Alt-Right Playbook: The Cost of Doing Business

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funeralxempire
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03 Oct 2022, 7:27 pm



This one discusses how there isn't a moderate position between anti-racism and racism, the juvenile understandings employed by many people to dodge that reality, how 'whiteness as default' is at the core of white privilege and how political dynamics between white anti-racists and their opponents often result in PoC and their direct interests becoming secondary to that battle between those blocs.


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03 Oct 2022, 8:00 pm

So if we're not on the streets, dressed in all black, face covered, violently attacking the racists/fascists, we're one of them?


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funeralxempire
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03 Oct 2022, 8:06 pm

Tim_Tex wrote:
So if we're not on the streets, dressed in all black, face covered, violently attacking the racists/fascists, we're one of them?


No. When was that ever said? :?


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04 Oct 2022, 12:37 am

For all the talk of diversity, the video blogger has a very binary view of racism.

The video blogger has a hostile view of capitalism but his definition of racism has given companies a weapon. Rhetorical question what demographic is more likely to hold the old "ignorant" definition of racism, and have more trouble adjusting to the newer "enlightened" definition of racism? Older workers whom usually have higher salaries. The companies don't have to admit they discriminate on the basis of age, they can just say the fired people were not team players and did not fit the direction the company is going in(or want their target market to think they are going).


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04 Oct 2022, 7:20 am

At one point the video very briefly displays some books about racism by Black people. Those books apparently are:

- Stamped From The Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi
- Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde
- A book by or about James Baldwin (I can't see the title)
- The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness by Michelle Alexander
- Killing Rage: Ending Racism by Bell Hooks


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funeralxempire
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04 Oct 2022, 11:44 am

ASPartOfMe wrote:
For all the talk of diversity, the video blogger has a very binary view of racism.

The video blogger has a hostile view of capitalism but his definition of racism has given companies a weapon. Rhetorical question what demographic is more likely to hold the old "ignorant" definition of racism, and have more trouble adjusting to the newer "enlightened" definition of racism? Older workers whom usually have higher salaries. The companies don't have to admit they discriminate on the basis of age, they can just say the fired people were not team players and did not fit the direction the company is going in(or want their target market to think they are going).


I think you're touching on one of the factors that drives businesses to look favourably towards so-called 'woke' ideas.

Besides the primary motive of not wanting to miss out on talent, 'legacy' talent is more expensive and if it can be replaced with younger, cheaper talent for an accepted reason, it will be.

Those businesses generally don't care about social justice movements or their goals, but they'll cynically exploit them like anything else.


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04 Oct 2022, 1:19 pm

funeralxempire wrote:
This one discusses how there isn't a moderate position between anti-racism and racism, the juvenile understandings employed by many people to dodge that reality, how 'whiteness as default' is at the core of white privilege and how political dynamics between white anti-racists and their opponents often result in PoC and their direct interests becoming secondary to that battle between those blocs.


I'm not going to watch a 35 minute video, but that thing I underlined is not just wrong, but it's objectively counterproductive if your goal is less racial division, that's like W era "you're either with us or with the terrorists" rhetoric. Also, another poster mentioned the book list, which is telling as the racism/antiracism thing is a signature theme of Ibram X Kendi, who I'd go so far as to call an academic fraud. The New Jim Crow also has some issues, with critiques even coming in from the left.


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funeralxempire
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04 Oct 2022, 1:43 pm

Dox47 wrote:
funeralxempire wrote:
This one discusses how there isn't a moderate position between anti-racism and racism, the juvenile understandings employed by many people to dodge that reality, how 'whiteness as default' is at the core of white privilege and how political dynamics between white anti-racists and their opponents often result in PoC and their direct interests becoming secondary to that battle between those blocs.


I'm not going to watch a 35 minute video, but that thing I underlined is not just wrong, but it's objectively counterproductive if your goal is less racial division, that's like W era "you're either with us or with the terrorists" rhetoric. Also, another poster mentioned the book list, which is telling as the racism/antiracism thing is a signature theme of Ibram X Kendi, who I'd go so far as to call an academic fraud. The New Jim Crow also has some issues, with critiques even coming in from the left.


I'd suggest it's only counter-productive in the short-term because of how strong the emotional reaction is. People are offended when they're made to confront unpleasant realities, but that doesn't mean the reality should be ignored.

In the long run, not trying to appeal to people who aren't willing to listen isn't counter-productive, it's efficient. You don't have to focus on every cauldron you encircle, you can just leave them encircled while moving on to more important objectives.


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Dox47
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04 Oct 2022, 3:07 pm

funeralxempire wrote:
I'd suggest it's only counter-productive in the short-term because of how strong the emotional reaction is. People are offended when they're made to confront unpleasant realities, but that doesn't mean the reality should be ignored.

In the long run, not trying to appeal to people who aren't willing to listen isn't counter-productive, it's efficient. You don't have to focus on every cauldron you encircle, you can just leave them encircled while moving on to more important objectives.


Eh, I think you're underestimating how offputting "anti-racism" is to the average person, how small the group that actually believes in it is, and how large the pool of simply non-racist people is who are sick to death of being proselytized at by people trying to guilt trip them into supporting their political agenda. Anti racism is influential because it's been adopted by a small but currently powerful group, but people in general hate it, and that's not going to end well for the anti racists.


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funeralxempire
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04 Oct 2022, 3:45 pm

Dox47 wrote:
funeralxempire wrote:
I'd suggest it's only counter-productive in the short-term because of how strong the emotional reaction is. People are offended when they're made to confront unpleasant realities, but that doesn't mean the reality should be ignored.

In the long run, not trying to appeal to people who aren't willing to listen isn't counter-productive, it's efficient. You don't have to focus on every cauldron you encircle, you can just leave them encircled while moving on to more important objectives.


Eh, I think you're underestimating how offputting "anti-racism" is to the average person, how small the group that actually believes in it is, and how large the pool of simply non-racist people is who are sick to death of being proselytized at by people trying to guilt trip them into supporting their political agenda. Anti racism is influential because it's been adopted by a small but currently powerful group, but people in general hate it, and that's not going to end well for the anti racists.


Wait, which one of us is trying to make the case that racism is widespread and that most people would rather defend their ego than consider that they might contribute to the problem again? 8O


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Mona Pereth
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05 Oct 2022, 8:03 am

Dox47 wrote:
The New Jim Crow also has some issues, with critiques even coming in from the left.

The above-linked Vox article is about Fordham University criminal justice expert John Pfaff's critique of the specific idea that the majority of people in prison are there for low-level drug offenses. The article says:

Quote:
The story that Pfaff carefully describes is different from the standard narrative: It’s not drug offenses that are driving mass incarceration, but violent ones. It’s not the federal government that’s behind mass incarceration, but a whole host of prison systems down to the local and state level. It’s not solely police and lawmakers leading to more incarceration and lengthy prison sentences, but prosecutors who are by and large out of the political spotlight.

However, the Vox article also says:

Quote:
By the numbers, Pfaff is correct: The latest data by the US Bureau of Justice Statistics shows that in state prisons, where about 87 percent of US inmates are held, nearly 53 percent are in for violent offenses (such as murder, manslaughter, robbery, assault, and rape), while only about 16 percent, as Pfaff said, are in for drug offenses.

...

One caveat to this part of Pfaff’s argument is the churn of the prison population. While the majority of people in state prison at a single point in time are in for violent crimes, many more people are admitted to prison for drug and property offenses than for violent ones. But the lower-level offenders end up serving much shorter sentences, so they don’t add as much to the total prison population at any given point in time as violent offenders do. This was demonstrated in a 2015 analysis by Jonathan Rothwell for Brookings, where he charted the “stock” and “flow” of prisons and how they differ based on offense:

[...]

So while reducing the number of violent offenders in prison is needed to undo mass incarceration (as measured by the total prison population), cutting back on drug and property offenders would still do a lot to lower the total amount of people exposed to the criminal justice system.

And indeed, what's most relevant to the argument made in The New Jim Crow is not the percentage of prisoners who are there for drug offenses at any given time, but the total number of black people who have been "exposed to the criminal justice system" and convicted of felonies, even with relatively short sentences or no prison time at all. These do, indeed, include vast numbers of people who have been convicted of drug offenses.

Most importantly, their criminal records continue to harm them for the rest of their lives. According to the book's website:

Quote:
As the United States celebrates its “triumph over race” with the election of Barack Obama, the majority of black men in major urban areas are under correctional control or saddled with criminal records for life. Jim Crow laws were wiped off the books decades ago, but today an extraordinary percentage of the African American community is warehoused in prisons or trapped in a parallel social universe, denied basic civil and human rights—including the right to vote; the right to serve on juries; and the right to be free of legal discrimination in employment, housing, access to education and public benefits. Today, it is no longer socially permissible to use race explicitly as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. Yet as civil-rights-lawyer-turned-legal-scholar Michelle Alexander demonstrates, it is perfectly legal to discriminate against convicted criminals in nearly all the ways in which it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once labeled a felon, even for a minor drug crime, the old forms of discrimination are suddenly legal again. In her words, “we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.”

According to Study estimates U.S. population with felony convictions by Alan Flurry, USA Today, October 1, 2017:

Quote:
New research led by a University of Georgia sociologist on the growth in the scope and scale of felony convictions finds that, as of 2010, 3 percent of the total U.S. population and 15 percent of the African-American male population have served time in prison. People with felony convictions more broadly account for 8 percent of the overall population and 33 percent of the African-American male population.

The study includes the first estimates of the felony conviction population and maps their distribution in the states, documenting the dramatic growth since 1980.

“There’s been a great deal of scholarly and policy attention toward incarceration, and rightfully so, as it has very distinct consequences for people that have that experience, as well as their communities and families,” said Sarah Shannon, assistant professor of sociology in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences and first author on the study.

“But the larger population who also have felony convictions face many of the same types of stigma that come with having been incarcerated-lack of access to jobs, lack of access to housing and welfare support-without necessarily having had the experience of spending time behind bars,” she said.

Here is a copy of Sarah Shannon's paper.

Anyhow, it also seems to me that ending or scaling down the War on Drugs would have a longterm effect of reducing the number of people in prison for violent crimes, as well as the number of people convicted of drug offenses. A lot of violent crime is gang-related, and legalizing the more popular drugs would make the gangs less profitable, hence hopefully smaller and fewer.


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05 Oct 2022, 11:34 am

According to Legalize It All: How to win the war on drugs by Dan Baum, Harper's, April 2016:

Quote:
In 1994, John Ehrlichman, the Watergate co-conspirator, unlocked for me one of the great mysteries of modern American history: How did the United States entangle itself in a policy of drug prohibition that has yielded so much misery and so few good results? Americans have been criminalizing psychoactive substances since San Francisco’s anti-opium law of 1875, but it was Ehrlichman’s boss, Richard Nixon, who declared the first “war on drugs” and set the country on the wildly punitive and counterproductive path it still pursues. [...]

At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

In other words: Ehrlichman is said to have admitted that the very purpose of Nixon's "War on Drugs" -- not a mere unintended side-effect -- was to have an excuse to harass both Black people and hippies, two categories of people who were deemed to be Nixon's political enemies.

Admittedly, though -- as I learned just now, when digging up the above quote -- some other former Nixon aides have disputed this reported remark: Nixon Aides Suggest Colleague Was Kidding About Drug War Being Designed To Target Black People by Hilary Hanson, Huffington Post, Mar 25, 2016.

Unfortunately, Erlichmann himself was no longer alive by the time his alleged remark was published. On the other hand, any Nixon aide who was young enough to be still alive in 2016 would likely not have been senior enough to be in on the dirtier aspects of Nixon's strategies. So, at this point, it's unknowable what the historical truth is regarding Erlichmann's alleged remark.

Be that as it may: Regardless of its actual intent, the War on Drugs certainly had the effects described by Ehrlichman. And it is certainly true that drug enforcement has disproportionately targeted Black communities.


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05 Oct 2022, 1:48 pm

You're preaching to the choir about the drug war, I've been in favor of ending it for more than 20 years, one of my most consistent positions throughout my life.


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05 Oct 2022, 2:06 pm

funeralxempire wrote:
Wait, which one of us is trying to make the case that racism is widespread and that most people would rather defend their ego than consider that they might contribute to the problem again? 8O


Okay, even if I stipulate that your premise correct, you think "you're either with us or you're a racist!" is a good rhetorical strategy?


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05 Oct 2022, 2:39 pm

I'm an anti-racist-----but I still don't believe white European-origin folks are automatically born racists. I don't accept that premise.

I accept the racist history of many segments of the United States. And I accept that racism still exists.



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05 Oct 2022, 5:22 pm

Dox47 wrote:
Okay, even if I stipulate that your premise correct, you think "you're either with us or you're a racist!" is a good rhetorical strategy?

The video's take is more along the lines of saying that racism is something all white people, including white liberal and progressive activists, have participated in whether we intended to or not; therefore, we all should listen more to people of color.

Here's an admittedly very loose and imperfect analogy: The job interview process at most corporations isn't specifically intended to discriminate against autistic people, but nevertheless does have that effect. In many other contexts too, many NT's will inadvertantly mistreat autistic people unless they've specifically made a point of learning to accommodate us.

Back to the video. It is aimed primarily at white liberals and progressives, and begins by talking about the following very disturbing dilemma for white liberal and progressive activists in today's world:

Quote:
Say, for the sake of argument, there's this -- call him a provocateur? -- a conservative who makes his living off being a public figure, saying scandalously evil things in public because controversy equals attention, and attention equals brand recognition. He gets his writing gigs and interviews and guest spots, sometimes because people agree with the awful things he says, more often it's because he gets views. His economy runs on engagement, and hate clicks are still clicks.

One revenue stream is speaking engagements, the college campus circuit. Fans at, let's say, UC Emoryville, invite him as a guest lecturer. But UCE is, broadly, a progressive campus, which means his presence there would likely provoke a lot of outrage, maybe even a protest.

And a protest would be PRETTY FLIPPIN' SWEET!

Protest means local news coverage. Maybe more than local. Hell, the conservative media machine loves taking stories like this and blowing them up to national importance. If he plays his cards right, he could get his words in front of millions of people, instead of just the student body of UC Emoryville.

Of course, he's gonna take that gig.

But the progressive students at UCE are wise to his tricks. They've seen him pull this stunt at other UC's: Stockton, Bakersfield, Vacaville. So they make the decision: We're NOT gonna protest. We're just gonna let him speak -- let the boy stamp his feet, and in a month, no one will even remember he was here.

As the date approaches, and the provocateur sees he's not getting the response he wants, he starts hinting things on social media, trying to bait a reaction:

"Psst! Psst! Hey, I'm going to make jokes about the Holocaust! I'm going to say Americans treated their slaves well!"

Nothing.

So he ups the ante, makes it personal:

"I'm going to put up pre-transition photos of your trans students! I'm going to out the queer students I've seen on Grindr! I'm going to name which of your students I think are illegal immigrants!"

Student body's like: "Bro! Do your worst! Nobody's falling for it!" -- until one student's like "Uhh -- Hold up! He's gonna dox immigrants in front of his audience of white nationalist gun nuts??? And we're just gonna let him??? You know some of his fans were in Charlottesville, right?"

What we're seeing here is a game of chicken between one group of right conservative reactionaries and one group of -- let's be honest -- mostly white liberals, for whom the stakes are who gets paid attention to.

The provocateur doesn't have the ammunition nor the optics to attack privileged liberals directly, so he pokes and prods at various social minorities whom privileged liberals are supposed to care about, until he gets a reaction. Going after people of color is a pure xanatos gambit for his fans. Either they get a protest, and a national audience hears their reactionary rhetoric, or there's no protest, and they get to f**k with some immigrants.

And because white liberals are largely ignorant to the threat posed to those immigrants, white liberals are not great at assessing the full scope of the danger. Often enough this remains, to them, an argument about ideas and principles. To them, they are but words -- until someone gets hit by a car, or shot, and then it's "Who could have predicted?"

The provocateur's animating force is not hatred of people of color. It's hatred of white liberals -- just as white liberals' animating force is less advocacy FOR people of color than moral victory over conservatives. Neither side acknowledges people of color as entities in this fight. They're viewed as tools for getting white people what they want, and their suffering is viewed as an acceptable by-product.

[...]

And, make no mistake: Weaponizing or disregarding students of color is still racism. But it's racism of a kind most white people have trouble recognizing -- or, to speak with a sharper edge, that white people often refuse to acknowledge.

From the white provocateur who does not hate minorities directly, but is willing to utilize the hatred of others to get what he wants from some white people, who says, "I will hurt them a lot, just to hurt you a little" -- to the white liberal who does mental gymnastics to not come out and say, "That is a black and brown sacrifice I am willing to make" -- racism is not always a passion, but it is tolerable, usable, easy to disregard. In a white supremacist world, it is the cost of doing business.

Let me make it clear -- nothing about this is okay.


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Last edited by Mona Pereth on 05 Oct 2022, 10:04 pm, edited 1 time in total.