2020 US Election (Part One)

[Camikaze]

Ehhhhhh you are leading the chat towards towards race, so I am undissuaded from my original assumption that you were thinking about it on the approach.

It seems the reason Gori is asking is so that race can be definitively excluded from consideration, i.e. once he has established that the ability to hold American values is entirely independent of race, then that topic can safely be put to one side.

 

[cardgame]

Yeah, I'm always ready to go on at length about how ideology should supersede race. I consider this idea to be a strategically anti-marxist idea in the current year, and a universally good, right choice. So yes, you are entirely accurate here. The essence of MLK's speech. Judging people by the content of their character.

Sounds pretty communist to me

The problem is that realizing MLK's dream takes more mental effort than we think, as most right action does, because racism is built into the brain. It's part of our evolved threat-response system. We do not detect faces that look like clouds; we detect clouds that look like faces. Such prejudice against clouds. But in angst over this, the left's love affair with science and the theory of evolution drops stone dead at the doorstep of this topic, which is why I think they have gone a little bit insane. They want all of this stuff gone. They want to be something that, as hominidae, as chordata, animalia, they can never be. They want life to be something it never was.

The first part is good, then you lost me with the 'the left wants all of this stuff gone' bit. Are you saying that we should acknowledge that racism is human, that it isn't going away? Because as an aspect of tribalism overall, I would agree with you, but simply giving up isn't the answer. Racism is learned behavior, not innate. As our tribes grow to include all races, it will and should disappear.

 

[Kyriakos]

Sounds pretty communist to me



The first part is good, then you lost me with the 'the left wants all of this stuff gone' bit. Are you saying that we should acknowledge that racism is human, that it isn't going away? Because as an aspect of tribalism overall, I would agree with you, but simply giving up isn't the answer. Racism is learned behavior, not innate. As our tribes grow to include all races, it will and should disappear.

While racism can be far more toned down or become a lot rarer than now, it won't ever be a thing of the past. No mental formation ever dies; at best they can become dormant, and that is entirely regardless of worth or intellectual value.
Furthermore it stands to reason that every person who has some racism has it in different way than the next person. Imo it is workable to deter and fight the more harmful/evident manifestations.

 

[brennan]

I don't see any evidence that racism is learned. Every culture in history has has a sense of superiority over 'the other' of one sort or another. What is learned is not being 'racist', but how not to see other groups of people as 'the other'.

 

[Takhisis]

Both are learned (in both senses of the word ‘learn’), but it's just that one is so pervasive that it seems the ‘natural’ state of things, until one day it doesn't.

 

[Gori the Grey]

I'm not going to laugh at Gori unless he posts more of his limericks and that's that.

You should know better than to encourage me. Let me see if I can cook anything up on the topic at hand, at the stage that it has reached. No humorous possibilities occur to me immediately.

 

[cardgame]

I don't see any evidence that racism is learned. Every culture in history has has a sense of superiority over 'the other' of one sort or another. What is learned is not being 'racist', but how not to see other groups of people as 'the other'.

Culture is not inherent, it is learned as well. Leave children of mixed races together in a typical kindergarten environment and they have no problems making friends with each other.

 

[rah]

Fathers teach sons and friends reinforce it. I hope I've done my best and not passed it on to my daughter.

 

[Kyriakos]

Culture is not inherent, it is learned as well. Leave children of mixed races together in a typical kindergarten environment and they have no problems making friends with each other.

I am not sure. In fact kindergarten children are known to be far more aggressive than (even) older children. Chances are they will attack anyone if they sense they can get away with it.

 

[Takhisis]

Fathers teach sons and friends reinforce it. I hope I've done my best and not passed it on to my daughter.

You'd better teach her to play civ or else, mister.

 

[MagisterCultuum]

Culture is not inherent, it is learned as well. Leave children of mixed races together in a typical kindergarten environment and they have no problems making friends with each other.

Or they might not get along, but without outside guidance they won't end up discriminating against each other using the same racial markers that define group status for the broader culture. It is easy to make young kids "racist" based on factors like the color of their eyes or the clothes they happen to be wearing.

 

[rah]

You'd better teach her to play civ or else, mister.

She used to watch me play when she was younger, but alas, she's not a geek.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I am not sure. In fact kindergarten children are known to be far more aggressive than (even) older children. Chances are they will attack anyone if they sense they can get away with it.

This is not true. Childhood aggression tracks with hormonal changes in puberty. The little ones are more physical with each other but it's not usually aggression. When older kids get physical, it very often is aggression of one sort or another.

 

[Tristan_C]

That sounds to me like someone who knows what American values are, and that marxist values aren't them and so he knows what American values are not. So, again, I'm not labeling you "sanctimonious"; at worst "certain he knows what are American values." I'm not sure I've ever called someone sanctimonious. I've called someone unctuous once.

Well rather than leave marxism in its current blobular form I will reason out why some nameable, main features are athwart American values and the constitution. You know, to avoid any pretensions of baseless sanctimony. Real life could strike me at any moment so if you wanted to put a point to me from all this or have the last word for the time-being, now would be a good time.

Classless and stateless society

The stateless part is fairly obvious, because the constitution establishes a government. This primary objective of marxism is unconstitutional.

Neither forming nor eliminating classes appears to me to be an American value. Since Americans are competitive, economic classes have to be expected based on the outcomes of competition. The Constitution explicitly prohibits the feudal hierarchy sanctioned by the Magna Carta (the document Tim thinks we just rephrased), but it does not intervene against competitive private activity to preserve equality of outcomes in the private sector. Accepting inequality in that form would fall under our notions of advancing freedom and individualism, I think, and it is incompatible with marxism.

Socialized ownership of the means of production

The US forces participation within specific confines we call the enumerated powers of government. FDR leveraged a crisis (may they never go to waste) to shift the battle line in Karl's favor, but there is a battle line. Capitalism invariably pulls in one direction, and marxism invariably pulls in the other.

International values

Modern strategies for spreading communism laid out by Gramsci call for using available media to supplant national values with international workers' values. This is of course incompatible with a national value or identity of any kind. There is a specific two-word term for this strategy, but modern marxists have made it so that the use of the term is prohibited in civil discourse. It's like uttering the name of Voldemort. They managed this by successfully executing one of the very tactics it prescribes: by associating it with racism.

Hence the partisan flavor of marxism in the United States: one party is rallying people by identity group, and is nurturing antagonism towards the "American identity group" by associating it with white power and racism. I am not sure which modern thinker first called for mass migration as another prong of this strategy. I only know it wasn't Pat Buchanan.

 

[Gori the Grey]

if you wanted to put a point to me from all this or have the last word for the time-being, now would be a good time

Oh, I thought this might go for a while. I gotta get my last word in now? Yikes! Ok. I'll see what I can do.

I mean really, Yikes! I only get this far:

Neither forming nor eliminating classes appears to me to be an American value.

and I already want to slow things down. You might be right that neither is a value. But has anyone in that whole long history of the US thought classes wouldn't emerge as a result of that competitive private activity? So, like, nobody maybe set out to form a class as a value in its own right, but nobody didn't think that it would happen.

Oh boy. I'll try to hone in on whatever I regard as the key stuff, to get my last word.

Like you can't count this as my last word. This is just me freaking out about having to give my last word already.

 

[Zkribbler]

An old man lies dying his bed. He croaks out: "These are my last words. No, no, these are my last words. No, no, gotcha again. These are my last words. No, no, these are my last words. This time really. These are my last words. Nope, these are my last words..."

 

[Gori the Grey]

No, I've been conscious that this whole conversation has been at Tristan's sufferance. If he says it's time to wrap up, I'll do my best to say my actual last words, and then really croak.

 

[Berzerker]

https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/1957/actions

You want simpler taxes? The tax preparation industry paid more in bribes.

A hero of the civil rights movement the honorable John Lewis is the sponsor?

 

[Gori the Grey]

Gori's Last Word*​

If the documents guiding your nation
Provide for their own alteration,
Individuals, see,
Will then find themselves free
To opt for co-operation.

*on the subject of the supposed utter incompatibility of American and marxist values

An old man lies dying his bed. He croaks out: "These are my last words. No, no, these are my last words. No, no, gotcha again. These are my last words. No, no, these are my last words. This time really. These are my last words. Nope, these are my last words..."

Gori's Very Last Word of All​

Oh, you'll know when "the Grey" is no more,
When you've heard the last of old Gor:
When there's no final line
In some limerick of mine
But the thing just hangs there after four.

 

[Traitorfish]

I don't see any evidence that racism is learned. Every culture in history has has a sense of superiority over 'the other' of one sort or another. What is learned is not being 'racist', but how not to see other groups of people as 'the other'.

But for most of humanity's existence, "the other" describes the next tribe over. It wasn't articulated in terms we comprehend as differences of "race". And when people did begin to draw larger, more abstract distinctions, it was in terms of civilisation and barbarian, or believer and infidel, terms which do not clearly lend themselves to a racial framework, and in the latter case tends to run directly against it. It took until the sixteenth century, at the earliest, for this allegedly-innate behaviour to manifest itself, and even then only in certain parts of Europe. So even if you might make the argument that hostility to out-groups is innate, it is still necessary to explain racism as such: to explain why the in-group/out-group distinctions have been drawn in these particular ways, and why they have proven so pervasive and so enduring.

Modern strategies for spreading communism laid out by Gramsci call for using available media to supplant national values with international workers' values.

For Gramsci, "available media" meant the Communist Party newspaper. It didn't mean, like, MSNBC. Do you genuinely not understand the difference?