"While I think I can understand these as attempts to compensate and encourage the black side of the chasm, I also see it as widening the divide in its exclusion of the those of us on the white side." The difference of course between segregation and BET is that one was enforced by an oppressive set of Jim Crow laws (and by white separatist terrorists with tacit approval from the political establishment) and the other is an entertainment channel designed to appeal to black Americans, but whose 'exclusivity' is enforced by, well, preference.
All 16 comments by...
Matt W
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"Now I note that some Collectivists (Hillary, most notably) are again calling themselves Progressives. I suppose they are running out of labels with which to mislead people." Contemporary liberal politicians are only "Collectivists" according to the pseudo-ideology and intellectual quackery of Objectivism. Clinton most certainly supports such Liberal institutions as international free trade, a market based economy, rights-based restrictions on the power of government, protection of private property, rule of law, and checks and balances among governmental powers. Liberalism has always acknowledged that there are certain functions that are too expensive, too unprofitable, or too specialized for the private sector to …
Posted to The Left's Identity Crisis
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scorp, I won't dignify your Clinton Chronicles litany with a response. The quotes you pulled are either meaningless without context, or only objectionable to an Objectivist. The real point of the multiple-choice format is merely a low-brow attempt to smear Clinton via negative association. Do you have any substantive critiques?
Posted to The Left's Identity Crisis
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Clinton is not associated with her own quotes? Well, that is certainly a novel interpretation. Especially since she has said essentially the same thing in different contexts over a period of years. And the contexts are quite accessible if you care to look them up. I distinctly remember at least two of them from news coverage at the time.
I don't care to look them up; I'm not trying to critique Clinton's policies. If you wish to provide a substantive critique, it's your responsibility to provide context for these remarks, which I note, you still haven't done. The negative association I …Posted to The Left's Identity Crisis
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scorp, You still have failed to offer any substantive critique of Clinton's policies. So far, you've said "Hillary is a Collectivist", "Hillary is a criminal", and "Hillary is about on par with Stalin." The free-market quote is from an interview done for Sojourners magazine and was specifically in reference to national health care. For reasons I've already stated, the free-market has<\i> failed in this area, and asserting this does not contradict any principle of modern democratic liberalism. The expansion of rights language from just property to universal enfranchisement, education, and collective bargaining represent one historical trajectory of liberal though since the …
Posted to The Left's Identity Crisis
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"This is actually a very good thing. This ruling will help end racial discrimination once and for all. The basis of helping others should not be centered on race, but rather on economic status. To provide extra help for rich blacks (or their children) is absurd. But to provide help to those who are actually disadvantaged - of whatever race - will help those in the lower classes rise up to the middle class." This argument assumes that racism no longer exists and does not operate in society on any level. This is far from true anywhere in America. Racism is …
Posted to God--And Progressives--Save This Honorable Court!
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scorp, I'm not sure what your rant has to do with the content of the article. In a typical libertarian fashion, you've erected a liberal strawman, ripe for demolition. I have never met a liberal who didn't fully support civil rights, including free speech. I have, however, heard several conservative talking heads who ramble about how those "damn Hollywood liberals need to keep their mouths shut." or how, "if you don't want to say 'under God' in the Pledge of Allegiance, you can move to Canada." (I feel that a Pledge of Allegiance itself is a disturbing totalitarian concept.) With the …
Posted to God--And Progressives--Save This Honorable Court!
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"Thus he seems to believe that only by racist policies can we fix the racism problem. Odd logic that has been tested for several decades yielding not only a lack of success, but dismal failure instead." Forgive my repetition, but here's another Kozol quote: "The achievement gap between black and white children, which narrowed for three decades up until the late years of the 1980s—the period in which school segregation steadily decreased—started to widen once more in the early 1990s when the federal courts began the process of resegregation by dismantling the mandates of the Brown decision. From that point on, …
Posted to God--And Progressives--Save This Honorable Court!
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"Tens of millions of victims of Communism are dead men, not straw men." Indeed - you illustrate my point. The straw man you've erected is this notion of a Collectivist hiding out in American society - someone who harkens for totalitarian state control of all property. This corrupt and grasping fictional person is an easy target. What you have not done is actually look at what real progressives are actually saying and address their arguments in a rational way. It's easy to dismiss the boogey-man, or use him to scare little kids. Somehow you assume that when progressives offer a critique …
Posted to God--And Progressives--Save This Honorable Court!
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"...limiting the freedom of the “free market” to be as devastatingly evil as capitalists are legally free to make it." I agree with the quotation marks here - markets are never free - they are merely (potentially) efficient tools for redistributing resources. A truly competitive market requires outside regulation in order to guard against monopolies, protect monopsonies, and ensure that _all_ the costs of production are factored into prices (e.g. the environmental impact of production.) It's telling that the four biases mentioned in the article, "anti-market bias (a skepticism that the price mechanism works), anti-foreign bias, make-work bias (a desire to …
Posted to Who's Afraid of Democracy?
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Regarding the libertarian ideas being explained by kulthur and ztnjv: "For example, most (and I do mean nearly all) professional economists are in agreement that free trade is a net benefit for society...by far." What do you mean by free trade? Do you mean trade conducted without any external (read government) interference? Such a thing is impossible. At the very least government has to police trade activity so that, for instance, I can't point a gun at you and demand your big screen TV without at least some fear of negative consequence. There also needs to be some form of contract …
Posted to Who's Afraid of Democracy?
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"Firstly, I said FREE trade. See the quote. Then you used fair trade. Fair trade is an obscure term with subjective meanings. I don't like it." Sorry about that. I meant to type "free trade" - guess that was a freudian slip - I've edited my comments to correct it. "That's not about trade policy. That's matters of constituional law to private propery and legal protection. We have courts for all that. And that matter of pointing a gun has no relevance to free, fair or unfair trade. That's a criminal matter of using force against an individual." My point was …
Posted to Who's Afraid of Democracy?
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Posted by scorp: "blah blah blah Dimocrat blah blah blah Dimcrats blah blah blah blah Dimocrats" You make interesting, though I submit highly misleading, arguments, but the use of infantile pejoratives merely makes you seem loutish and stupid. The Democratic Party is no more monolithic in ideology than the Republican Party. There are indeed Democrats who sit way over on the libertarian side when it comes to government influence, taxation, and spending, just as there are Republicans who seem to favor big government and out of control spending (current administration included.) "The budget should not be allowed to go into surplus, …
Posted to Who's Afraid of Democracy?
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TI, Please ignore the ravings of this board's resident racist/misogynist/lunatic blowhard. (Why do these folks always write in one long block, as if they're spewing invective in monotone without stopping to take a breath?) I count myself squarely in the liberal/progressive camp and consistently side against capital punishment in my political action, but I'm willing to have a rational conversation about it. I am very sorry for the tragedy and violence visited on your community. My sympathy lies squarely with the young woman who was killed and her family. I wholeheartedly support any government program that provides support, financial and otherwise, …
Posted to Inside the Death Chamber
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"Such was a product of the modern trends in a two tier economy, not slavery’s legacy." Interesting post, but what is the source of the two tier economy and the "job and housing discrimination" black families faced as they migrated north? Slavery institutionalized racism for generations of white folks. Hence the death of reconstruction, the introduction of Jim Crow, the rise of white supremacy, and the racism that is still evident in nearly every sector of American public life. Slavery isn't responsible for some imagined "shiftlessness" in black folks; but it's legacy can be felt in the very real bigotry expressed …
Posted to Slavery and the State of Denial
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This article is a good first step in outlining the social/philosophical parameters around internetworked discourse. What is missing is an analysis of how folks actually use the medium. The article makes presumptions about "the typical Web surfer" based on popular impressions, supposed fads, and "cyberspace gaming." I suspect that "sitting alone in front of a PC screen . . . with no direct window onto reality, encountering only virtual simulacra" is not an accurate description of the average contemporary netizen, who clearly must interact with the "real world" in order to generate the not-insignificant economic resources required to participate in the …
Posted to In You More Than Yourself
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