The Right isn’t half of humanity, it’s a minority. The majority of humanity is what the Right wants to kill and torment and enslave.
Roughly, it’s “mind your own damn business.”
The book-banners don’t want to normalize trans and gay folks because they think those folk are mentally ill and destroy society. (This isn’t a caricature–this is almost verbatim what one of our local book-banners told me). They want to reduce everyone’s freedoms so that folks they don’t like aren’t normalized and accepted.
That’s malicious.
Someone who wants to fund more charter schools isn’t trying to reduce anyone’s freedoms, even if that’s the inadvertent effect; indeed, they see my plan to reduce “school choice” as a reduction in freedoms, even though they’re missing the actual effects. That’s fundamentally different from the book banners’ malicious approach.
Poor kids who have access to fields. It’s a lot easier to fit a basketball court (or half-court) in an American inner city than a full-sized football pitch, especially as parks are not a priority to American urban planners.
Firstly, including something in popular entertainment media, and even more so to school curriculums, for the express purpose of normalising it in society, is also not ‘minding your own business’. I don’t think normalising gay and trans people is going to do any particular damage to society, but there are other things the left sometimes tries to normalise or destigmatize that I feel much more ambivalent about: sex-work, divorce, promiscuity - I think you could make a decent argument that normalising these things (as opposed to merely tolerating them) harms more people than it helps. Hypothetically, if normalising something helps a minority but hurts the majority, would you still do it?
They may want to do this, but removing books from school libraries is a poor example of it. I’m sure there are books you think would be inappropriate for kids of various ages to stumble across in a school library - would you want Playboy or a pro-life picture book in a primary school one, or a school shooter’s manifesto or even an anti-trans book in a middle school library? The fact that the people deciding what books to stock share your values and generally agree with your assessment of what is appropriate is a kind of invisible privilege in itself.
My opposition to the social justice ideas I described in the OP began because their supporters want to reduce everyone’s freedoms - purposely making large numbers of adults fear losing their jobs and/or being socially ostracised for speaking against these beliefs is a far more significant attack on freedom than removing a book from a school library!
I know there are also people on the right who want to reduce our freedom. People like me are caught between these two factions. I’m hoping that support for ‘wokeness’ continues to wane on the left, so that it again becomes something I can support, rather than vote for only because the alternative is worse.
You don’t need full-sized fields to play street soccer. We literally played in the streets. And on much smaller areas than a full-sized pitch.
And there you’d be going against American car culture. Those guys have way too many cars.
Yes, yes and yes.
That’s sad, but you don’t need a full-sized pitch to play football. When I was growing up boys played it on the school field every break and lunchtime, they played it in parks - they didn’t have football pitches in those places, they made their own goal posts with coats and jumpers. Do inner city schools in the US not have playgrounds at all?
It was my understanding that not so much in the inner cities.
Granted, I’m going by media, but I see inner city people playing basketball in spaces we would also have used for soccer or cricket.
It’s not just about field access or space. It’s also about access to the coaches and travel, i.e. institutional barriers. It’s a pay-to-play model.
Yes, all three of those are about keeping Black people disadvantaged. (And the third is also used to keep other of “those” people on their place.) Opposing affirmative action is perhaps the closest to “disagree about means” of the three, and i believe it’s possible to hold constructive arguments with people who hold that belief, sometimes. But failing to recognize that the US has a police racism problem is so utterly antifactual as to be evidence of lack of good will. And idolizing the principle of free speech over all else is like idolizing the principle of freedom of motion over all else. Both are generally good principles. But when your freedom of motion means you punch me in the face, it ceases to be an overriding good. Same with certain types of speech.
There are people who feel as strongly about healthcare, but they are a minority in the US. As i said in another thread, we tend to object more to negative actions than to inactions that cause harm. If you are actively holding someone down, that’s worse than refusing to pay for his food, shelter, or healthcare.
It’s because this is a plausible belief that i separated affirmative action from the other two items. We can argue constructively about this, imho.
I think soccer is just less popular here. I agree that you can learn the basic skills with just a ball and the playgrounds that even poor urban kids have access to. Baseball actually does require space to practice the basic skills, and it’s easier for rural and suburban kids to pick up those skills than for urban kids. And you can’t play ball in the streets of our cities. (You can play ball in the streets of our suburbs. I did that as a kid. But city streets are all about cars and buses.)
Are you saying that for example Jeff Has Two Mommies , a book designed for children, is comparable to Playboy- a magazine that you legally have to be 18 or older to purchase? How is a school shooter’s manifesto in any way comparable to a children’s book?
I have my own reservations on sex work. I’ve known many girls/women who were molested by family members or other people close to them over many years. They often ran away from home, and found themselves with no support system and no job. In order to make money, many turned to sex work- they already viewed sex as a horrible thing they endured. Why not get paid for it?
Divorce is only shameful in a Christian context. In Judaism, for example, a religious marriage certificate is called a ketubah. Ketubahs are generally framed and proudly displayed in a house. A religious certificate of divorce is called a get. There are a long list of circumstances in which a divorce must be granted. Staying together no matter how miserable you make each other or what has happened is definitely not a Jewish thing.
I personally, obviously, support promiscuity. As long as everybody involved is an adult who freely and enthusiastically gives their informed consent and safe sex is practiced, let the good times roll. I do not believe in ‘slut shaming’. If somebody wants to wait until marriage to have sex, that is their choice and I am fine with it. If somebody wants to engage in group sex on a regular basis, as long as the conditions I listed above are met that is their choice and I am fine with it. In general, I agree with the attitude of Dr Ruth, who was of course Jewish.
This is all over the place. You asked me for the difference between the malicious behavior and the well-meaning behavior. I described it. I’m not going to be drawn into yet another hijack on this.
(my ellipses)
John Havlicek and Hakeem Olajuwon glance befuddled @FlikTheBlue 
Like most things, lack of American Black participation in soccer (and baseball in recent decades) is multi-factorial. No cite, but if some musing may be permitted in IMHO: Part of the problem is lack of safe, accessible public green space for sports fields in some urban communities. Set-ups for informal basketball, say, are a lot easier to come by and require less space (though I know constrained forms of soccer are played, for example, in Brazilian favelas).
In many suburban and most rural areas in the U.S., green space is not a problem but the local cultures of American football and basketball are typically deeply imbedded.
EDIT: That’ll teach me to skip down a thread. What @Alessan, @puzzlegal and @Zoobi said – with a heaping helping of “not the culture” dolloped on top.
John Havlicek, Larry Bird and Hakeem Olajuwon glance befuddled….
Bird is of Irish, Scottish, and Native American descent (I didn’t know that until I looked it up just now), not Eastern European. My point, however, is that compared to their relative numbers, Eastern Europeans are over represented in the NBA compared to Americans of Eastern European descent, while the opposite is true of Black Americans (largely of West African descent) compared to West Africans. The reason for this is obviously (at least to me it seems obvious) cultural rather than genetic or due to systemic racial bias in the NBA against West Africans and white Americans of Eastern European descent.
To make a long story short, I think part of what being “woke” means is attributing ongoing racial disparities entirely or at least almost entirely to racism on the part of the majority. Clearly inherent racial differences don’t play a part. On the other hand I think it’s incorrect to deny that there are cultural factors in some Black urban communities, one of them being a lack of emphasis on education to get ahead, that also play a large role.
But it’s also incorrect to extrapolate from specific cultural groups to Black people in general.
And it’s incorrect to consider the culture of any specific community without considering its history.
I think “woke” means “being aware of what is going on.” I know, how stupidly literal, but frankly that’s what I think it means.
The trouble comes when people see what is going on and are horrified and try to change it. That when the shit hits the fan, because the reason it is going on is because it benefits some people while oppressing others. To be a beneficiary, one must close one’s eyes to a greater or lesser extent.
It’s much like eating meat. If you truly were aware of what suffering went into your burger, it would destroy your enjoyment of it, so even though the information is available, you refuse to think about it, or downplay it, or excuse it – or get belligerent about it. Sometimes the belligerence takes the form of mockery (tree huggers, bleeding hearts). That’s what woke has become, a mockery of empathy, a mockery of those trying in whatever way to make the world less unfair.
People who have benefitted from privileged status who feel the world should change in order to take away some of the privilege are easy targets; misguided efforts and hypocrisy are rife. But the opposite, those who want to continue oppression so that they can continue to enjoy privilege, that is far more immoral. I’d rather be pathetic than evil.
This seems like a basic misunderstanding of other people’s motives to me. The fact you want to do something to help black people, or some other group, does not mean that people who oppose doing that thing do so because they want to hurt black people. To use @Left_Hand_of_Dorkness’s example, it would be like thinking people want to fund charter schools in order to harm kids whose parents have fewer resources, rather than because they think it’s a good solution to problems with public education. Most people aren’t actually sadists.
I don’t see how anyone can look into the issue of police killings and think it’s primarily a racism problem. The differences in the violent crime rates are similar to the disparity in numbers of each race killed, and 100s of white Americans are killed by police each year - do you think those killings are all fine and justified? Dubious killings of white people simply aren’t widely reported by the media, which I assume is why people believe it’s purely a racism issue. If you don’t tackle the main cause, then you aren’t likely to have much success (and so far haven’t, as numbers remain very high). Additionally, assuming the police are racist, how are you going to make them less so? Studies of DEI trainings mostly show they don’t work. Whereas better training of police in deescalating dangerous situations, and hiring more police officers to try and reduce crime, could save lives, including a lot of black ones.
As for free speech, this is an incredible reach. Historically the principle of free speech has benefited powerless groups far more than powerful ones - that’s why the left has traditionally supported it. It’s pretty wild to think hate speech laws wouldn’t be just as likely to be used against minorities as to protect them: the police and justice system you believe are heavily biased against black people would be in charge of administering them! The corporations you encourage to fire people for opposing affirmative action may just as soon fire others for supporting a cause you believe in when the political winds change. Supporting free speech protects everyone more than it harms them.
I actually think affirmative action is the closest to disagreeing on ends rather than means. Supporting it or opposing it depends on whether you think it’s more important to be fair to groups of people or to individuals, and whether you think diversity (especially of experience) and representation, or hiring the most skilled person is more important in a given job. I’d suggest teaching and politics as jobs where affirmative action may be more justified (teachers have to relate to the kids, while politicians need to understand the needs and wants of their constituents, plus voters need to feel represented. Safety critical and non-public-facing jobs like air-traffic controller are ones where skill should be the biggest and probably only consideration, even if it leads to disparities.
Not having affirmative action isn’t holding people down, it’s just not giving them an advantage at the expense of others. But I guess it’s free for everyone except the few losing out on opportunities. Is that the difference? It’s okay to object to helping someone because you don’t want to pay for it, but not okay to object because you think it’s unfair or ineffective?
…thinking about this some more, you believe it’s the ‘system’ that’s holding people down, and it could be reformed without having to cost anyone anything? So supporting the status quo is hurting people for no reason. But I don’t believe that. The conservatives you see as desiring to keep people down almost certainly don’t believe it either. They see it as Democrats trying to give unfair advantages to minorities, and/or changing their own families’ lives or society for the worse (eg by taking away advanced classes in schools, or increasing crime) in a frequently-wrongheaded attempt to benefit minorities. I get that there are people who do hate black people, but I think the actively hateful ones are pretty rare nowadays.