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PoliGAF 2017 |OT5| The Man In the High Chair
- Thread starter aspiegamer
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whyamihere
Banned
This is the best article I've read about how the left and liberals need to understand each other and echoes so many of my own thoughts.
http://washingtonmonthly.com/2017/0...he-lefts-war-of-mutually-assured-destruction/
http://washingtonmonthly.com/2017/0...he-lefts-war-of-mutually-assured-destruction/
Here's a nice dose of HOPEium for you!
He's Not Afraid. He's Not Going Away.
Robert Mueller is going after all of it.
He's Not Afraid. He's Not Going Away.
Robert Mueller is going after all of it.
Dominican Power
Member
Trump is going down. It's just a matter of when.
Spoiled Milk
Banned
I want to go back to a time when left and liberal meant the same thing
Autodidact
Banned
I want to go back in time to when Mr. Jerry Orbach was still alive. Reading the name Lennie Briscoe makes me so nostalgic.
The divide's always been there. The liberals were the moderates of the early French 1st Republic, the Left were the Sans-Culottes types. The history of Euro-Socialism in the 19th century is a slog of the hard-left fighting the center left (like Rosa Luxenburg in Germany during World War I when the SDP endorsed the Kaiser's war).
It's just that America's rarely had a "left" to speak of, usually so marginalized as to be meaningless in primary or presidential elections. Remember that we didn't even have a liberal party until some time between the late 40s and the early 60s (barring the brief heyday of Lincoln/Grant Republicanism from the 1850s to the 1870s, which was definitely liberal).
The French Revolution?
Spoiled Milk
Banned
Faites comme eux, vous étiez dessous, mettez-vous dessus. Voilà la révolution.
ArkhamFantasy
Member
I read this in Solid Snake's voice for some reason.
Get out while you still can!
Yeah, that articulated it pretty well.
I'm surprised by how civil the thread in OT is.
The Technomancer
card-carrying scientician
Civil dialogue is surprisingly possible when it takes place on a platform that affords lengthy replies and people perceive the same conversations instead of one in which everything is fragmented, decontextualized, screencapped to make good "dunks" and no-one is ever seeing the same set of interactions so everyone's perception is that all of their friends are awesome and all of their enemies are horrible
Fuck Twitter
Just gotta wait another couple decades and it'll come around again. He's already in California so he'll have a good view.
I don't. Liberalism is defined by the support of capitalism, the garbage mode of production which lies at the heart of basically all of our problems. White supremacy, imperialism, material inequality, and global warming all emanate from the search for profit.
Transitioning to a more equitable economic system needs to be the goal of our political endeavors.
No.
The belief that "if we didn't have capitalism, people wouldn't be racist or selfish" is fucking ridiculous.
The Technomancer
card-carrying scientician
I'll agree with two of those things
Racial categorization was created by European colonizers to justify their subjugation of indigenous and African peoples in their extraction of American resources. Once these populations started practicing Christianity and speaking European languages, skin color and heritage was used to crystallize social hierarchy.
If not for capitalism, there's no whiteness and no white supremacy.
RustyNails
Member
Man I missed that avatar. Welcome back to the trenches!
The fact that non-white, non-christian, non-capitalist countries can also be racist as fuck has completely managed to elude you?
How on earth can you look at China, or India, or Africa and go "everything sure was sunshine and roses before those white people showed up"
This is a conversation about white supremacy. There are a lot of other nasty systems which have justified the position of one group of people over another, but they aren't relevant to American politics. In fact, capitalism is the reason why these hierarchies don't affect our country, because the industrial revolution and corresponding development of capitalism allowed European states to export their arbitrary conceptions of whiteness and blackness to Africa and Asia and the Pacific territories, as a justification for even more resource distribution.
I guess it's possible that Sunni Muslim supremacy or Han Chinese chauvinism could have been the defining superstructural hierarchy of the modern world, but that isn't how history played out.
I've been telling you all to get the fuck off Twitter for months, if not years. Fuck that garbage platform.
He said white supremacy, not racism.
There's no difference. If it wasn't white supremacy it would be something else.
What do you think White Supremacy emerges from, exactly?
Humans are tribal and will make stupid arbitrary designations because of it in order to enforce a desire for dominance over others.The Roma, The Jews. The Blacks. The Untouchables. The Tutsis.
You don't need white people involved to oppress a minority group.
White supremacy isn't just a collection of mean attitudes, it's a hierarchical system that places white people at the top and black people at the bottom. This system didn't exist before capitalism. Just look at Othello, a play focused on the relationship between a black man and a white woman, where there is no fear of lynching and no discussion of racial purity.
While abstract forces like xenophobia can be found basically everywhere, systems of social oppression are rooted in their material basis and emerge to benefit one group over another. Medieval anti-Semitism worked out great for Christian landholders, because it allowed them a superior position of power over their Jewish creditors while also exploiting religious divisions to inhibit social mobility. Patriarchy, developing sometime in the ancient past around the agricultural revolution, facilitated early ownership of property and the creation of dynasties.
You don't need it but that's the problem we're discussing in particular, and it is historically linked to the rise of capitalism and the imperial takeover of the western hemisphere. I don't think there was a literal conspiracy where rich white guys sat around going LET'S DO THIS TO SEPARATE THE ENGLISH WORKERS AND BLACK SLAVES but it arose out of the situation that those economic forces created as a form of justification, and its continued existence is partially - but not entirely - due to the continuing usage of it as a wedge tactic by the part of the bourgeoisie that wants to stoke and exploit it to make white people vote against their economic interests.
Othello is a play based on another story written by a white English guy! Using it as an example of "how good it was for minorities back then" is ridiculous.
Did you somehow miss all those times majority groups enslaved minority ones over the course of history? Or killed them. Or believed in their peoples' superiority over others?
The idea that the concept of white supremacy exists because people started making money for themselves is inane. People have been fighting wars, killing and tormenting each other over racial/tribal lines for millennia.
Same song that's been playing for eons. Just a new verse.
Spoiled Milk
Banned
THERE WAS A CONSPIRACY.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacon's_Rebellion?wprov=sfla1
Bacon's Rebellion saw lower class white farmers and black slaves alike rebel against the Virginia elite for selling the colony out to the natives. The quelling of this rebellion specifically introduced societal reforms that segregated society by race so class could not be a unifying factor again. It was replicated across the other colonies who were also afraid of losing their plantations and wealth to populist revolt.
BlastProcessing
Member
Othello was fictional...
Without the conquest of the New World (maybe we can push it a bit back to the Crusades having an influence) there is no white race. Hence no white supremacy. No unification of Europeans in a racial sense.
Intellectually lazy!
Well yeah there's that but I see that more as part of the process, not that one day it was one way and the next it was totally different.
cooljeanius
Member
I said pretty much the same thing the other day...
Kirblar, you're missing the point. White supremacy isn't just prejudice, it's a social pyramid in which white people are placed above black and brown people. This social pyramid was created not because white people were racist, but because white people had the ability to subjugate Africans and Native Americans.Racist attitudes emerged afterward, as a way to crystallize and protect the real system of power in colonial American society.
Ta-Nehisi Coates put this very well a couple years ago:
I used the example of Othello because William Shakespeare was writing in a place and time largely insulated from white supremacy. Black people existed in Elizabethan England, but they were living outside the horrifying systems of oppression that were experienced by black people in Cuba or Brazil at this time. Othello, as an African man living in Italy, would have been considered an exotic visitor rather than a sub-human creature destined for servitude. This doesn't mean they didn't experience xenophobia. Queen Elizabeth I actually attempted to deport "the Moors", but it wasn't because they had black skin. She was bothered by Africans' disbelief in Christianity, suggesting that this kind of xenophobia had little to do with race as we know it.
Host Samurai
Member
I feel like Trump picks his cabinet positions by browsing GAF and reading about who we hate the most.
And you're missing that if the pyramid didn't exist, someone would create a new one. Because that's what assholes like to do. People fucking love their tribal identities that put themselves at the top and all others below them.
No one ever has a problem with one-off exotic outsiders. They're fun and harmless and non-threatening! It's when you get a sizable minority population that things start to get ugly. Like w/ Trump. Like w/ Brexit. Or the rest of the EU's issues w/ the rise of far-right groups. Or, you know, the Holocaust.
No one ever has a problem with one-off exotic outsiders. They're fun and harmless and non-threatening! It's when you get a sizable minority population that things start to get ugly. Like w/ Trump. Like w/ Brexit. Or the rest of the EU's issues w/ the rise of far-right groups. Or, you know, the Holocaust.
nature boy
Member
Urgh, Russian media is loving the chaos:
Widdle Puppy
Banned
He knows the end is near. I'm guessing this has made he rethink things and not want to be a part of the whole game of party politics. In your final days you tend to see what's important.
This line of thinking attempts to label white supremacy as a uniquely pernicious institution, which doesn't hold water. "White supremacy" in America had a long history of being exclusive to certain types of caucasians before the 1960s finally brought whites of all stripes under one banner (as far as white supremacists were concerned).
The Irish used to be just as bad as the Africans, and the Germans before them.
I do think racial and ethnic forms of bigotry are tied into the needs of political and economic domination, but this is far and away not exclusive to the problem posed by white supremacy, which we've observed can change its definitions to maintain its power.
Spoiled Milk
Banned
One hundred percent ahistorical.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_people_in_Ancient_Roman_history?wprov=sfla1
White supremacy and structural racism are post-hoc justifications for complete economic dominance and subjugation, like Valhelm is saying.
But you didn't have a sizable minority population
The Romans were still slaveholders- the axes of oppression was merely along a different, non-black/white line.
Spoiled Milk
Banned
There has never been a time in American history where Irish and German were segregated by law from the rest of the population.
The point is that the line is arbitrary. What groups are included, etc. White Supremacy is just one of many such schemes that have drawn lines in the sand between groups purporting one to be superior than the rest.
I.E. fuck minorities.
Do people really not get history. The progressive New Deal was written to exclude minorities. Same with social security. And the progressives SURE do love to ignore FDR's internment camps.
Obamacare had to be watered down just to get the Blue Dogs, (all of who were white and most from the South) to sign it.
Not to mention, ignoring white supremacy is how we got into this mess of Trump anyway.
Spoiled Milk
Banned
You know what, counterpoint: Valhelm, how do you explain the de facto policy of Russian supremacy in the USSR such as the ethnic cleansing of Poles, Germans, and Ukrainians? That's a racial supremacy model without a clear economic impetus.
Urgh, Russian media is loving the chaos:
Is this real? Please someone show this to Trump. He hates being ridiculed. Just imagine how much he hates being ridiculed by Russian media.
The Irish and Italians wouldn't have been suckered into having to prove they were white if whiteness wasn't a thing.
Sure there could have been something else. But we are dealing with what was and what is, and the ramifications of actual material history.
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