In May, I wrote: “The attacks, and the silence of progressive New York, are utterly appalling.” In December, it’s more than appalling. It’s complicit. (Karol Markowicz)
To say that today’s BBC broadcast reports of the latest attacks in New York pivoted swiftly to denouncing generalised “racism and homophobia” in the age of Trump might be called an exaggeration – since to pivot, one must first be pointing in a different direction. But arguably that is unfair, and the beeb’s afternoon and evening news broadcasts did indeed merely swiftly pivot to a more acceptable talking point. Certain omissions, hinted at in this post’s title, assisted that pivot.
How far the BBC is on the same complicit page as against how far they are just unwisely still treating their progressive American friends as trustworthy and sufficient sources of insight, I do not know. My impression was that the beeb covered Corbyn’s little problem in this area a bit less absurdly than what I saw today. It is easier to fool UK viewers about the US than about the UK – and some beeboids do seem to be trying.
I should note that a hint of appearance did appear on the BBC’s website. And, thanks to crime movies, most UK viewers know enough of the geography of New York to realise that Harlem is maybe not the most obvious place for a white-supremacist-style anti-semite to hide out. It will be revealing to see whether coverage becomes more informative – or not.
They told the ignorant what they needed to know.
The Democrats are on the cusp of losing their ‘permanent” “persons of no appearance” constituency. Trump’s support there is growing. Loss of that constituency would be devastating to the Dems. (It’s the same as Labor support for anti-semitism – they cannot afford to lose the truly anti-semitic constituency that they’ve imported.)
The Dems dare not call out “persons of no appearance” and appear to support one of the rival constituencies. So, they’re adding up votes, and anti-semitism wins.
The BBC now has a photo of the attacker:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-50938507
But of course the article does not go into the racial/religious breakdown of the perps in the various New York attacks.
WikiFootia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Monsey_Hanukkah_stabbing
From the Atlantic, interesting, scary:
“After Monsey, Will Jews Go Underground?”
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/12/after-monsey-will-jews-go-underground/604219/
The BBC is mostly Leftist-Marxist so they have to protect the black racial weapon they helped build and use often. Hence we have silence+manipulation= fake news from BBC.
If it were whites murdering and attacking jews we could be certain that would be front page and explicitly put there.
We would have “artists” “protesting”, BBC journalists would contact several “human rights” organizations and we would have a big case…
Since the images of the arrested suspect are all over social media, then the only way one could remain ignorant on this is….well, if one WANTED to remain ignorant.
Also, compare and contrast Monsey with Texas:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7836121/Moment-hero-former-FBI-agent-shot-dead-gunman-opened-fire-inside-packed-Texas-church.html
This “persons of no appearance” thing is the same issue as was discussed previously here. Most of the time, the race of the perpetrator is totally irrelevant to the crime in question. They’re not mentioning it for the same reason they don’t mention the perpetrator’s blood group, astrological sign, or favourite ice cream flavour.
The BBC gave what it considered to be the relevant background on the attacker:
He has a long history of mental illness and hospitalisations. That seems to explain it pretty well. And mental illness has got nothing to do with race.
You can point, if you like, to the articles where the criminal’s whiteness is mentioned despite its irrelevance as evidence of the media’s racism. But it looks deranged to criticise them for the things they didn’t say, when there was no reason to say them.
His lawyer said, that his (unspecified) family said…
In a part of the country where Islam desperately recruits “impressionable” black men in it’s war against ANYONE not like them , but ESPECIALLY Jews…
Even without Islam, in THIS part of the US, Black “community” hatred for Jews, and “justification” for violence against them, is a simple matter of history.
Knife attacks? A machete is the prefered choice for folks premeditating carnage.
Quite uncommon where there’s no jungle groth to clear, or agricultural produce to harvest.
Go ahead, keep holding your teddy bear and living in denial.
I chose to point, as consequence free media SELECTIVE lies by omission are simply best assumed.
Like with Tass.
NOT BBC, NPR, CNN, MSNBC, WaPo, NYT.
https://heavy.com/news/2019/12/thomas-grafton/
“I chose to point, as consequence free media SELECTIVE lies by omission are simply best assumed.”
But you have thereby invented a complete narrative with ZERO evidence.
That’s an example that any anti-racist campaigner can point to to persuade even the most open-minded independent observer that those attacking the media are themselves biased and unreliable. You destroy your own credibility doing this. You confirm the mainstream media narrative about you.
If you have no evidence, you cannot draw any conclusions. If you start drawing conclusions from no evidence, everyone will assume that all your other conclusions are drawn from no evidence either.
It’s fair enough to be sceptical, to seek out other sources, or contrary views. If as a result of your search you had found EVIDENCE that he was a jihadist, or had been influenced by anti-semites, or was a member of some anti-semitic hate group, then fine – publish it. That helps.
But the evidence presented so far indicates that he had no known links to organised anti-semitism or Islamism, he was mentally ill, generally “confused”, and in an area where 32% of the population are Jewish would have been quite likely to have attacked Jews even if the attack was totally random. We don’t know his motives. We have no evidence. We need to wait until we do. We don’t want to make it easier for the mainstream left to portray our side of the argument as based totally on evidence-free prejudiced assumption.
My retort is milder. Where you say
I see that the BBC quotes his lawyer’s statement. I do not say it looks deranged for you to equate the two, but it does look naive. I disapprove that calling something a ‘hate crime’ makes the same act more punishable than otherwise, but while it is so, any defence lawyer has motive to claim that it is not, without that being in itself informative. In the case of a white supremacist hate crime, the defence lawyer and the narrative are opposed. In the reverse case, they are not.
More generally, anyone who suspects that a pattern of contrasted shoutings and silences from a PC broadcaster is narrative-supporting will note data points of silence even more than of shouting because shouting, being intended to be noticed, will likely be noticed anyway whereas silence, being intended not to be noticed, is more needful to be pointed out.
Not to the PC, which includes the BBC. Most of the time, race matters a lot to them, whether to stress or to omit. Race can indeed matter less than they pretend or not at all, but since they do pretend, and the BBC is part of the pretence, and we are obliged to fund it, it is proper to notice their coverage and review their motives.
For example, Erin Biba writes for the BBC. Erin’s tweet suggests beeboids can see positive reason not to say what I remark the BBC broadcasts did not mention and the BBC’s coverage in general did not remark. As the tweet’s disappearance suggests, most beeboids will not say it so openly.
Not THIS time. For 2 reasons.
First, in any “hate crime”, the race, gender, and sexual orientation of the perpetrator is just as important as that of the victim.
Nullius questions whether this is a hate crime at all. That brings up the 2nd reason why the race of the perpetrator matters in this case: Governor Cuomo and Mayor De Blasio have rushed to blame Trump for it. To do so, obviously they need to hide the race of the perpetrator AND they need to label it as a hate crime.
(Even so, i submit that, if they believe their own propaganda, then they are delusionally insane — and, if they don’t believe their own propaganda, but believe that other people will, then they are also delusionally insane.)
“More generally, anyone who suspects that a pattern of contrasted shoutings and silences from a PC broadcaster is narrative-supporting will note data points of silence even more than of shouting because shouting, being intended to be noticed, will likely be noticed anyway whereas silence, being intended not to be noticed, is more needful to be pointed out.”
Maybe so, but it needs to be pointed out in a way that constitutes evidence, and doesn’t play into the PC narrative of racist conspiracy theorists who make up conclusions from evidence-free assumption. You observe that a defence lawyer’s words are not entirely to be trusted because “Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?” How much more so does that apply to someone who freely admits to assuming particular motives without any need for evidence because they believe such motives are being covered up by a global conspiracy of leftists in total control of the media? Don’t you see how that looks?!
How persuasive do you think your claim of seeing a “pattern” is if you evidently can’t tell what constitutes actual evidence and what doesn’t? Why should we believe this “pattern” you see isn’t more of the same? Stuff you “assume” is true because it fits your preconceptions? Pareidolia and apophenia and confirmation bias are common to all humans. If the BBC can find their unconscious political biases warping their perception, then why do you think you’re immune?
Now, suppose you was to do a systematic survey of several hundred news stories about crimes, and count the number of times the race of the perpetrators was or was not mentioned, compared to the races involved, and whether it was relevant to the story, and can show a bias – to show the “pattern of contrasted shoutings and silences” – then yes, that might constitute actual evidence. That might actually be persuasive.
But individual anecdotes, selectively sought out and presented by people with an obvious political agenda, come under the same heading as the statements of defence lawyers. And this particular case doesn’t even rise to the level of an anecdote. There is no evidence regarding his motive. We don’t even know it was anti-semitic. We don’t know if he’s left-wing. We don’t know if he’s been influenced by Democrat anti-Zionist demagogues. For all we know, it could be over a neighbourhood parking dispute, or an argument in a bar, or because one guy’s son was picking on the other guy’s son in school. Or it could be because the guy’s schizophrenic and thinks the Lord Jesus Christ And His Angelic Choir Came Down In Glory From Heaven and told him to kill the Jews because of him holding a grudge over that whole Barabbas thing. Or the magic pixie unicorn who lives in his hat doesn’t like the shape of the bushes in their garden, or whatever. We. Don’t. Know.
Until there’s actual evidence, all this sort of thing does is play into the hands of leftists who want to paint the whole of the right wing as Constable Savage-like irrational racist conspiracy theorists who leap to conclusions just because he was black. Both that we’d say it, and that we’d not point it out when others ‘on our team’ say it. And assuming you’re right about the “pattern of contrasted shoutings and silences” (let’s see some proper statistics, please!), it does that cause no good at all to discredit that concern with nonsense of this sort.
“First, in any “hate crime”, the race, gender, and sexual orientation of the perpetrator is just as important as that of the victim.”
So you think it might be a homosexual angry with the Jews about Leviticus 20:13? Well, why didn’t you all say so?
If and when we find evidence of his motivation, and it turns out race is a part of that, then maybe. And a trend of rising black-jew conflict in the area might constitute relevant social background. But at the moment, there’s no evidence as to his motivations.
“That brings up the 2nd reason why the race of the perpetrator matters in this case: Governor Cuomo and Mayor De Blasio have rushed to blame Trump for it. To do so, obviously they need to hide the race of the perpetrator AND they need to label it as a hate crime.”
And in that case, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to point out that we have no evidence yet regarding the guy’s motivations, and therefore Cuomo and De Blasio are as off their evidence-free rocker to blame it on Trump as any hypothetical racist who would automatically blame it on Islamists or anti-Zionist Democrats.
Don’t be like them.
This always strikes me as the wife-beater husband standing over his bleeding spouse and screaming “see what you made me do!”
They deserve similar responses.
Well, we do have some:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/30/nyregion/jewish-attacks.html
The BHI have historically been involved in violence towards Jews. They most definitely lie on the progressive side of the political spectrum. They consider Sharpton to be an ally.
bobby b,
Thanks! Much better!
It appears the phrase “ebinoid Israelites” appeared in his notes – which may be connected to the Black Hebrew Israelite movement, or could be from some other source. (The Black Hebrew Israelites are not the only ones to espouse variants on the “ten lost tribes” theory – the Igbo and Sefwi being two other obvious examples.) The lawyer I see has pointed out that there were “scores of papers” and that they were full of incoherent ramblings mostly unrelated to the Jews, but that were clearly evidence of a disturbed mind. Possibly a bit of cherry-picking went on picking those phrases out? And I’ve done internet searches for Hitler (and worse subjects) myself! It looks thin, to me.
But it is at least evidence worthy of discussion.
The dicey part is, it seems as though the mentally deranged are always the first foot soldiers in any socio-political war. They seem to grasp on to the most outrageous conspiracy theories and stories and derive purpose from them.
They’re the harbingers of movements. Most of those movements end still-born or die early deserved deaths, but some continue on and grow.
So, mentally ill or not, we recognize that their private hell has been constructed with help, and we try to head off that help before it spreads the hell. And the black/Jew war has historically been spread through the progressive side of things. Race matters here – because the progressives have been fashioning a specifically racial war.
Which is why so many progressives are now reduced to looking at Trump and screaming “see what you made us do!”
“The dicey part is, it seems as though the mentally deranged are always the first foot soldiers in any socio-political war. They seem to grasp on to the most outrageous conspiracy theories and stories and derive purpose from them.”
In this case I think I’d describe them as among the first casualties. The foot soldiers fire up the violent rhetoric, which everyone is expected to recognise as loud talk to arouse passions and not to be taken literally, but which the deranged are unable to recognise as rhetoric rather than reality.
The first signs of socio-political war are seen when evidence no longer matters, and judgements are based simply on which ‘side’ you’re on. When people think the most important aspect of a crime or tragedy is to first find out which side the perpetrators and victims are on; which side is ‘responsible’. When the main issue is not sympathy for the suffering of the victims or prevention, but in whether and how this news can be used as a weapon to attack the enemy, or how it can be defended against if the enemy use it to attack us. Truth and evidence and applying consistent principles don’t come into it.
Interesting video that just appeared on my Youtube page, which seems apposite here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLA8-5I221M
(I don’t really know much about this Akkad person, and I’m not endorsing him, but what he says seems at least interesting.)
But, here, those foot soldiers doing the inciting clearly are on one side. It’s not an illusion, it’s not a fable we tell ourselves to make us feel virtuous. And so the evidence as to “sides”, such as it is, IS important. It’s important that people be able to see what is happening and why. Only then can our future acts and impulses have any real evidentiary foundation.
If we simply await more and better evidence in the face of the progressives laying the blame on Trump, we risk the loss of a lot of support. A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes. So far, that lie is traveling well.
“But, here, those foot soldiers doing the inciting clearly are on one side.”
They’re on both sides.
I’ve seen plenty of rhetoric on the existential threat to society posed by Leftists and Islamists and immigrants and the Great Replacement theories, that would be all too easy for some schizophrenic to take on as their save-the-world mission. And there have been a few nutters like Anders Breivik and Brenton Tarrant who have gained partial inspiration from them. And again, the most important thing for people interpreting the events was often which ‘side’ they were really on, and which side could be blamed for it.
It’s a universal human tendency. It’s easy to recognise it in your opponent; it’s incredibly hard for anyone to recognise it in themselves. It’s why revolutions fail – why the revolutionaries always turn into the tyrants they fought to defeat. They always use the same means as their enemies, just fighting for different ends. But the problem of tyranny is not in the end goals, it is in the methods.
A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes, they say. So one might argue that the way to catch up with the lie is to send another lie in pursuit of it instead.
But I prefer Milton: “Though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously, by licensing and prohibiting, to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?”
Most of the time, the race of the perpetrator is totally irrelevant to the crime in question.
Historical background: It used to be routine to publish photos of criminals. This began to change in the 1960’s when the left objected on the grounds that citizens would notice that a very large fraction of the criminals were black. The publicly stated reasons were usually different, but the privately exchanged reason was as I relate.
Seems to me that the race/ethnicity of the victims wasn’t irrelevant to the alleged perp. For all the talk of ‘mental illness’, it seems that a specific intent formed to target people because they were Jews, and this was not diverted towards any random bunch of people or indeed the alleged perp’s own family.
And who is anyone to determine what others might or should find relevant?
The recent attacks on Jews on New York city have been made by blacks. That fact makes it itself a basis to be in the news.
besides like Neil writes above about BBC “journalism” :
“Not to the PC, which includes the BBC. Most of the time, race matters a lot to them, whether to stress or to omit. Race can indeed matter less than they pretend or not at all, but since they do pretend, and the BBC is part of the pretence, and we are obliged to fund it, it is proper to notice their coverage and review their motives.”
Mr Ed: ’ And who is anyone to determine what others might or should find relevant?’
Precisely! And NiV is no-one we should listen to in that regard, as his lengthy screeds (so refreshingly absent from Tim Worstall’s site) are geared exactly to that.
The key, according to him, is that this is down to ‘mental illness’, despite numerous videos online of young black youths harassing and attacking Orthodox Jews for no reason other than that they are Jews.
Not so much ‘folie a deux’ as ‘folie a mille’, eh, NiV?
“The publicly stated reasons were usually different, but the privately exchanged reason was as I relate.”
Mmm. You mean, that was people’s privately expressed theory about why it was being done? Back in the 1960s when racism was more of a thing?
“Seems to me that the race/ethnicity of the victims wasn’t irrelevant to the alleged perp. For all the talk of ‘mental illness’, it seems that a specific intent formed to target people because they were Jews, and this was not diverted towards any random bunch of people or indeed the alleged perp’s own family.”
Really? How do you know?
Suppose this guy writes some journals containing screeds against Mexicans, newspapers, cats, aliens, unicorns, clouds, weasels, charity collection tins, Arabs, Jews, Russians books, heathen temples practising black magic, oven-ready chicken, Ukrainians, nuclear power, pasta, boats, and people who wear black hats. He’s schizophrenic. There might be lots of categories in his writings that his victims belonged to. Or it might be nothing to do with that.
All we know is that he’s long-term mentally ill (easily checked, so no point lying about it), and that the people he attacked were Jews in an area where about a third of the population are Jewish. According to the family lawyer, the story they got out of him was incoherent, but it seems the voices in his head told him to go damage some property there, and something about demons. Again, easily checked by the police, who have him in custody.
I agree, it’s not unlikely that the household were targeted because they were Jews – there’s a lot of prejudice going around for nutters to latch on to, and has been for a very long time. But we don’t actually know for sure. He might be lying, or pretending madness. We don’t know what it was he believed about Jews that led him to this, or where he got it from. The reference to “ebinoid Jews” might indicate he’s heard it from the Black Hebrew Israelites, and that’s not unlikely in the circumstances, but he was also searching for stuff on Hitler and the Nazis, and that’s white guys. I don’t suppose the Rev. Farakhan preaches a lot about Hitler. So it’s unclear.
It’s possible we’re never going to find out. The job of the police and courts will most likely be to determine if he’s criminally responsible, or whether it was because of his mental illness, and if so what to do about it. Was it a one-off, or does he need to be confined in a mental hospital for public safety? They’re not going to be interested in where he got it from or which ‘side’ he was on, unless it turns out someone fed the stories to him deliberately, with the intent that this should happen.
You have to judge every case on its individual merits. There have been a series of attacks recently in the area, that do appear to have clear connections to Black Israelite politics. With this one following on so closely, people have leapt to the conclusion that it is the same, but that may be coincidental – it seems in this case he may have been simply nuts. And this is always the risk when crimes have to be fitted into the narrative of the war between political sides. It distorts people’s judgement, as they try to force the facts of every story into the political mold.
The danger posed by such wars is not so much the goals people are fighting for, but the methods they use to get there. The danger is the “us” and “them” psychology, where “us” must be defended at any cost, and “them” pose such a danger to society that any means necessary are justified in the battle to defeat it. It’s a psychology that overrides people’s ethical limits, and makes atrocities inevitable.
Stick to the evidence, even if you don’t like the conclusions, and beware of “us” and “them” psychology. And if you see other people doing it, don’t copy them.
Not in relation to the OP’s point, Nullius: you appear to be arguing with an imaginary post, not the one I wrote. It is no surprise that yet another of the recent attackers is found to have overt anti-semitic attitudes, still less that his defence lawyer’s denying statement is no sooner made than contradicted, but it is only background info.
As Snorri Godhi (December 30, 2019 at 7:21 pm) tried to explain to you, when the recent ‘bad week’ of attacks on Jews in NYC overcame the pure ignore-it attitude previously being shown towards the longer-term rise, then both the mayor of New York City and the governor of New York State began their pivot back to a preferred topic by saying, in their usual heavy emphatic manner, that these were hate crimes (the BBC’s coverage echoed this). If you thought that this initial starting clause of the rhetoric my post questioned should itself be questioned, it is them, not me, you should be arguing with. My post was about the follow-on (the ‘pivot’). The mayor and governor had a choice of saying (I summarise)
or
Nullius, you know as well as I do why two politicians who routinely mention race even in strange and inappropriate contexts chose to use the less-informative first form over the more-informative second form. My post is about why the BBC imitated them. I offered two suggestions and, in a comment, called your suggestion – AFAICS, that they knew but honestly thought it too irrelevant to mention – ‘naive’.
As regards the background, there is an admirably cautious discussion of what is known in this Tablet article. A particular mechanism by which anti-semitism is justified to blacks is discussed here, but I share the Tablet’s caution whether we yet know that it or anything else is the explanation.
“If you thought that this initial starting clause of the rhetoric my post questioned should itself be questioned, it is them, not me, you should be arguing with.”
I’m arguing with you *both*, because of the habit of judging every crime by whose ‘side’ the perpetrators are on. When the ‘us’ and ‘them’ are Democrats versus Trump, that’s what they latch on to. When the ‘us’ and ‘them’ are whites and blacks, as is the case with the racists, that’s the only fact they want to know, the only topic they’re interested in to come to judgement, and that’s why they find it so annoying when news reports leave it out.
Not every crime is a part of your war! You’re supposed to be *better* than the likes of Cuomo and De Blasio. Don’t assume without evidence, and don’t presume that because sometimes your assumption was right, that means assuming is OK.
But I don’t think any of you are able to see it, and I have other things to do, so I’m giving up for the time being.
None of this is new. Blacks and Jews have been at each others’ throats for decades. Blacks have long considered Jews to be economic predators within black communities on the USA East coast. Look back to Jesse Jackson’s comments regarding Hymietown.
We saw the same dynamic in Los Angeles back in the late 80’s between blacks and Koreans – who owned many of the few existing retail establishments that were seen to be taking money out of the black communities. Think back to the Korean shop-owners defending their shops in the ’92 riots.
Blacks as a social group have historically had few resources with which to start businesses, and so have had to patronize non-black-owned establishments since the early 1900’s – and in different areas, those outsiders were comprised of different outsider groups. We could argue forever about whether or not there was true exploitation or merely one group’s recognition of a good investment opportunity, but the fact remains that the poorest always see themselves as surrounded and used by exploiters. In New York City, that’s Jews. In Los Angeles, that was Koreans.
But, with the current Middle East controversy that has driven progressives to become pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli, it has become fashionable once again for progressives to (at the least) allow for anti-semitism within their ranks. This has allowed those age-old hatreds to rear their heads once again in explicit form.
And the progressives, who face losing their monolithic black support to conservatives for the first time, that’s an easy choice. There are a lot more black voters than Jewish ones in NYC.
My great and long-standing disgust at the idea of “judging every crime by whose ‘side’ the perpetrators are on” is why I disliked the idea of ‘hate crime’ law from the moment it was introduced – as I said above (Niall Kilmartin, December 30, 2019 at 6:39 pm). If a man knifes another man, I think it should be effectively punished, whether done because the attacker hated the victim’s ethnicity or wanted his wallet, whether done by an attacker whose ethnic group often does such things or seldom does them.
If you thought otherwise then you really have been arguing with imaginary posts written by an imaginary person, not with my posts and me. 🙂
Mmm. You mean, that was people’s privately expressed theory about why it was being done? Back in the 1960s when racism was more of a thing?
No. As I thought I made clear, those were the (usually) privately expressed reasons of the leftists who wanted to expunge all racial data from crime reporting.
Blacks and Jews have been at each others’ throats for decades. Blacks have long considered Jews to be economic predators within black communities on the USA East coast. Look back to Jesse Jackson’s comments regarding Hymietown.
We saw the same dynamic in Los Angeles back in the late 80’s between blacks and Koreans – who owned many of the few existing retail establishments that were seen to be taking money out of the black communities. Think back to the Korean shop-owners defending their shops in the ’92 riots.
Also Chinese people. Vietnamese. Arabs. Indians and Pakistanis.
Blacks as a social group have historically had few resources with which to start businesses…
The critical resource that was lacking was culture, not money. Many Asians have come to America with very little money and yet by working extremely hard have succeeded economically. The Vietnamese refugees of the 70’s, for example, had extremely little money. See the memoir “Chinesee Girl in the Ghetto” for the story of a young Chinese girl living in a Los Angeles ghetto neighborhood (because her parents did not have the savings or income to live in a better neighborhood) and who was routinely harassed (and worse) by the local black kids. She and her parents worked hard and succeeded while the kids who chose to be her enemies remained poor.
Cuomo & De Blasio do not “assume without evidence”. They knew very well that the suspect is Black. That means that, unless they are even more delusional than Nullius, they know that he is extremely unlikely to be a Trump fan. Not because no Trump fan is Black, nor because no Trump fan is an antisemite, but because the intersection of Blacks, Trump fans, and antisemites has got to be infinitesimally small!
And anyway, why should i be better than Cuomo & De Blasio? This is asymmetrical warfare. They are the Establishment, i am not. Not even Trump is of the Establishment. (Though he is of the ruling class.) I feel entitled to use any means that i can get away with, as long as there is little collateral damage.
Bobby:
I see the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a cover story (no better word comes to mind) for a process that was unavoidable due to Snorri’s 2nd Law of Antisemitism:
Absent external shocks, every anti-capitalist institution becomes increasingly anti-Semitic over time.
Bobby again:
pst314 adds:
Perhaps you are familiar with Sowell’s essay on middlemen minorities. If you aren’t, i recommend it.
There is something to add, though: other middlemen minorities in the US do not have a major party tolerating, nay welcoming, their outspoken enemies. Only the Jews do.
Which ties in with another remark from bobby:
But this is a chicken+egg problem: are (many) Blacks antisemitic because the Democrats are antisemitic, or vice versa?
It is also important to note that there is a lot more Jewish money than Black money in NYC. This is relevant because, from what i read, about half of the funding of the Democratic Party comes from Jews. I don’t know if that is true: it does seem a bit far-fetched. Maybe somebody can confirm or refute the claim.
Anyway, IF the claim is true, then the implication is that American Jews should blame their rich fellow Jews, rather than Black people, for antisemitic violence. Because clearly most of the funding for the Democrats has to come from the very richest Jews — such as Bloomberg, now running for President. And without such funding, the Democrats would not have the luxury to incite violence.
Snorri’s 2nd Law of Antisemitism:
Absent external shocks, every anti-capitalist institution becomes increasingly anti-Semitic over time.
Sad and true.
Yes.
The Jews and the Koreans ended up playing the role of The Man’s man in the black cities. They were the company storekeepers in the company town. If you saw Django Unchained, they were Samuel Jackson’s house ni**er. (Damn, I feel cowardly typing that.) They took on the job, for pay, of point man, and absorbed all of the hate and terror the blacks felt for the powerful. Jesse Jackson, when he was decrying “Hymietown”, was speaking of the manner in which whatever dollars found their way into black hands were immediately collected and harvested by The Man’s man and taken right back out of the city.
And there are so many chicken-and-egg problems in this scenario. One in particular: Have blacks underperformed economically and thus need the Democrats’ largesse, or has the Democrats’ largesse caused blacks to underperform economically?
The truth does not fit the evil “White Supremacist” and “White Nationalist” narrative of the media – from the BBC to Hollywood and even including the History Channel.
Also the truth, that some black people are attacking Jews, would raise the question “why are they doing this?” and the answer is NOT “genetics” (they did not use to do this) or actual bad things that Orthodox Jews are supposed to have done – Orthodox Jews have not got more “greedy” or “dishonest” (contrary to some comments on my own Facebook post on this), so what is the reason?
The reason is the SOCIAL JUSTICE “exploitation” and “oppression” narrative pushed by the education system and the media (especially the entertainment media) – people, especially black people, are told that their poverty is due to the wickedness of other people – white people, especially “capitalists” and who are the obvious “capitalists” (businessmen) they see on the street? JEWS.
It really is that brutally simple – the education system and the media (including the entertainment media) have pushed the SOCIAL JUSTICE “exploitation” and “oppression” narrative and it is blowing up the face of the Jews – as-it-always-does, as they are the group of people most obviously “over represented” in business and the professions, and to SOCIAL JUSTICE any inequality is an “injustice”, it is “unjust” and merits punishment. Those who are not equals of the “masses”in the gutter must be guilty of “exploitation” and “oppression” and so must be PUNISHED.
Why wait for the state to “redistribute” income and wealth? Why not jut STEAL – as people loot from shops when Democrat Party (and is always Democrat Party) D.A.s say that “small” thefts do not really matter, and why wait for the state to punish the “capitalist Jews” for their mythical crimes, why not do it directly by stabbing them or hitting them round the back of the head.
Lastly for those people of Jewish ancestry (in both the education system and the media) who have helped spread the SOCIAL JUSTICE doctrine of “exploitation” and “oppression” that is leading to the robbery and murder of Jews (and will lead to the robbery and murder of many other people), may you hang your heads with shame. You blame “Trump” or “white people” for your own misdeeds – shame on you, you have brought robbery and death upon the innocent.
The Social Justice message in language so simple a pig could understand it – and it was certainly a pig who originally wrote the following sentiments….
“What is the God of the Jew? Money. What is the religion of the Jew? Hucksterism” Karl Marx.
Yes Karl Marx – a man whose family were of Jewish origin and who is made a hero by such demented films as “The Limehouse Golem” (a Catholic nun pops up to say “you are not fit the shine the boots of Karl Marx – he fights for the people” as if the madness of the modern Church was present in the 19th century Church).
Karl Marx was not a good man, and what he taught was a series of lies. His doctrines are false – but they dominate the modern education system and the “mainstream” media, and the innocent are paying a terrible price for that.
Where “be better’ is nevertrumper-style code for “don’t punch back”, “submit to their concept of manners” and etc., that is a very fair question.
Were it to mean don’t imitate them in using suppressio veri, suggestion falsi and the lie direct to advance ‘the cause’, then one reason would be because their tactics hurt themselves – many a leftist self-own can be traced back to the mental limitations that their propaganda lies impose. But a deeper reason was stated by someone I rarely quote – Nietzsche:
Bottom line: Live by PC, die by PC. If social justice warriors want to make everything about race, they cannot then disavow race.
Nullis repeatedly sidesteps this – even when Niall restates it quite clearly in the comments:
NiV: Most of the time, the race of the perpetrator is totally irrelevant to the crime in question.
——————–
Niall: Not to the PC, which includes the BBC. Most of the time, race matters a lot to them, whether to stress or to omit. Race can indeed matter less than they pretend or not at all, but since they do pretend, and the BBC is part of the pretence, and we are obliged to fund it, it is proper to notice their coverage and review their motives.
——————–
Never addressed by Nullis. Just sanctimony about how race shouldn’t matter, and going off on various distractions.
Niall: Excellent comments throughout.
.
ETA: Many more, ranging from very good to excellent (bobby, Paul my nominees for the latter.)
Perhaps you are familiar with Sowell’s essay on middlemen minorities. If you aren’t, i recommend it.
Yes, very insightful. Thomas Sowell’s entire body of work is worth reading.
Jesse Jackson, when he was decrying “Hymietown”, was speaking of the manner in which whatever dollars found their way into black hands were immediately collected and harvested by The Man’s man and taken right back out of the city.
The answer is for black people to get to work: study hard in school, learn a trade or profession, develop good work habits, be honest and reliable and thus a valued employee and/or a valued business person. Complaining about others’ success because you fail to do what is needed to succeed is the complaint of losers. And when Jesse Jackson does it, it is cynical and immoral pandering to losers.
Note that black immigrants from elsewhere have little patience with and less liking for for American black ghetto culture.
Dammmmm!!!!
Wrote a nice comment involving moral-equivalence and what-about-ism comments, and suggesting comparison of two reports. Mulligan, shorter:
Read my mind about the former. There are other comments here in the same general area.
As for the reports, I quote Neo’s posting at
https://www.thenewneo.com/2019/12/30/violence-against-orthodox-jews-who-are-the-perps/
https://www.thenewneo.com/2019/12/30/violence-against-orthodox-jews-who-are-the-perps/
It’s what the one doesn’t say, and the other supplies the omitted material without saying a word.
(Neo also recalls riots against the Jews from the ’90s, and the whole phenomenon is discussed.)
.
NY Daily News:
https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/ny-jewish-woman-attacked-anti-semitic-20191227-gsajbddenbfypcb2gxigqa7dl4-story.html
.
NY Post:
https://nypost.com/2019/12/27/woman-accused-of-anti-semitic-attack-gets-supervised-release-at-arraignment/
The SpamBot does not like me to post links without taking off my socks. In this case, I posted the Neo link twice. I have to go look at the Smite-Cats now, as penance.
Most of the time, the race of the perpetrator is totally irrelevant to the crime in question.
The race of the perpetrator can be entirely relevant to social policy:
– Should we restrict immigration by ethnic or religious groups that are likely to perpetrate far more crime than natives?
– Should we call attention to such phenomena and demand changes in the cultures that produce this criminality?
– Should we push back when leftists complain about “excessive” and “racist” rates of arrest and imprisonment of members of such groups?
Sure. But what if one political party makes a conscious decision to trap a group in dependency to ensure its political loyalty? What if that party makes a War On Poverty that ensures that families have a financial incentive to split up, and thus deprive ensuing generations of kids of the stability and culture of the two-parent family – and in fact specifically leave kids – boys – fatherless, with the resulting loss of discipline and honor?
What if they devise a welfare system that dis-incents people from starting to work, by making the bulk of that work no more profitable than staying at home? What if that party grants gifts of welfare to that group, and then convinces that group that it will starve without those welfare gifts, and that the other party hates them and will forever seek to end those gifts?
What if one party not only fails to demand educational performance that would improve the lot of that group, but it makes educational attainment within that group a point of shame within their own culture?
Perhaps this is apocryphal, but President Lyndon B. Johnson is claimed to have said, as he fought for passage of the original Civil Rights bill back in the early sixties, “I’ll have those ni**ers voting Democratic for 200 years.”
No other group has ever been subjected to such an all-encompassing plan to keep them dependent and grateful. The War On Poverty was almost exclusively designed to benefit, and entrap, American blacks. And it has worked well so far. Only now, with black employment rising and black financials improving through (arguably) Trump’s efforts has the monolith of the black Democrat bloc been challenged at all.
And this is exactly what was needed to begin the end of the horrid subculture that “urban black” has become here. So, it might be in our own best interests to encourage rather than disparage.
Niall @7:02pm made a good point in answer to my (rhetorical) question as to why i should be better than Cuomo & de Blasio:
True, and i would add that Niall and I, and most people at Samizdata, unlike prominent Democrats, do not have the media to cover our backs.
Still, if i may, i’d like to point out 2 important qualifications at the end of my previous comment:
The 1st qualification is being able to get away with it. I am too prudent to think that i could get away with suppressio veri or suggestio falsi, let alone outright lies.
The 2nd qualification is avoiding collateral damage, and innocent bystanders can be hurt by such tactics.
Happy 2020! I am already in it, but you folks in the UK and US are behind the times as usual!
You’re just jealous that we get to celebrate the New Year with the reanimated corpse of Dick Clark.
Via instapundit linking a powerline post, I learn that back in 1992, the occasional liberal in the occasional New York Times article was once willing to break – and criticise – the omerta on black anti-semitism.
Henry Louis Gates, author of the above words, is (correctly) described as “a certified Harvard liberal and old friend of President Obama”. Apparently, back in 1992, there was less cancel culture when he failed to practise – indeed criticised – the suppressio veri around this issue. (There was some: a commenter in the powerline article states that Don Muhammad, the local Nation of Islam leader back then in Boston, retorted, “Harvard has ruined more black men than bad whiskey.”)
I hear as high as 40% of US billionaires are Jewish so that could account for the high proportion of Democrat money coming from Jewish sources, but I don’t know how actually true that statistic is.
The problem with all the stuff about evidence and whatnot from Niv is the SJW media education complex imposed fog of war designed to cause a race war / revolution.
This has to be opposed to avoid or minimise social unrest and therefore needs an opposing side.
So this kind of agenda based story telling posted as news needs pointing out to prime the opposition into existence.
Then we all fall into the never ending cycle of opposing each other to the profit of few, the trap Niv refers to.
But even knowing the trap is there, not opposing SJW forces is too suicidal. Better a relatively minor social realignment every 40 years to the fall of Rome that results in just letting SJWs crash civilisation.
bobby b (December 31, 2019 at 11:28 pm), while your Johnson quote could well be true (or, as you note, could well be apocryphal), I pedantically quibble with the word ‘designed’ in
for the same reason I mentioned to Snorri – PC propaganda impedes their mental processes more than ours. You have correctly described its effects. PC teaches its useful idiots to disbelieve those effects will come, to mock and hate those who warn them, and then to ignore evidence they have come, because their intent is evidence – all they evidence they feel they need or want.
I’m doubtful that even Johnson foresaw the effects these programmes would have on blacks. I’m more doubtful that most so-called intellectuals foresaw them. Cloward-Piven types maybe did, but though they have the immorality to endorse the whole I’m not sure even they had the clarity to foresee the actuality.
This is a very pedantic quibble, and I appreciate you may have been using ‘designed’ to characterise the system, not its authors, which is a legitimate rhetorical way of speaking. And while Johnson did not foresee the actual future, he surely expected and welcomed some entrapping effects.
Bobby @11:28pm makes a strong case against the sort of Democrat policies that hurt Black communities. More generally, we should always ask of a social problem, not how the government can solve it, but how the government is causing it.
Perhaps i can offer a tentative reconciliation between bobby’s apparent position, that the intent of Dem. policies was to keep Blacks on the reservation, and Niall’s self-described “pedantic quibble”.
It is conceivable that the Dem. policies were designed “with the best of intentions” — or, more realistically, that they were designed to keep the Democrats in power by making Black people grateful.
At the same time, it is conceivable that Dem. policies, now that their effects are known, are kept in place to keep Democrats in power by making Black people dependent.
Though the bit about the educational system might have more to do with teachers’ unions.
Itellyounothing, January 1, 2020 at 10:54 am :
A very wise comment. (As always, it’s figuring out the method that’s difficult.)
.
In line with which, I was struck by the difference between Prof. Gates’ apparent attitudes in 1992 and in the kerfuffle 17 years later between him and the Cambridge, Mass. cops — as reported at the time.
Of course, the Sith had to slide its slithery webbed claws into the mess, making it all worse.
I searched with DDG on
“Henry Gates” complaint police.
Law prof & pundit Jonathan Turley, sometimes described as “libertarian” and sometimes as “liberal” (not a favorable description in American Right-speak) put up his own short report just after the incident. Interesting also. (Partly for the refreshing lack of heat.)
I like this, almost at the bottom:
‘Harvard Professor Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Arrested in Cambridge’
https://jonathanturley.org/2009/07/21/harvard-professor-henry-louis-skip-gates-arrested-in-cambridge/comment-page-2/
I also liked what seems like a pretty good reportorial, somewhat detailed page on the whole thing at the Great Foot:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Louis_Gates_arrest_controversy
Unfortunately, paranoia led me to check footnote [71], which cites the Boston Globe, 1995 ( my boldface):
Still, I suppose even WikiFootia is entitled to a typo or brain-f*** once every 200 years or so. One does do profiling on WF’s not-too-august pages, but still, in a case like this perhaps the Court might recall the doctrine of “innocent until proven guilty” of this particular crime, if such it be.
[Or my own wetware might be out of order again. Oh, shirley knott….]
I have to say it again. This is an exceptionally, exceptionally good discussion, with most of the commenters having somewhere between 1 and 1,000 intelligent and interesting points to make.
And the additions since I first said so have carried on in the same form.
.
That includes this from Snorri, at 6:28 on New Year’s Day:
It’s nice to hear such a novel observation. And frankly it sounds believable to me; nor do I think LBJ’s infamous comment tells against that interpretation.
I been thinking of this specific line, and wanted to respond.
A). Sometimes we all feel the same frustration towards each other.
B). I’m hoping “the time being” is short. A forum on which we all just pat each other on the back and agree is boring and ultimately useless. I’ve never felt the urge to simply pat you on the back and agree with you.
I have no doubt that the bulk of the Democrats firmly and honestly believe that their philosophies will best serve humanity. I disagree, but I’m really not usually questioning their basic motives. I’m questioning their reasoning.
At the same time, this is much like analyzing media bias. There are “mistakes”, “errors”, in reporting things such as employment figures, polling data, criminal ID’s, whatever . . .
And always, always, those errors go one way. You never see a media correction that says “we made Trump/conservatism look better than was warranted, but we were wrong.”
From this, I infer biased motivations.
Looking at Democrat policies in the US towards blacks and crime and poverty since the sixties, I again see the same – every “mistake”, “error”, or “unexpected effect” comes out one way.
My parade of horribles in my 12/31 11:28 comment above all elicited the same effect – a growing black-community loss of self-sufficiency and an increasing dependency on government support.
It’s all simply too much to allow me to conclude that the motivations accidentally achieved this happy (for Dems) effect.
Niall K politely (as always – thanks for that!) allows me the out of positing that I’m not quite so cynical as my comment might imply. I have become that cynical. I’ll stick with “designed.”
bobby — to me, the point is that the design may have developed out of progressive do-gooderism, or even Catholic do-gooderism as exemplified by Scarlett O’Hara’s mother, who died of (typhoid???) she caught while looking after the ill white-trash Emmy Slattery (IIR the name aright);
but that even so, what might begin in a spirit of compassion can easily become a tool to manipulate something desirable out of grateful recipients, such as getting votes out of grateful “black” folks;
whence some clever nogoodniks may have re-thought and then redesigned the tool so as to keep “black” folks down and simultaneously strengthen their tendency to vote Dem. (And if that idea didn’t arise de novo in any Dem’s mind, all the squawking on the right, including that from people I most definitely admire in this context, like Candace Owens, etc., some will have picked up the notion of it from them.)
By the way: This observation does absolutely NOT mean the original motivations were entirely unbiased racially — although I’ll also remark that noticing that Group X is coming in for undeserved contempt and ill treatment might move some to try to improve the situation whether or not they themselves are biased against X in some way.
Anyway, we should all remember that the iteration of the Civil Rights Movement that devolved into the current mess (with the help of the damDems, the New Left, and the Communists) formally began with the 1957 Civil Rights Act under Pres. Eisenhower (a Republican, though with, it is said by some, some sympathy for “progressive” ideas).
Anyway, people have been working on anti-“black”-slavery since (IIrC) the late 1600s and certainly since the 18th cent.
And it is said that the Democratic Party has never (in any of its iterations) been a true friend of Negroes or part-Negroes. As to the truth of this claim, I do not pretend to know. But with that in mind, where or when does this alleged “keep them on the plantation” plot begin?
“Let me be perfectly clear” *ugh* : Your own cynical self may be right, overall. I’m just opining based on my own “be careful about assigning guilt” nature.
By the way, this question could generate a posting and discussion on a much wider topic, about how what starts as a wish to do good can turn into an obsession with doing evil. I believe that either Elrond or Gandalf, more likely both, had something to say about this.
.
As long as you’re coming in for a disagreement from me (who has never disagreed w/anyone here, as I’m sure everyone is definitely aware), I will also state that while an Echo Chamber is not what we here desire, almost all of us at least occasionally enjoy a pat on the back and a simple “well done.” Moral support, and affirmation that one is not entirely nuts nor entirely lacking in the upstairs.
.
Anyway, an amazing amount of Sz comments strike me right in the sweet spot and though I have nothing to add (or no time to write Vol. 24 of Comments by Julie), I want to let the commenter(s) know their comments are appreciated. I like feeling good and I like trying to pass the feeling on; and when the pass works, I like seeing the results.
Deal with it. :>))))
So our disagreement is that, in that very instant of Big Bang formation of the Dem plan, there was pure good intent, and then an instant later it was transformed, and so they get the benefit of the doubt granted by those first few insta-seconds?
Okay. Say I buy that point. Then we’re in accord? Because I can go THAT far.
I appreciate your morale-building agreement.
😆 😉 😎
I am a morale-building machine.
😈
bobby b responding to Julie: “So our disagreement is that, in that very instant of Big Bang formation of the Dem plan, there was pure good intent, and then an instant later it was transformed, and so they get the benefit of the doubt granted by those first few insta-seconds?”
But to believe that, one would have to be ignorant of the over representation of the Democratic faction in the KKK, ( they practically owned it ). The under representation of Blacks as Democratic members of Congress up until, (say) – 1940. I don’t have the exact figures and it’s early here atm. But Candice Owens has put forward the facts and figures of Republican Blacks in Congress vis a vie Democratic black members. They ( the figures ) were not flattering to the Democratic party.
So to the proposition: Democrats have an ounce of human compassion or good will? No.
@APL
You can have no respect for someone (even despise them) and still want to do some good for them-just in a very patr
iarchalonising way – “those dumb people from Norfolk will never amount to much and are barely human but we still shouldn’t make them eat haggis.”Of course, in the process you are almost bound to reveal your prejudices – “they are far too coarse to appreciate steak, but we could sell them bologna”.
Oh, and Happy New Year everyone!
It’s not a matter of compassion and good will but of intelligence. Most politicians are not intelligent enough to predict the results of their policies. Witness the Blair government rubbing voters’ noses in diversity, with the result that Blair effectively opened the doors of the European Parliament to the BNP.
We might quibble on whether this is stupidity or delusional insanity, however.
I think there’s a couple of different things at play here, bobby.
I think there’s the actual politicians, and the political class, who really should know by now.
I think then there is the left voting block. And I’m unsure that “they should know by now”
Prima facie, for the majority, government intervention on behalf of the disadvantaged, is a good thing. Minimum wage? Anti-discrimination laws? Rent controls?
What monster would argue against those??
There’s some deep thinking involved to get to that point, and a lot of it looks, on the face of it, to really, really harm the most vulnerable in society. Who on earth would argue against minimum wage laws?
Some kind of capitalist bootlicker, that’s who.
(Not someone who has a connection with a group of disabled people who can’t get work because they apparently aren’t worth £10 per hour *cough*. Y’know, like me)
Your left voting block are going “inequality is a really shit”, but they genuinely don’t have the time to work out that inequality is caused by state monopolies on land, ideas, capital, tariffs, etc etc (cf Benjamin Tucker). Why would they? So they’re turning to the government for help. Like everyone else.
And the anti-gov guys? Ie. us? The guys that are going “if everyone just cracked on, we’d be fine”?
We’re arguing that trans people shouldn’t be afforded basic dignities, and that if a perpetrator of a crime isn’t named, then we’re desperate to say that it’s because they’re black.
I have to say, it’s not the best argument I’ve come across for less state intervention.
Bobby, Julie and Snorri, my ‘pedantic quibble’ has spawned quite an interesting discussion.
1) Democrats do indeed have form as regards intentionally exploiting PC-ness to racial effect. Southern Democrat politicians in the 1930s, like South African politicians in the 1920s, are on record as seeing that minimum wage laws would discriminate against blacks while being more politically acceptable than explicit racial quotas. Back then, they did not fool blacks (who nicknamed the National Recovery Act the Negro Runaround Act) but they fooled many a white do-gooder intellectual.
I do not know of equally-explicit self-written evidence that 1960s Democrats were intentionally expanding their 1930s playbook to fool blacks. But when considering explicit cases like Johnson, or that senator Byrd who was in the KKK when young yet died a ‘liberal’ senator, praised (and oh-so-eagerly excused) by all the usual suspects, the question can fairly be raised: did the extreme speed with which they changed tack show only their careerism and sensitive political antennae or was it more than that?
However the speed with which blacks went from Malcolm X’s 1964 remark
to being their most reliable voting block suggests to me that many white Democrats and many blacks who worked with them must not have known of their leaders’ intent, maybe because those leaders were themselves good at not knowing it.
2) My own usual take on this (which I suspect applies to northern US do-gooders, but such as Johnson and Byrd may be another matter) is that there is a youth-growing-older effect – that PC corrupts actions first and character later.
Many a youthful PC activist is led into advocating policies that harm, using methods that are often dishonest in their own terms, never mind ours, but they think they are doing good (while enjoying the heady adolescent rush of being the rebel hero of their own drama). As they age, reality comes knocking – sometimes very gently at first – with a hint that some aspect of the narrative is not quite right.
– For some, it’s the start of the soclalist-at-20-no-longer-at-40 effect.
– Others respond by building the first low course of a wall between themselves and the reality of what their policies do, each course enabling the next one as reality speaks louder and louder to them. Thus they never notice the “your help is hurting” effects they cause.
– Others again spend less time on the wall and more on coming to terms with the fact that they are careerists. OK, so the cause they naively believed in as teenagers is in fact a racket – but it’s their racket, and it would be painful to quit and find a new one, Jung Chang and her husband suggest that Mao was such a careerist from the very start, but others only gradually realise, with more or less acceptance or unhappiness, who they really are.
Niall, do you get how racist this thread looks?
APL (January 2, 2020 at 7:31), although everyone (everyone, that is, not inside the PC memory hole), knows that prior to the 60s, southern Democrats were the the party that KKKers would belong to, the enforcers of Jim Crow, etc., I think that is not the issue – or at least, not diagnostically so. The question is: when southern Democrat President Johnson reinvented the Democratic party as the one that would help blacks – and the Democrats received that absolution that all those they themselves accuse of the most farfetched past racist sins never receive – what were the chief causes?
a) A morally-guided change of mind .
b) A politically-guided decision to get black votes but believing the means would be genuinely beneficial to blacks.
c) A subtler rerun of their 30s playbook, this time suckering blacks, as well as do-gooder whites, into voting for it.
IIUC – I may not – bobby b suspects a non-trivial element of (c) in the leadership. I am more inclined to think it was (a) (more so in followers) and (b) (more so in leaders).
Do you get how it looks to ask that without making your meaning a bit clearer and without a supporting argument?
On the one hand, you could be asking how actually racist this thread looks. In that case, do you get how ridiculous it looks to suggest that black liberal Henry Louis Gates in 1992 was racist to refuse his PC friends’ pressure not to say what he did? Do you get how ridiculous it looks to suggest that it’s racist to point out the well-documented South African and southern Democrat exploitation of minimum wage laws for racist purposes, or consider – in my case from a very cautious PoV – whether the same game could have been intentionally played more recently?
On the other hand, you could be asking how ‘racist’ this thread could look to e.g. “Mark from Purchase Ledger”, conditioned as the poor guy is to take the narrative’s many absurdities and hypocrisies seriously. In that case, do you get how unwise it was not to say so?
The thing everyone forgets, or ignores, is that, while it’s easy to speak of “the other side”, that “other side” is usually split up into many different parts itself. The line between leaders and members delineates one such split. That’s why I can speak of believing in the good motives of the bulk of the Democrats, but still consider the motives of their leaders to be bad.
And that seems to be the driver of Niall’s “pedantic quibble” – I’m aiming my cynicism at those leaders (who, as you say, really should know by now), while Niall is imputing better motives to the bulk of the Dems. So I think that maybe we’re both correct, and I was just inexact in defining my terms. There is no “other side” as a monolith – heck, if there was such a thing, Trump, with a Republican Senate and House during his first two years, could have accomplished legislative things – but he couldn’t.
Again – Who’s “we”? I think almost everyone here would have the civility to call anyone what they asked to be called. That’s just being decent. But they’re putting people in jail and taking away jobs for refusing government orders as to what you have to call people, and that can’t stand. That’s what we’re against – not civility towards people.
We’re not the ones who insist that race be a part of every thought, impulse, and discussion. But if that’s the way it must be, then we’re going to react badly when we’re told – told – that race cannot be considered when it becomes inconvenient to their theme. It’s going to generate pushback and argument, and people are going to become very pointed about the issue.
In a vacuum, no, it’s likely not important if the store was robbed by a black or a white or a green person. But we’re not in a vacuum – we’re in a society obsessed with race. And to be told that it’s out of bounds to consider race in only those arguments where the race of a person doesn’t serve our controllers’ needs is naturally going to result in our insistence that race is discussed.
Both of these issues ultimately stem from “don’t tell me what I can or cannot say.”
Well, I claim the Right of Free Speech allotted me by the Great Frog to say that I pretty much agree with both bobby and Niall in the last go-around just above.
bobby’s last line just above brings that thread of the discussion to a very good point.
There’s more I agree with from both of you, but I don’t want to offend bobby by being overly cheerleaderly. ;>))
So deal with it.
[You both in the end manage to acknowledge that not necessarily all Dems past & even present are dirty rotten scoundrels. This I agree with, along the lines I put out above (about Keep ’em in the Plantation). Having relieved my troublesome urge for accuracy, I now can feel free to going back to think ill of them, or of the ones in the drivers’ seats anyway plus a whole bunch of the rest as unnecessary to the health and well-being of the relatively sane.]
The theme of the conversation seems to be, whites have been taking advantage of, and using, black society for their own political ends, to the ultimate detriment of black society.
The quibble seems to be, was this borne of evil original intent, or did it arise as unexpected bad consequences?
Unless your point is that it’s racist to be speaking of “whites” monolithically, and not recognizing explicitly that there are differentiations within that group – as you pointed out – then I’m lost.
You do understand correctly. That’s what I’m saying.
Niall, above at 7.49 p.m. you wrote,
This I did not know. Thanks for the info!
Yeah, I should have been more exact in not imputing bad motives to all progressives. It’s just . . . inconvenient to the conversation, I guess . . . to have to keep throwing in disclaimers, even when the disclaimers really are needed.
🙁
(And, agreeing is not cheerleading! It’s conversing!)
Agree w/you about the constant disclaimers as a tiresome pain in the tail. :>(
Anyway, I think most of us (and certainly not you and Niall) in this discussion don’t really subscribe to the “one mark of the Beast fits all” theory. Only 99.9% of ’em. *grin*
It’s just that I am a good hobbit who likes “everything laid out fair and square with no contradictions.” [ More :>(( ]
Never thank me for providing info – it only encourages me to provide more. 🙂
In 1931, the Davis-Bacon act mandated minimum wage rates, union-based job classifications, etc. In the debate on it, Congressman William Upshaw (D, Georgia) argued for it because of the “superabundance or large aggregation of negro labor, which is a real problem you are confronted with in any community.” He was supported by congressman Clayton Allgood (D, Alabama), “…it is labor of that sort that is in competition with white labor throughout the country … it is very important we enact this measure.”
In the records of unions, you can find yet more explicit material. In the US, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Fireman struck against the Georgia railroad in 1909 to make them stop employing blacks but when the company instead consented to a minimum wage, the union negotiator reported “… the incentive for employing the Negro thus removed, the strike will not have been in vain”. In South Africa, the United Mine Workers Union advised the authorities that “… we will have to ask the commission to use the word “colour” in the absence of a minimum wage but when that [minimum wage] is introduced we believe most of the difficulties in regard to the coloured question will automatically drop out.”, while George Beetge, Secretary of the Building Workers Union stated that “There is no job reservation [i.e. colour bar] left in the building industry, and in the circumstance I support the rate for the job (equal pay for equal work) as the second best way of protecting our White artisans.”
Writers like Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams cover such issues. Milton Friedman also noted them. Hannah Arendt noted that imposing minimum wages in South Africa “destroyed the rentability of the railroads overnight”.
So bobby b’s question of whether the 60s Democrat undermining of the black community, or today’s resumption of minimum wage ideas, shows wilful folly (maintained by PC thought-censorship) at pretty-well all levels (my take) or secret mental clarity at the very highest levels (his take) is a perfectly fair question to ask.
That American minimum-wage laws were designed to prevent Blacks competing for White jobs, is also in Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism. Although it does not have the same intellectual cachet of Sowell or Friedman. (And is rather poorly written and organized.)
Another factor to keep in mind is that we humans are very clever at deceiving ourselves about our true intentions. It seems unlikely that Hitlery deceived herself into thinking that she was using a private email server for the good of the country — but it is more than a little likely that some top Democrats who supported Johnson’s policies, convinced themselves that they were acting for the good of the country.
I assumed it would go without saying, in the context of my previous post, but yes. Exactly that.
It’s not an accusation of racism.
You’ve said, at least once, but I think a few times at least “don’t go after the mascots”, as such, but it’s lost amongst all the noise.
Go back over the last 10 or 20 OP posts. How many of them are a positive vision? How many are negative? I contend that the negative outweigh the positive enormously.
https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=14162
The College Fix is on the case.
https://www.thecollegefix.com/u-new-hampshire-prof-black-antisemitism-is-the-fault-of-white-gentiles/
Oh, Niall, …. the last thing I’d want to do is encourage the sharing of information, substantive comment, or general helpfulness. 😥
But please feel encouraged to do so anyway.
.
Yes, of course on Drs. Sowell and Williams. As for Dr. Sowell, Brad DeLong says he’s an idiot, so that’s a recommendation right there. No link, but if he keeps archives of his postings, it s/b findable. If anybody cares.
Thanks for the additional info. :>))