Nope, the politicians and talking heads from the right that I have seen ranting about wokism are just saying meaningless and ignorant things. As noted before, they are double ignorant when they pretend that they are not using the word as a slur.
Explaining why some researcher wrote something is not the same as defending it. And the point stands anyhow, there is no other good reason to point at a nutpick as wanting to smear others in the process.
Saying that someone is a beneficiary of decades-past white supremacy and saying that someone is a beneficiary of current far-right white supremacist movements are two entirely different things. That’s why there are other terms such as systemic racism and institutional racism. People’s automatic thoughts when they hear the term white supremacy are to think of the Ku Klux Klan. Saying that it means something else and you’re talking about white advantage based on historical racist power structures is pointless unless you’re trying to be confrontational. It’s using a provocative term with a widely understood negative meaning and then equating it with a different concept in order to be antagonistic rather than making some societally useful point.
No thanks, I’ll stick to pointing out the inaccuracies in the posts I see in this thread.
It’s not an inaccuracy.
I quoted your post (#373), including the embedded quote from Sam_Stone. You’re the one who omitted his bit about Biden, not me.
And there’s a reason you did so. We’re making the argument that many of the policies of the Democratic Party left are distasteful to Republicans and the right. You keep trying to refute that argument by saying that those policies aren’t principals of Bidenism. Guess what? Sam had just made that point. It would have made your strawman nonsense if you had included his sentences on Biden into your quote. So you intentionally left them out, and now you’re trying to obscure why you did so rather than admitting you made a flawed argument.
Let me know when Biden did say that he was not approving of the “Defund the police” because he was “an old man with racist attitudes”. The point was not that Sam interpreted how the left was thinking about Biden (that can be also seen as a straw man since not all the left see it that way), but there was really no other point to mention how the left would allegedly see Biden when dismissing that slogan, the straw manning comes for thinking that a poster like me or others would say or assume that “attitude” coming from Biden now.
In my case. While I’m at the left of Biden, I do take into account that Biden did not use his “racist attitudes” when deciding that defund the police was an extreme idea. Because, Biden had good reasons about not going for that slogan during the election, not all the left assumes it is because of “racist attitudes”.
It is debatable. I don’t know for any one person whether it is true or not. It may be true in some instances but false in others. Heck, it may even be true in the vast majority of cases, but it’s still debatable.
The economy is hurt by not allowing people to achieve to the fullest extent of their abilities. This unknown factor would help an unknown amount of people to an unknown degree. This has to be balanced against some people, but not everyone, getting a better education and jobs that other people did not get, but in the context of an overall worse economy.
And the economy is the only realm in which there is a benefit. I’m not benefitting from outright supremacists getting free reign to harass and sometimes kill people, nor am I benefitting from the resources wasted on the discriminatory war on drugs. The money spent on this, and even, to a lesser extent, the harm caused to people and thus to myself based on my common humanity and also the distrust engendered which prevents us from focusing on important stuff like health care, is a negative to me rather than a positive.
So non-permanent treatments which are "no guarantee against regression” are cures?
This discussion is getting seriously weird. It’s discussing Whiteness, which has on the face of it a definition as the state of being White, as a malignant pathology. But we’re supposed to ignore that obvious definition, and the secondary definition that “Whiteness” is a cultural phenomenon based on a socio-economical identity that results from being a member of the white race. Instead, we’re supposed to define “Whiteness” as
which is apparently what is a malignant pathology. A condition described by Donald Moss as “a malignant, parasitic-like condition” which “renders its hosts’ appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse” and " these appetites are nearly impossible to eliminate". Yet somehow, despite Moss stating the condition has “no guarantee against regression” and “[t]here is not yet a permanent cure” that doesn’t mean it’s not an incurable condition. I think we should just take Donald Moss’s words as he’s using them, rather than using the “well that’s what was said, but that’s not what it means” definitional technique.
Donald Moss and his writings, in terms of mainstream American thought and political opinion, are almost surely inconsequential. But the elements of the left that buy into this type of thought aren’t inconsequential. They influence left-wing Democratic Party elected and appointed officials. Republicans and the US right object to this type of thought, and their objections fortify the left-right divide that supports the Republican Party base and ensures it isn’t going away as a winning party in American elections.
Sure. Obligatory “it depends”: this is only for the US, it’s multiple whole fields of practice, it’s more complicated than this, and it changes all the time depending on what the Supreme Court takes on. (And it is really, really fascinating to see how the specific idea of what, e.g., “equal protection of the law” is has changed. For example, there’s lots of people who make arguments in 2021 that are the exact same arguments that people made in like 1883. The only difference is that in 1883 they were arguing in defense of things that are now considered the kinds of “blatant racism” that doesn’t happen anymore, and now they’re making the same arguments about things that they think are completely different and fine. This is all a digression, but the history really informs my perspective.)
Anyway, to answer your question: what you do is ask three questions: is there discrimination going on? Against whom? What is the stated justification for it?
Once you have the answers to those questions, you do a kind of sorting, with the end goal of deciding whether the justification is good enough. If there’s no discrimination, that’s an easy one, no justification necessary. You’re left with a bunch of cases where somebody is getting discriminated against, and the government has said “this is why.” This is where the concept of “protected class” kicks in. Very broadly speaking, the Supreme Court has said, beginning in the 1940s, that when the government is trying to do certain things, it has to be scrutinized more closely than at other times. These times include when they’re taking “fundamental rights” away from people (not important here), and also when they’re doing things that classify people based on “suspect” things like race and national origin, which the law has historically used to cause particular harm by focusing on (important here - these form the protected classes). In those cases, instead of using the general rule of just asking whether the government has a “rational basis” for doing what it’s doing, the court is going to apply “strict scrutiny” to make sure the discrimination is actually needed to accomplish its objective.
In other words, you’re the government. You want to start doing something that some people aren’t going to like… say, closing things down in a pandemic. If you do so in a way that is not discriminatory at all, or in a way that is discriminatory but only on the basis of some non-protected characteristic (like, say, people who operate cruise ships), a court isn’t going to say you illegally discriminated unless you basically had no reason at all for doing it. That’s the baseline: the court will defer to you, the government, to do government things. But if you do so in a way that discriminates against people based on race, or national origin, or religion, etc., the court is going to “strictly scrutinize” your justification for it, to ensure that you aren’t denying those people the equal protection of the law unfairly.
This is why it’s not technically accurate to say that it’s legal or illegal to do X or Y. It is possible, and it does happen, that a court will find that X fails even the “rational basis” test, where they aren’t discriminating based on any protected class, but they still fail to assert a good enough justification. In one such case, the Supreme Court found that a city in Texas illegally discriminated against people with mental impairments by declining a permit for a group home (disability not being a protected characteristic in this kind of case, but having since been protected by other laws). In other words, they said you aren’t discriminating against a protected class of persons, so you only get reviewed to see if you have a rational basis, but you have failed to assert even that, so it’s still illegal.
And then on the other side of the coin, it is also possible to discriminate against a protected class, but have a justification that is so good that you satisfy the “strict scrutiny” from the court. This famously was the case in one of the ugliest Supreme Court cases we’ve had, where the court found that yes, it’s discriminatory against Japanese people to confine them in camps, but hey, there’s a war on, and so the justification is good enough. That was discrimination of the kind that on its face is the least OK–it was explicitly against Japanese Americans for being Japanese Americans–but it was OK under those circumstances.
The balance has shifted over time, and for a while during the civil rights era courts drew distinctions between “invidious” discrimination, i.e. discrimination that oppressed, and discrimination that was intended to uplift, i.e. affirmative action-type measures, but the Roberts court has been very clear about not recognizing this distinction and striking down laws that rely on it. These laws, for the foreseeable future, are to be read as color-blind, in the sense in which it is used by modern conservatives. So a white person, or a man, or a Christian could bring exactly the same claim as a person of another race, sex or religion, and it would be treated by the law as the same kind of discrimination. There is still a bit of a muddle about what you can and can’t do, and what you can and can’t assert as a legitimate justification for doing it, but there’s nothing on the books that says these people are protected and these people aren’t.
Like I said, I’m not really sure how that fits into the various arguments being put forth in this thread, but it is at least an uncontroversial fact that white people don’t lack certain legal protections that other people have.
For what it’s worth, I, like, strenuously object. To the extent that I’m anti-woke, which is a non-zero amount, it is not because I’m not far left enough. I agree it’s about being anti- a certain kind of liberal progressivism, but I don’t think there’s really any sense in which I’m on the “right” of that progressivism. I think it’s almost an… I don’t know, an aesthetic choice.
Thanks for that. Are there some examples of what justifications have passed the ‘strict scrutiny’ test recently?
Could you elaborate on this? Sounds interesting.
I think it’s about being anti illiberal progressivism.
There’s a, let’s call it a half a one? Parents Involved. The school plans in question reassigned students to area schools based on a complicated formula, with race as a tie-breaking factor. The goal was to re-integrate the school systems, which remained heavily racially divided in practice despite no longer being legally segregated. Parents of white kids who didn’t get into the schools they wanted sued, because the districts were discriminating based on race. The Court applied strict scrutiny and said no, you can’t do that, so it’s not an example of surviving strict scrutiny. The reason I call it half an example is that Roberts wanted the Court to find that “diversity” is not a compelling interest, ever, i.e. it is not a justification that anyone can ever use for race-conscious policies. Kennedy went the other way on that question, and so even though these specific plans were struck down, the idea in general of having race as a factor in a holistic, comprehensive diversity initiative survived as still a possible justification. You can still do it, but you have to do it with means that are better tailored toward that justification than these were. It was a big defeat for affirmative action either way, but if Roberts had gotten his way on that point, it would have been much bigger.
I think the whole thing was an abomination, and it made me sick to my stomach to read two guys invoking Brown v. Board of Education and good civil rights law in order to say no, don’t desegregate your schools. But it is a good illustration of which way the wind is blowing. It’s a funny dance, where the litigants and the court all know that strict scrutiny is generally a death knell when applied to a particular set of facts, and so mostly what we get is increasingly complicated ways of talking around the issues in order to get a “good” result without having to uproot major precedents or establish ones you don’t want to be held to. If someone were to argue that it’s all semantic horseshit and that it’s really politics that determine any individual application of these rules, I wouldn’t know where to find the energy to disagree.
To answer your other question without another novella, hopefully, the specific thing I was thinking of was the 1883 Civil Rights Cases, where the Court said in an 8-1 decision, about the now-freed black American, who “by the aid of beneficent legislation ha[d] shaken off the inseparable concomitants of the state,” that “there must be some stage in the progress of his elevation when he takes the rank of a mere citizen, and ceases to be the special favorite of the law.” That was the reason for striking down five different laws which were intended to actually provide equal accommodations for black people – basically, once you’re no longer enslaving people, that’s the end of the discrimination, and it’s up to them now. The Court said it would be “running the slavery argument into the ground” to say that the fact that they couldn’t stay in a hotel, or ride on a train, or go to a theater, had anything to do with the law anymore. The law had no business telling people who they should and shouldn’t serve, as that was just a private matter that had nothing to with equal rights under law. In 1883 they were saying this. And, of course, the result was that since the legislation was struck down, the Jim Crow era followed, 80 years’ more of catastrophic policy, until another attempt at actual equal rights. It’s just striking to me that literally as soon as we stopped enslaving black people, we started complaining that we were now giving them special privileges, and we have never at any point stopped complaining about it. There has never been a single time when people weren’t arguing that racial discrimination used to be real, but it was already over, and that any current attempt to remedy it was basically the real injustice. And you can track the exact same forms of argumentation through the eras right up to today.
I dunno, that sounds like something I’d be on board with
My understanding is that a leftist stance would call for a complete reversal of military expansionism, the dismantling of Wall Street, and the formation of a society similar to that of Cuba. And if it is highly likely that most Americans will not agree to such conditions, will be ruled by a dictatorship of something like the proletariat, or an intelligentsia of leftists.
If it is likely that most Americans won’t agree to such, then I think the problem doesn’t simply involve a conservative right but also a liberal left that’s part of a consumer spending economy that has incredible levels of debt and consumes energy and resources at significant rates per capita. For example, the country only has around 5 pct of the world’s population but consumes up to 20 pct of world oil production, partly to power up something like a quarter of the world’s passenger vehicles.
I recall similar about the world economy, where I think on report pointed out that something like 15 pct of the world’s population is responsible for something like 60 pct of personal consumption.
Score one for Saintly_Loser.
Great straw men there! That’s like a whole army made of straw!
I was referring to a leftist stance, not liberal.
Here’s the point to consider:
For example, I (and I consider myself a leftist, and by conservative standards, a far leftist) think that liberals and leftists ought to really sit down and put themselves through a really rigorous examination of conscience and consider how neoliberalism alienated and marginalized the working class. And the article to which you linked had some actual insight into that.
Given the point that liberals and leftists are not the same as they are mentioned separately, then how are they different?
Presumably, for a liberal, the solution is similar to that of Occupy Wall Street, which is to increase wages or similar. In short, maintain current systems but increase income for those who lack it.
What about leftists? If they follow Marx and others, then the problem involves the very systems themselves.
How is that seen in light of neoliberalism? Is it not the case that what allowed it to spread, i.e., the use of the dollar as a global reserve currency, eventually led to a Triffin dilemma for the states, and with that declining real wages by the 1970s. And how did the country deal with that? Deregulate slowly from the 1980s onward, leading to increased total borrowing and spending across the board?