People tended to be leaner in the days of traveling music teachers.
Note I had no objection with calling King racist.
My argument was just that racism needs to be understood as a social ill, not a moral evil, which makes the fight against racism more religious crusade than an actual attempt at problem solving. We don’t approach addiction, mental illness, or crime that way. To be sure, a lot of good has been done recently to approach racism in a more scientific manner. By understanding how racism becomes a problem and how best to fight it:
But it does satisfy the left’s version of Bible Thumpers.
Basically, understand the root causes of racism. There are three functional types of racism:
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Pure hate brought on by upbringing or active recruitment into racist terror groups. This tends to be a matter for the criminal justice system. Not much you can do with these people, although there are some cases of rehabilitation.
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Hate brought on by fear of the unknown. As Vox observes, just TALKING to people like this in a reasonable way can often change views. They hate what they don’t know. When they know, they don’t hate anymore.
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Hate, or more accurately resentment, based on real and legitimate policy differences. Black people resenting whites for Jim Crow was perfectly rational. And every white person who feels they got passed over for a promotion due to affirmative action has a grievance. That one may or may not be legitimate, depending on the circumstances. But on immigration, that’s the main issue that’s led to a resurgence of xenophobia in recent years. The government has been acting against the will of the people, and further the illegal immigrants they are protecting have been quite bold and assertive in claiming they have a right to be here. It is shocking(not) that many people, and yes not all of them white, but also some blacks, Hispanics, and Asians(who do not benefit as much from benign non enforcement since there’s no shared border with their homelands), don’t take it well. Trump didn’t just win white voters, he did historically better among nearly all groups than Romney or McCain did.
Meanwhile, Europe is going much further than Steve King ever would:
I don’t know of any right-wing Americans who have called for a headscarf ban. That’s actually law in some places now.
Nonsense. US xenophobia is largely Muslim-directed (why’s it called a “Muslim ban”, again?), and that’s got much less to do with immigration per se than with neocon whipping-up of Islamophobic sentiments in order to enable military adventurism and resource exploitation.
There is also longstanding American xenophobia against Latinos, but that’s not what the recent “resurgence of xenophobia” has mostly been about. It’s primarily the “Clash of Civilizations” shit.
Why not both?
Oh, I completely agree that effective anti-racism strategies when actually engaging with racists require paying attention to how the racists are feeling. As your linked article describes it:
But there is a difference between being sensitive to that kind of fragility when talking directly to the people who suffer from it, and euphemistically downplaying it when talking about it to other non-racists. Here on the Dope, we all presumably have too much respect for facts and rationality to need to be gently coaxed out of racist prejudices. (And here in the Pit particularly, words are even less likely to be minced on such subjects.)
So I think racist remarks like King’s are still going to get called out in this thread as Stupid Republican Ideas, no matter how fragile King might feel about having them challenged if he ever happened to encounter this discussion.
Wow, that’s some amazing left-wing rationalization there. Why do you guys go much easier on the hate whipped up overseas against us?
We are at war. In historical context, we’re doing better at not being racist towards Muslims than we ever did at not being racist against Japanese, Spanish, Brits, Germans, or even people from a different state. When the war is over, as in the haters over there quit their nonsense, it’ll die down here too.
That explains the Islamophobia, but there’s also the small matter of resentment towards Latinos, and that’s immigration-based.
The resentment against Latinos is primarily economics-based. People think they are taking their jobs. And some of them are right! Enough of them to make a critical mass of people who have legitimate reason to be pissy. When you know the factory in your area is employing illegal labor, you report it, and nothing gets done, are you supposed to be happy about that?
It can be both, but not both EQUALLY. Liberals have long regarded crime as a scientific problem to be solved through proven, empirical means, with moral judgment of the actual criminals generally withheld unless we know the specifics of their cases. Some even argued that society failed these people. Sometimes it was true. Sometimes people are just plain evil and society failed their victims.
Racism today is less motivated by evil intentions than by ignorance or seeking someone to blame for the problems in their personal life. There aren’t too many rich racists, at least not in the “I hate Mexicans!” sense. Of course implicit bias and institutional racism are still very much a thing, but that’s an intractable problem, whereas hate based on resentment can be cured.
They should be. King has no excuse. But I think he also doesn’t mean a word of it. He’s pandering to people, just like Trump is. Resolve the problem at its roots and these politicians either flip back to being normal, decent people because they have to, or they get replaced by better people. And five years ago I would have just said, “Fuck that guy”. But now we live in a country governed by these people.
Hopefully this’ll remain just a S.R.I.o.t.D…
(coulda put this in the “How has Trump pissed you off today?” thread, I spose)…
(other articles claim it’s a $1.3 billion cut proposal to the Coast Guard)…
Shitty enough that shit’s going on on my side of the border too (as oil tanker traffic is starting to go through the fucking roof now).
I don’t really like to get into the business of criticizing budget cuts. Budgeting is all about priorities and if Trump thinks the Coast Guard is less important than the other services that’s his opinion. It may be mistaken, but it’s not stupid, because you’d then have to make an argument about why the Coast Guard should get more and the other services a little less. Or call for some other tradeoff.
The Coast Guard cut proposal caused me to raise an eyebrow, but ANY cut to the military would result in some protest. Is it wrong to cut the Marines, Air Force, Army, or Navy? If not, then why is it wrong to cut the Coast Guard? Is it because the Coast Guard has been singled out?
Which is just as evil if not more. He’s enabling evil for his own personal gain.
If they have to flip back to a moral position, then they are not normal, decent people.
And you just engaged in right wing rationalization.
When people complain about immigrants stealing their jobs, and then in the same breath go on to accuse immigrants of just being lazy moochers on the welfare system, that’s a pretty clear sign that the problem isn’t actually economic.
Careful. What you’re describing is the Clintons. They didn’t hesitate for a moment to throw any group under the bus they had to to be politically successful. From super predators to rushing back home to execute a mentally disabled person for the sake of a primary, to bragging about signing a gay marriage ban(but only in the South, lest coastal progressives hear about it).
History has actually been very kind to people who have used hate to win elections. If they DIDN’T mean it, they actually got treated more kindly than principled racists. Liberal apologists tend to blame the people for having to be pandered to, rather than the politicians that legitimized their hate.
What you describe is a funny paradox, but it’s also true to the extent that some states have gone out of their way to accomodate illegal immigrants by both letting them work, displacing American workers in some cases, and letting them take advantage of taxpayer benefits.
Where such things go on as part of the normal democratic process, fine, it is what it is. Where it’s done on the downlow in defiance of the process, then you run into problems with your bosses(the people).
Who was (maybe ) mentally disabled because he tried to commit suicide after shooting a cop in the head.
DOMA was nationwide. Is there something wrong with changing your mind in later years?
I was addressing your claim that King doesn’t mean it. At least if he means it, he doesn’t have a conflict regardless of being an asshole. And I do believe he means it. His words are not those of someone keeping quiet about his true beliefs.
Changing your mind doesn’t mean much when you do it long after it doesn’t matter anymore, when you’re merely catching up with public opinion. And sometimes they make no secret of the fact that they said what they had to say. Obama was pretty direct in saying that he personally believed gays should be allowed to marry, but his public position was that they should not.
Obama tries to explain it in a way that sounds better, but it doesn’t really work.
Clinton has never made such an admission on any issue, but a lot of his support from disadvantaged groups was based on the idea that he was on their side, but might have to say certain things to win elections.
Oh, and Obama is trying to make you forget that in 2008 he invoked his Christian faith to justify his oppositon to gay marriage. Is Christianity also his strictly public position, different from his private views on faith?
So you don’t like his explanation. What a surprise.
Putting off changing a situation due to the political atmosphere is different than promising with no intent to follow through.
i haven’t really paid attention to his faith as it’s immaterial.
Trump’s opinion is mistaken and stupid because if the Coast Guard has had major budget restrictions over the past few years then it’s no longer a question about why should the CG get more and the other services a little less (as you posit) but about why should the CG get further hobbled when there has been no citable proof to justify such a misguided proposal in the first place.
From Virginian-Pilot article:
Huh - kinda funny in a thread like this that I’m actually cutting a (an least temporarily lucid;)) Rep. or two, there, a little slack.
Considering I’ve never seen any citable data credibly bolstering the need to maintain current military spending, then making cuts will be much less catastrophic to implement in the Marines, Air Force, Army, and Navy, while the following article (the entire thing is quotable) asserts why it’s wrong to propose Coast Guard cuts:
Okay, so if we were cutting defense spending, including the Coast Guard, it would still be bad to cut the Coast guard? Is the Coast Guard underfunded while the other services are overfunded?
But we are willing to call those people who commit crimes through the failure of society criminals, and to condemn them for it. Similarly we don’t have Democratic lawmakers telling their constituents that the correct solution to their economic woes is to go out and commit crimes.
I am fully willing to agree with Obama’s assertion
[QUOTE=Obama]
You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
[/QUOTE]
I am also willing to do whatever possible to ease their burden, but that doesn’t mean that their xenophobia, shouldn’t be condemned or that we shouldn’t call out politicians who actively promote it for political reasons.
Remember Trump’s claim about who’s bringing in drugs?
Coast Guard and drug interdiction.
I’ll bet Cheeto doesn’t know that.
Yes, which was elucidated in my previous post that explained why cuts to the CG will be worse than cuts to the A/N/M/AF.
And further, from the Virginian Pilot article:
as well as:
Yes to the first half, as already answered, above, and a yes to the second half: there are countless cites reporting excessive military expenditures, thus, a much more pertinent question would be - would Trump show any signs of curbing such spending, or, more realistically, how exponentially off the rails will the Trump admin. go with its eventual military spending?