No I am suggesting that some people have it so deeply rooted I their life that they don't even know they being racist. Again I don't think you can understand as you have no experience of it so I'll leave it there.
Pat494
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You probably know that book " Lord of the Flies " which has a different view of a group of children on a desert island. I regret it may be a bit nearer the reality. Unfortunately.
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@Atilla, here is some light reading of deeply rooted racism of the kind Europe left behind in the days of Hitler. https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&s...zrLifoAAM1psaecpQ&sig2=eLEF_6X-JuiYYUcujuhDUQ
Pat494
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A good question that is getting more relevant as AI proceeds.
I think the solution is to remove the stigma of not working. Many could then take time off to do other things but still have an unemployment income. Enough to live on. The arts and science would flourish exponentially.
Atilla
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Yes shocking picture and events. People have prejudices which can be exploited and turned into active racism to the point of ethnic cleansing.
As mentioned before and the point I'm trying to make is we all have these prejudices.
- It can be white on white neighbours (protestants v catholics).
- It can be white on black (slave trade), black on white and black on black (Tutsi v Hutu's).
- Asians aren't excluded with muslims v hindu's or numerous dynasties wars of China.
- It can be within the same faith as muslim's fight among them selves with Shias and Sunni and various other sects.
- Some people even fight for colours of ones football shirt identifying a neighbouring region. Yep, football shirts. Doesn't take much to kick off any form of rivalry escalating into tragic consequences.
Key is to belong and be accepted by a group and beat to death what is different. None of it has ever resulted in anything positive but death and destruction.
There are always some people who'll exploit those differences.
I am optimistic of humanity as we are evolving in recognising that racism is simply wrong and has no place in modern society and in the World.
Atilla
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This crystalises issues very well.
Cost of US labour expensive and multinationals companies have two choices:
1. Move to location where factors of production cheaper
2. Import cheap labour to host country maintaining manufacturing industry
US labour has three choices:
1. Move to where there are jobs
2. Reduce wages to match those of competitors
3. Stay put and wait for politicians to apply tariffs to kill off the industry
Stoping migrants and taking over their jobs will entail working for less pay. Some salaries may rise but it will ultimately raise costs and prices.
:whistling
Whether we are racist, or not, the human is always at war. All of us are on one side or, the other.
Our problem, as ordinary people, must be to decide for ourselves, what that side is.
Often, our geographical location and "belonging" to a certain population influences that decision, but not always.
It can be black,white, catholic,jew, gentile, christian, Mediterranean, nordic, slav, straight, gay, north, south.
People will, even, fight at football matches.
Which side are we on?
Politicians can, and do, capitalise on this and we, as gullible fools, fall for it.
Our problem, as ordinary people, must be to decide for ourselves, what that side is.
Often, our geographical location and "belonging" to a certain population influences that decision, but not always.
It can be black,white, catholic,jew, gentile, christian, Mediterranean, nordic, slav, straight, gay, north, south.
People will, even, fight at football matches.
Which side are we on?
Politicians can, and do, capitalise on this and we, as gullible fools, fall for it.
timsk
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Given the latest twist in this illuminating thread, it strikes me as the perfect time to post a video by arguably the finest protest songwriter ever to come out of the U.K. None other than the incomparable, wonderful and masterful Mr. Billy Bragg. Enjoy . . .
Atilla
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Just like to reiterate my main point being the distinction between prejudice something we all have, born into what ever locality we happen to find our selves in and racism which is the active pursuit that leads to death and destruction for no gain.
Trump has undoubtedly tapped into this nerve with some people's prejudice, opinions and beliefs are now in translation into active racism where some people find them selves punched in the face.
That's all.
Outcome rests with the blue eyed blondie and the American people.
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Pat494
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It could be that the majority of the US people are sick and tired of the standards of yesteryear and will vote against them whatever.
Their moral high ground has been slipping in recent years with all the killing and no positive results. One supposes the US backed forces in the Middle East will be dumped as Trump cozies up to Putin etc. Maybe NATO too. What an idiot. It's like 1 man in the tug o war team let's go !
Their moral high ground has been slipping in recent years with all the killing and no positive results. One supposes the US backed forces in the Middle East will be dumped as Trump cozies up to Putin etc. Maybe NATO too. What an idiot. It's like 1 man in the tug o war team let's go !
Atilla
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Putin is not the enemy or the Russian people.
The enemy is viral capitalism, evasion of tax with accumulation of wealth in the hands of the 1%.
Moreover the defence and space industries in the US consume vast amounts of public money for whose gain exactly. US spends 5x the amount Russia does.
Anyhow, going down this road it's a fight it can not win against the Chinese. Focus will shift from Russia to China as public enemy no 1.
The other enemies are AI, Automation with Global warming.
AND what do people do??? Pick on Mexicans and free trade.
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/09/15/ford-to-move-all-small-car-production-to-mexico-from-us-ceo.html
"We shouldn't allow it to happen," Trump said.
US car production cost I think was about 45% higher than the Japanese. What are the alternatives.
Russia and Mexican migrants are both wrong diagnosis and solution will also be wrong. Pretty obvious to me. I'm giving up on the US of A. Like our Brexiters just totally wrong.
People will ultimately pay for their folly.
The enemy is viral capitalism, evasion of tax with accumulation of wealth in the hands of the 1%.
Moreover the defence and space industries in the US consume vast amounts of public money for whose gain exactly. US spends 5x the amount Russia does.
Anyhow, going down this road it's a fight it can not win against the Chinese. Focus will shift from Russia to China as public enemy no 1.
The other enemies are AI, Automation with Global warming.
AND what do people do??? Pick on Mexicans and free trade.
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/09/15/ford-to-move-all-small-car-production-to-mexico-from-us-ceo.html
"We shouldn't allow it to happen," Trump said.
US car production cost I think was about 45% higher than the Japanese. What are the alternatives.
Russia and Mexican migrants are both wrong diagnosis and solution will also be wrong. Pretty obvious to me. I'm giving up on the US of A. Like our Brexiters just totally wrong.
People will ultimately pay for their folly.
Atilla
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Cheers guys! Keep chasing your tails on that hamster wheel.
Some people beginning to smell the coffee
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...ompanies-must-invest-more-to-counter-populism
Some people beginning to smell the coffee
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...ompanies-must-invest-more-to-counter-populism
The reason Trump won is because professional politician talk about nothing and care only to be political correct to gain votes, they do not talk about real issues like overpopulation and so on because it is not strategically convenient.
I am a racist? I think I am but not against skin color but against stupidity which often is inculcated by culture, do you want to come to live here? Yes that is fine, but please do not came here and spit in your own plate, if you do get the f@ck out of here.
I am an immigrant myself and also my parents were but wherever we went we embraced and appreciated it and gave our own effort and gratitude knowing we are cultured different.
I am a racist? I think I am but not against skin color but against stupidity which often is inculcated by culture, do you want to come to live here? Yes that is fine, but please do not came here and spit in your own plate, if you do get the f@ck out of here.
I am an immigrant myself and also my parents were but wherever we went we embraced and appreciated it and gave our own effort and gratitude knowing we are cultured different.
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Atilla
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I'm absolutely dumbfounded by the remarkable STUPIDITY of the TRUMP rhetoric and idiocy.
Just heard him say on TV, he is going to repeal the job losing directives of Obama by by reversing and cancelling the Paris agreement and climate change policies.:-0:-0:-0:-0:-0:-0:-0:-0:-0
Do the American people know that solar panels, solar roof tiles, wind power basically green industries are growing industries!!!!
HOW STUPID and ILL ADVISED can any leadership be????
If draining the swamp means putting plonkers who think like he does then the US will be well and truly frumped...
Wake up America! :idea:
Just heard him say on TV, he is going to repeal the job losing directives of Obama by by reversing and cancelling the Paris agreement and climate change policies.
:-0:-0:-0:-0:-0:-0:-0:-0:-0Do the American people know that solar panels, solar roof tiles, wind power basically green industries are growing industries!!!!
HOW STUPID and ILL ADVISED can any leadership be????
If draining the swamp means putting plonkers who think like he does then the US will be well and truly frumped...
Wake up America! :idea:
dbphoenix
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A great self-comforting fallacy is often deployed in discussing American racism: One has to intend racism to be a real racist, which is to say that without intention, there is no racism. This belief in the legitimacy of intention is directly related to the sacrosanct status of feeling in America, to the notion that feeling is more authentic and true than fact or thought. (This is hardly news. The idea is spread wide and thick all across this good land: In today’s America if people felt that gravity didn’t apply, they’d feel free to fly.) If feelings are sovereign and unassailable, so are the intentions that come out of them—one’s agency is rooted in feelings, realized in intentions. Thus, for instance, the ethical legitimacy of voting for a Donald Trump who intends to forestall the nonexistent rise in crime would be unquestionable because it’s rooted in feelings.
The ethics of feeling align with the belief, deeply embedded in a population far exceeding the number of Republican voters, that the good intentions of America are forever inscribed in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and thus congenitally imbue all those who feel American. Never mind slavery, systemic racism and exploitation, disenfranchisement of women, frequent wars of aggression. The Founding Intentions are good and there for all to see, and the acts don’t matter; American history is rife with crimes dismissed as honest mistakes. Most recently, the lies of the Bushist regime, which created systems of torture and surveillance, came out of the feeling that the country was endangered after 9/11—who could deny the truth and legitimacy of that?
The self-congratulating American ethos allowed for an immoral and criminal enterprise to avoid prosecution. One of the benefits of that immunity was that Americans could continue to feel as decent people, despite all the contrary evidence. The election of Barack Obama confirmed the feeling, while he, in return, graciously eschewed addressing in any substantial way the ethical (and financial) bankruptcy of the Bushist America.* American culture went fully along with it, because, no matter what we’ve done, we’re a great people (We elected a black man!), all of us born and bred as citizens within the exceptionalist ethics. Even now, after Trump passed a national job interview while his psychopathic tendencies were manifest, the Democrats, beginning with President Obama, cannot accept that the idea of American decency is no longer viable.
So here comes Donald Trump. He, as they say, tells it like it is, which is true only if what is is determined by feeling. He is but a Viagratic bundle of incoherent aggression clustered around a single bull**** intention: to make America great again. Once his supporters’ feelings empowered the intention, no fact or thought could ever matter. Trump’s election confirmed the ethos, and neither the Trumpist voters’ hurt feelings nor their decent intentions could after that be diagnosed as racist. Who in their right mind would argue that they intended to endorse the discourse of white nationalism, or to reconfigure American democracy as an autocracy?
The insurmountable advantage of the intentionalist ethos is that one can assign the moral value to one’s act by way of negotiating one’s intentions. Presently, among the white citizens of this country, a vast reassessment of what constitutes a “real” racist is taking place. The Trumpist white voters counter the claim that Trump intends to discriminate against nonwhites by invoking his good intention to make America great. In the same turn, they reject being called racist, as might their white Clintonite friends and family, because, you know, they can’t be “real” racists. The convoluted interpretations of the electoral outcome centered around the foggy feeling of economic anxiety serve the same purpose. Many a Thanksgiving dinner will be spent conducting such ethical negotiations, all the negotiators stuffed with the same turkey. The common outcome, other than indigestion, will be the normalization of racism: We agree to disagree, **** the darkies and their friends the Jews.
The grand negotiation amounts to a whitewash operation. The majority of white Trump voters (as distinct from those who like to light up crosses and have no problem with racism) are presently invested in conceptualizing ethical positions in which they can feel not racist while fully and willingly enjoying all the benefits of an openly racist system wherein whiteness has an immense value. This is not new either. Indeed, this is how white America has operated for a long while. What is relatively new is the blatant aggression of Trumpian racism and, with it, a new value of whiteness, all of which requires some crafty renegotiation. Trumpist voters (and their Thanksgiving guests) would like themselves to feel that they’re unintentionally white within an intentionally white-nationalist political operation, soon to take over the American state apparatus.
But the only ethics that matter are act-based ethics—it’s what you do that matters, not what you feel. After all, the legal system in this country, as yet based in reason and belief in the rationality of law, is contingent upon the ethical value of the act. And an act is a fact—what you do is what is. The Trump voters committed an act of voting for an unabashed racist, whose hate speech is an act and a fact in public space. There is, of course, more than a distinct possibility that white Trump voters knew exactly what they were voting for and they wished for it. After all, Trump kept promising it, over and over again, and it’s already here. But even if they didn’t intend their racism, those who voted for Trump must reconcile with his acts. These might include deporting millions of people, which is not possible without violence, or legally discriminating against Muslim American citizens. If such acts come to pass, those who have already committed the initial act of voting for Trump, whatever their intentions may have been, will have undeniably given him a mandate for radical racism.
A citizen’s basic responsibility is to be aware of the consequences of his or her acts. The feelings that led tens of millions to vote for Trump have been rendered morally irrelevant by their vote. Perhaps those feelings and intentions might be interesting to psychiatrists and historians, but an immigrant family or a woman in a hijab being chased down might care less. The racist act of voting instantly converted Trump supporters into racists, and now they’re as real as can be. They might or might not want to deal with that fact, but what’s left of the decent America must.
--Aleksandar Hemon
The ethics of feeling align with the belief, deeply embedded in a population far exceeding the number of Republican voters, that the good intentions of America are forever inscribed in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and thus congenitally imbue all those who feel American. Never mind slavery, systemic racism and exploitation, disenfranchisement of women, frequent wars of aggression. The Founding Intentions are good and there for all to see, and the acts don’t matter; American history is rife with crimes dismissed as honest mistakes. Most recently, the lies of the Bushist regime, which created systems of torture and surveillance, came out of the feeling that the country was endangered after 9/11—who could deny the truth and legitimacy of that?
The self-congratulating American ethos allowed for an immoral and criminal enterprise to avoid prosecution. One of the benefits of that immunity was that Americans could continue to feel as decent people, despite all the contrary evidence. The election of Barack Obama confirmed the feeling, while he, in return, graciously eschewed addressing in any substantial way the ethical (and financial) bankruptcy of the Bushist America.* American culture went fully along with it, because, no matter what we’ve done, we’re a great people (We elected a black man!), all of us born and bred as citizens within the exceptionalist ethics. Even now, after Trump passed a national job interview while his psychopathic tendencies were manifest, the Democrats, beginning with President Obama, cannot accept that the idea of American decency is no longer viable.
So here comes Donald Trump. He, as they say, tells it like it is, which is true only if what is is determined by feeling. He is but a Viagratic bundle of incoherent aggression clustered around a single bull**** intention: to make America great again. Once his supporters’ feelings empowered the intention, no fact or thought could ever matter. Trump’s election confirmed the ethos, and neither the Trumpist voters’ hurt feelings nor their decent intentions could after that be diagnosed as racist. Who in their right mind would argue that they intended to endorse the discourse of white nationalism, or to reconfigure American democracy as an autocracy?
The insurmountable advantage of the intentionalist ethos is that one can assign the moral value to one’s act by way of negotiating one’s intentions. Presently, among the white citizens of this country, a vast reassessment of what constitutes a “real” racist is taking place. The Trumpist white voters counter the claim that Trump intends to discriminate against nonwhites by invoking his good intention to make America great. In the same turn, they reject being called racist, as might their white Clintonite friends and family, because, you know, they can’t be “real” racists. The convoluted interpretations of the electoral outcome centered around the foggy feeling of economic anxiety serve the same purpose. Many a Thanksgiving dinner will be spent conducting such ethical negotiations, all the negotiators stuffed with the same turkey. The common outcome, other than indigestion, will be the normalization of racism: We agree to disagree, **** the darkies and their friends the Jews.
The grand negotiation amounts to a whitewash operation. The majority of white Trump voters (as distinct from those who like to light up crosses and have no problem with racism) are presently invested in conceptualizing ethical positions in which they can feel not racist while fully and willingly enjoying all the benefits of an openly racist system wherein whiteness has an immense value. This is not new either. Indeed, this is how white America has operated for a long while. What is relatively new is the blatant aggression of Trumpian racism and, with it, a new value of whiteness, all of which requires some crafty renegotiation. Trumpist voters (and their Thanksgiving guests) would like themselves to feel that they’re unintentionally white within an intentionally white-nationalist political operation, soon to take over the American state apparatus.
But the only ethics that matter are act-based ethics—it’s what you do that matters, not what you feel. After all, the legal system in this country, as yet based in reason and belief in the rationality of law, is contingent upon the ethical value of the act. And an act is a fact—what you do is what is. The Trump voters committed an act of voting for an unabashed racist, whose hate speech is an act and a fact in public space. There is, of course, more than a distinct possibility that white Trump voters knew exactly what they were voting for and they wished for it. After all, Trump kept promising it, over and over again, and it’s already here. But even if they didn’t intend their racism, those who voted for Trump must reconcile with his acts. These might include deporting millions of people, which is not possible without violence, or legally discriminating against Muslim American citizens. If such acts come to pass, those who have already committed the initial act of voting for Trump, whatever their intentions may have been, will have undeniably given him a mandate for radical racism.
A citizen’s basic responsibility is to be aware of the consequences of his or her acts. The feelings that led tens of millions to vote for Trump have been rendered morally irrelevant by their vote. Perhaps those feelings and intentions might be interesting to psychiatrists and historians, but an immigrant family or a woman in a hijab being chased down might care less. The racist act of voting instantly converted Trump supporters into racists, and now they’re as real as can be. They might or might not want to deal with that fact, but what’s left of the decent America must.
--Aleksandar Hemon
