The greatest myth of multiculturalism is that different non-caucasian groups can unite around their animosity toward white people. The truth is that all these various groups also harbor deeply negative feelings about the other groups... and these always come to the surface in a competition for control of their own personal agendas. The same holds true for feminists... there are myriad opinions about key issues among women and none of them are comfortable being told that their personal positions must be forsworn in the name of universal (leftist) sisterhood. And then there is ageism! This is why the upcoming Democrat party Presidential nomination process shall be so much more entertaining than discovery battles over Trump's taxes and financial shenanigans. It's black vs white vs Hispanic vs Asians, Jews vs anti-semites, old vs young, urban vs suburban and rich vs poor. Morituri te salutant.
Democrats thrive on dividing the country. They are so full of hate that it is frightening.
from the other side? For example do you see Donald Turmp as a unifier or a divider?
Democrats thrive on dividing the country. They are so full of hate that it is frightening.
.....identity politics is literally the ONLY commonality that they all seem to share. (Although the MSM has worked hard to create a second commonality - a hatred of Trump regardless of his record of improving many of those groups specific situations). Perhaps this is part of the reason why the Democrat Party mouthpiece (the Mainstream Media) has been working so hard on stirring up fake stories on Trump. They need to keep their alliance together, and hatred is a strong glue.
There are well intentioned Dems who want to solve discontent. But in the end, those well intentioned Dems are merely providing power to the discontent mongers who control the party, and who can't tolerate true solutions, because true solutions will dissolve their voting base. They need things like racism to maintain their voting base, so they find racism where ever they look, even when it does not exist.
Besides the Russian collusion, of course.
Given America’s brutal history of white racism, it is understandable that the pendulum of racial double-standards has swung in the opposite direction—indeed, it is a testament to our laudable, if naïve, desire to fix history—but the status quo cannot be maintained indefinitely. Cracks in the reparations mindset are beginning to show themselves. Whites are noticing that black leaders still use historical grievances to justify special dispensations for blacks who were born decades after the end of Jim Crow—and many whites understandably resent this. Asian students are noticing that applying to elite colleges is an uphill battle for them, and are understandably fighting for basic fairness in admissions standards. The majority of blacks themselves are noticing that bias is not the main issue they face anymore, even as blacks who dare express this view are called race traitors.
As these cracks widen, the far-Left responds by doubling down on the radical strain of black identity politics that caused these problems to begin with, and the far-Right responds with its own toxic strain of white identity politics. Stale grievances are dredged up from history and used to justify double-standards that create fresh grievances in turn. And beneath all of this lies the tacit claim that blacks are uniquely constrained by history in a way that Jewish-Americans, East Asian-Americans, Indian-Americans, and countless other historically marginalized ethnic groups are not. In the midst of this breakdown in civil discourse, we must ask ourselves—academics, journalists, activists, politicians, and concerned citizens alike—if we are on a path towards a thriving multi-ethnic democracy or a balkanized hotbed of racial and political tribalism.
Coleman Hughes is an undergraduate philosophy major at Columbia University. His writing has been featured on Heterodox Academy’s blog as well as in the Columbia Spectator. You can follow him on Twitter @coldxman
We have one direct point of comparison right here on this forum.
don't matter how you get it as long as you get it.
steal, cheat, doesn't matter as long as you get money.
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Once in the NY Times magazine about the most significant 25 songs right now.
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being crushed by bigotry through identity politics.
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The Dems are playing a dangerous game. They need white identity to be real to gain power, and they are betting they can gain control before the white identity they build up gains enough steam.
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And I don't mean Trump. I think we all know he is not conservative.
response to inner city unrest, Reagan: welfare queens in response to the great society.
All goes back to the 60’s southern strategy to overtly appeal to the white vote there and elsewhere.
You forgot Clinton's crime crackdown, and his welfare crackdown. Reagan was not using race anymore than Clinton was. You are reachign.
A higher % of GOP voted for Civil Rights Act than % of Dems.
You can't say that the GOP was worse on race than the Dems.
The D’s who voted against the civil rights act were the Southern racists. They were soon without a party. Many became R’s like Strom Thurmond. Along these lines, the parties realigned over time after 64, with the R’s becoming the party of the white south and the D’s, the party of the minority. The first shot over the bow on that was Goldwater’s stance on the civil right act, reversing R policy, and lo and behold, guess what, he won some southern states that hadn’t voted R since reconstruction. The process continued under Nixon and came to full fruition under Reagan, who carried the south over a D southerner. Reagan was not himself a racist at all, yet the Lee Atwaters of the world knew where their bread was buttered and his campaign also addressed white grievance ergo welfare queens. Clinton did try to triangulate to the right during his tenure, but nowhere to the extent of the R’s.
P.S. Almost all of the R’s who voted for the CRA were northern moderates who have been driven almost to extinction in the party.
American Blacks are no fans of Haitians whatsoever. Illustrates your point that racial groups do not all think alike.
against Haitians? Just maybe, like whites convict other whites, and blacks other blacks every day of the week.
Like I said, you are a beauty.
different than any other group when it comes to paranoia about others who are different.
As long as we don’t recognize that a white version of “identity politics” is the core of the GOP, we can use the phrase as part of the culture war! Yeah team!
say about other groups... like jews? That's not identity politics?
landed and prolly well before that.
I just laugh when one side accuses the other of what both regularly do.
Although, I give you points for decrying identity politics while using identity politics. That was well done.
The whites rallying instinctively to whites in, say, police killings are identity-politics-free? Or when you leap to the defense of oppressed Christianity , you are not basing your view on identity?
Makes sense, probably, in your world.
Good thing you found a field where constructing logical arguments isn't at a premium.
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Ultimately, someone who repeatedly just plasters arguments by assertion, arguments by authority and strawman arguments on the forum is just lazy.
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Any Rex Reedian, overwrought prose about that film? I'd give you a twenty right now to repeat that review of Roma that you gave to Cheeks. The only thing missing was, "I laughed, I cried."
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I like to think that you don't rely on ad hominem and strawman arguments in the classroom, unlike here. This is, after all, just an internet forum, so the same standards need not apply, I suppose? But, you do have an opportunity to educate the unwashed Open masses, so why not take advantage of it?
Here, your posts are less educational, and more demonstrations of political power. In the political arena, ad hominem and strawman arguments are very effective ways to convince people to vote. But, those techniques prevent the search for truth. Would be great if we could rise above that here, though.
You can't be surprised that a group responds defensively when targeted. it happens evertime with every group. How about we stop targeting groups? The problem with that is that liberals have made identity politics the lynchpin of almost every aspect of their policy stances.
Certainly, conservatives do it at times. They share the human flaw as well. But Cons haven't done it to nearly to the same degree, and much of time these days when they are doing it, it is in response to being targeted first.
Perhaps we can all agree to just stop it, and to call it out when we see it? Curly's point is that the Dems can't really do this without losing their loosely held, heterogenous coalition of disparate groups.
Ironically, your post demonstrates this.
The first step in solving this problem is acknowledgement of it's existence within all of us.
A solid article on the topic.
Link: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/our-emotional-footprint/201802/belonging-is-our-blessing-tribalism-is-our-burden
Our hunter-gatherer phase, for instance, of course included some instances of violence, but it was nothing like we have seen in the modern era. Humans generally found it self-defeating to engage in tribal warfare once the longer-range spear had been invented. If you click on my link below, you can see some research of even more recent era of Japanese history where there was also relative peace. Mind you, that's a 12,000 year period. When someone picks out a comparatively tiny span of time, like 800s - 1800s, and declares that this is in some way a just comparison to millennia and millennia of relative peace, he isn't making a strong argument. Also, keep in mind, how the specter of atomic/nuclear annihilation is/is not figured into this equation. Like Jordan Peterson, he's another of these legitimate academics who have found a lot of acclaim and wealth by becoming prominent on YouTube and by writing popular books. I love popular books, but they need to be good ones and sometimes these guys sacrifice good research for commerciality. (Amusingly, Pinker has the exact opposite take on identitarianism that Chris has, but Chris finds him useful in citing him to reinforce his "Things just keep getting better and better!" thesis.)
As for the Psychology Today article, we don't emphasize enough the positive social markers associated with "tribalism." That term carries almost entirely negative connotations these days, and I'm guilty of employing it only in that way much of the time. That said, the homogeneity often correlated with that tribalism brings with it higher levels of social solidarity and less anomie.
Link: https://cassiopaea.org/forum/threads/study-of-ancient-japanese-hunter-gatherers-suggests-warfare-not-inherent.41326/
My mistake for making it seem like I thought it was only negative. I really don't.
Curious, have you read Harari's Sapiens? It's on my to read list. It's a fascinating topic to me, one that I don't know enough about.
BTW, as should be apparent, I'm a pessimist by nature and generally assume the worst about human nature, so it's not like the conclusion that human beings once existed in relative peace is something that is helpful to my worldview.
That statement doesn't resonate with most people, but I'd bet it does with you
I can handle that.
More than anything, people generally bore me. When I find a real-life person who is willing to debate things of consequence and demonstrates intellectual curiosity, I try to hold onto those people. They're few and far between.
The most discouraging aspect of human nature to me is that most people cannot acknowledge their own biases, much less confront them.
I think it would be helpful if people would train themselves to "catch" thoughts and emotions that seemingly come from nowhere (the subconscious mind) and analyze them rationally as if it was something someone else had said. Gut instincts (again the subconscious) are often helpful, but they deserve scrutiny.
Pinker has amassed a tremendous amount of data and evidence. Almost all archaeologists agree.
The world is far more peaceful now than ever before.
You should trust me on this one. You won’t, but you should.
"In most foraging societies, said Fry, lethal aggression was infrequent, and in the archaeological record violence didn’t take regular group-on-group character until relatively recently, when people settled down in ever-larger, more complex and hierarchical societies. In the new paper, Fry and Soderberg looked at ethnographic histories of 21 nomadic forager societies, compiling a database of every well-documented incidence of lethal aggression that could be found in reputable accounts spanning the last two centuries.
They counted 148 incidents in all, of which more than half involved a single person killing another. Only 22 percent involved multiple aggressors and multiple victims, and only one-third involved conflicts between groups."
This illustrates the kind of sloppiness of which I'm speaking.
Link: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2007-05299-000
Violence was, though.
LeBlanc is probably the best on this - though Pinker’s book cites hundreds of studies, should you actually be interested.
One can always find peaceful communities - but the overwhelming majority of ancient and pre-ancient people fought all the time.
Link: https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/constant-battles-the-myth-of-the-peaceful-noble-savage_steven-le-blanc_katherine-e-register/440639/?mkwid=sCyfizsSR%7cdm&pcrid=70112876712&pkw=&pmt=&plc=&pgrid=21324117192&ptaid=pla-366218457672&gclid=Cj0KCQiA5Y3kBRDwARIsAEwl
That was what the whole discussion of violence centered around. That was what you have specifically centered your assertions around in the past. We're now moving the goalposts to individual acts of revenge and settling of scores?
BTW, how do you weight different wars and actions taken in war? For example, how much weight is placed on bombings like we saw in Hiroshima/Nagasaki/Dresden versus one of the Crusades? Additionally, how much weight do you give to a persistent threat of atomic/nuclear annihilation relative to these other occurrences?
Whether you count them simply or with more nuance, the amount of international violence is declining.
The suggestion that the prehistoric world was somehow less violent is actually the product of leftist assumptions about the essential evils of western civilization. In reality, humanity has been becoming less violent, and less warlike.
If you are really interested, you should start with Pinker and progress to John Mueller, who writes the best stuff in security studies.
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