approximately 8,400,000 pounds
It took the British almost two centuries, but they finally were able to reduce Chinese civilization to just ‘China’, yet another member state in the global European hegemony, and they did this via the means of crippling the Chinese response by addicting millions of Chinese to heroin. It was a fucking beautiful setup - the British would use effectively enslaved Indian field hands to grow poppies, they would process this into heroin and other usable forms, they would sell this to the Chinese, and with the vast amounts of money they had pouring in from China, they could use it to effectively enslave even more Indians, growing even more poppies…
For 200 years straight*.
Yay? Go team?
But, again, like the Incas, much of this is left out of traditional Western Civ narratives as taught in America, especially from K-12.
*One could argue that the 1917 loss of the Chinese drug trade, and its attendant India-centered profits, was as important to Britains eventual loss of India as the two World Wars and their financial impact.
Came up with a thought experiment. Bear with me now, it’s 4am.
For 1 year, you own 46,000,000 American slaves. You get to cut their wages to sustenance levels (for 2021 - let’s call this minimal wage… what, $7/hour?) while putting the surplus in your pocket. In addition to that, you get all revenues generated by the work product produced by those 46 million… though, to be fair, you also get all expenses, so you really just net out profit. And… and this is real lucky it happened this way, but your revenues and profits are an exact reflection of the overall American economy and not just one sector, making things real easy for me.
Question (PLEASE ANSWER BEFORE READING FURTHER):
Of the two… appropriated wages, or profit earned… which do you think is higher, and by how much?
(For example, phrase it like “profit would be higher, and 60% of your revenue would come from profits”)
Let’s find out!
Appropriated Wages: Average hourly wages in America is $30 (rounded) according to the BLS. Given that we decided sustenance is a $7/hour cost, this means for every hour worked by your slaves, you pocket $23/hour in savings per, or $1,058,000,000/hour. Since we know 410,000,000,000 hours will be worked by the end of the year, just multiply 410B times $23: $9,430,000,000,000 in appropriated ‘surplus earnings’.
Since the 46 million represent 28.5% of the September 2021 labor force of 161 million, this means you get to pocket 28.5% of American profits. According to the BEA, this means you get 28.5% of $2.2 trillion in 2020 profits, or $627 billion.
So:
Appropriated Wages: $9.43 trillion
Profits: $627 billion
Total: $10.7 trillion, with 90% coming from stolen wages.
I genuinely think with $10.7 trillion, I could jumpstart a sustainable space program, complete with mining asteroids and moon hotels. Let’s make this happen by giving me your surplus income for the next year - PM me for my Venmo!
I hate the CRT debate largely because–whatever one’s opinion on CRT, before about 2 years ago it was something that mostly existed in academia and academia-adjacent circles, and wasn’t even comprehensively taught at all colleges, although it was taught in some in the sort of classes/programs you’d expect (African American Studies etc.) Then some right wing “influencers” started conflating CRT with basic education about American history–things like the Civil Rights movement etc, that have been taught as standard curriculum since the early 1990s in most states, and claimed it was part of a liberal plot to teach that “white people are evil” and that “whites should be ashamed to be white.” This lie then propagated out to the point discussion of CRT is one of the most dominant things in the grassroots right today. Many local school boards are being taken over by candidates with zero experience or knowledge about the education system, solely because they are running on “anti-CRT” platforms.
It doesn’t matter one whit to any of them that CRT has essentially never been taught in an American High School, and the school boards and State legislatures already taken over, have been passing local and state laws that aren’t blocking CRT–they are usually phrased much broader such that substantive education on things like the historical treatment of blacks under Jim Crow, the history of Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction, the Civil Rights movement–all of this is now very difficult for teachers in some parts of the country to teach. This isn’t new age hippie shit being shut down, this is curriculum that in many places dates as far back to the 1980s, with revisions since then. The anti-CRT lie is being used to roll back education on race (which in most schools was a couple units a year and pretty scant as it was) to pre-Reagan era levels of dialogue. It’s a huge disservice to actually educating children in the real history of their country.
Normally I love flippant posts, even to the point of biting and sarcastic but last night I was tired and slow thinking. Your explanation was one way I was reading the post but a few beers on not enough sleep had me questioning my reading and understanding. Somehow I was able to read your post which I did recognize as my favorite form of post- snark, to support both sides of the argument. I guess we will never know how I would have interpreted it stone cold sober and well rested. I prefer to think I would have gotten the meaning easily, but I might be a bit biased.
Since I have little formal education there are large gaps in the sphere of information from which I try to draw my conclusions. (Years ago I relied upon whatever knee-jerk reaction I felt when I first heard an idea- but years of reading the Straight Dope and listening to NPR has shown me how often my uninformed reactions were on occasion.)
Here is a classic example of what I mean. I was cleaver enough to realize there was a problem, but not familiar enough to know this beautiful nugget truth and wisdom quoted above.
This reminds me of an interview I heard on NPR several years ago, at least eight years- maybe ten or twelve. The right wing had this group of consultants who just named things-- that was their whole job. They found acceptable names for unpopular policies and prejudicial names for popular but opposing policies. That eventually led to a whole framing the issue cottage industry I must assume from watching recent Republican talking points.
One of the most obvious and famous examples was two synonyms used for completely opposite purposes. If the left had any initiative concerning nature that the right wanted to block, they would plaster the word Environmentalist all over their advertising because just that word brought the association of "tree hugging " and “sandal wearing” to the issue; they became unspoken modifiers of the word. Of course there were few things the right opposed as much as tree hugging, sandal wearing environmentalists. On the other hand, if the right had an initiative concerning nature that they wanted to support, they would use the word conservationist. A conservationist is of course conservative (it is right there in the name!), it is grandpa who served in WWII and taught you how to hunt and fish when you were a kid. A good and true American patriot who would never let strip miners ruin America’s natural beauty! Even though Environmentalist and Conservationist have the same DENOTATION, they have very different CONNOTATIONS. Now I believe it has grown past those steps to actively weaponizing phrases as we will see below when I Quote JohnT.
As the charts further demonstrate, JohnT makes a very good point here. The right is so very good at creating arguments that SOUND good, and impact voters very emotionally, but are really just bad policies that promote really bad beliefs (racism, exceptionalism, control over women, irresponsible monetary policy, etc.)
It really does seem to me that Republicans are the party of style and packaging, while Democrats are forming good and positive policies and naming them stupid shit that no one would support.
Are you in favor of police reform?
No! I want to defund the police! (for example)
I did not even get what “kneeling” was in the chart and just before I was going to look it up I saw it was lumped in with “Woke” and “Cancel culture” and realized it must be some right-wing bullshit - - oh, the pledge nonsense with Kaepernick. I know it is so obvious to us, but the right has NO SUBSTANCE at all – they are only about what they can say to stir the outrage of their base
Lastly, there have been several very good, very thoughtful posts in this thread and a few I have not quoted because I could not add one thing to the point being made. I especially appreciate the contributions of Martin_Hyde which were very informative and helpful in both streams of this thread. and many others I refuse to name because if I add one more name I will have to list everyone that I have and have not quoted who posted in this thread even once. (I do have a very long list I wrote on scratch paper and started to type out – but then thought better of it and deleted what was becoming an every single poster list. Rest assured that you are on it, you personally.)
I am going to suggest that we have two different discussions going on here, the original: How are the different factions of the Democratic party going get anything passed before mid-terms and: The Right vs The Left; who has the best policies, the better message, the more effective techniques, the moral high ground, and love and respect of their opponents (with detailed dives on Critical Race Theory, Immigration, Economics, Cancel culture, an eventual Socialist State under democrats, an eventual Fascist State under Republicans, the Green New Deal, the formation of a centrist party, the party affiliation of outliers in the major parties, the meaning of certain movies, Climate change, Antifa, and Diversity).
If you want to split this off into two different threads in case something does happen on the two bills in the next week or so we can continue that discussion in one thread, while also slugging it out in the Battle Royal over differing agendas in a different thread. (On the other Hand, gandrews3367 has not been back for a while and we may just be talking to each other – which doesn’t mean it isn’t still a good idea. In my mind, they are two completely different conversations that are not even all that closely related.)
I agree with every word of this. The fragility of white-supremacists—who, now, cannot even bear to have the words ‘slavery existed’ appear in American textbooks—is both epic and infuriating.
\
This, and the associated graph, are fascinating. I hadn’t thought of “Me, too” being the specific head-exploder for the right, but it does make sense that it was.
\
Also fascinating. I can’t identify the NPR story, but I’d be very surprised if the Heritage Foundation were not involved in this very thing.
As for splitting up this thread: I’m not sure there’s a clear-cut answer. No doubt we’ve all noticed how the topics have morphed, but in one sense they are all about the same thing: how the two parties try to accomplish their goals. Tactics, strategies, and governing philosophies of the left and of the right. And where the moderates fall, in all these issues.
Of course the thread title is inherently critical of Democrats and not of Republicans, but we all seem to be pretty good at keeping the Republicans under scrutiny.
As we’ve all probably heard, Dems passed the “bi-partisan” infrastructure-only bill and it has now been signed into law by President Biden.
And now, according to the NY Times, " Pelosi Predicts Thursday Vote on Biden’s Ambitious Social Policy Bill."
A House vote, months in the making, could come as early as Thursday evening on a $1.85 trillion social policy and climate bill that would be the largest expansion of the safety net in 50 years.
Ms. Pelosi talked up the areas of agreement that Democrats had reached in both the House and Senate: universal prekindergarten, generous assistance with child care costs, prescription drug price controls and home health care for older Americans.
If the bill clears the House, it faces a difficult road in the Senate, where Republicans will have a clear shot to offer politically difficult amendments, any one of which could unravel the delicate Democratic coalition behind it. Two Democratic centrists, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, have not committed to supporting it, and a single defection would bring the measure down in the evenly divided chamber.
Well, they did something – and it can be seen as a fairly significant something. Plus now they have a swing at something more.
Surely as ShadowFacts’ quote above states, it might be a very limited or non-existent something more but that is the hand this administration has been dealt. Overall, I am proud of the left for not managing to screw-up the whole damn thing. And I give them extra points for putting Gosar in his place as a nice bonus piece of House business.
I hope Man & Sin let them have a much diminished additional bill also, but if they don’t it will be on the back of the two obstructionists, not the administration nor the party as a whole in my opinion. It sure would be nice to get one more little piece of something more, now too!
