In 1957, William F. Buckley wrote his most infamous editorial for National Review, entitled “Why the South Must Prevail.” Is the white community in the South, he asked, “entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically?” His answer was unambiguous: “The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.” Buckley cited unfounded statistics demonstrating the superiority of white over black, and concluded that “it is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority.” He added definitively: “the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage.” And what method should be used to enforce the maintenance of “civilized standards”?
Buckley suggests a no-holds-barred defense, including violence. “Sometimes,” he wrote, “it becomes impossible to assert the will of a minority, in which case it must give way, and the society will regress; sometimes the numerical minority [white] cannot prevail except by violence: then it must determine whether the prevalence of its will is worth the terrible price of violence.”
Barry Goldwater had voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act and it was noted by pro-segregation Southerners. In fairness to him, he supported other civil rights plans. But it was Nixon who devised and pursued what came to be called the Southern strategy. As Wikipedia puts it, this was an appeal “to racism against African-Americans.” Nixon was not the first Republican to notice that Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights legislation had alienated whites both in the South and elsewhere — Johnson himself had forecast that Southern whites would desert the Democratic Party. This is the moment when the party of Lincoln deposited Lincoln in the nearest receptacle.
Dexter Nibble: A mouse among men. I used to make up two hour bedtime stories about this guy and his friends, including the “eyeball robot” floating beside him. And yes I realize how counterproductive a 2 hour bedtime story is. But they were GRIPPING!
A cheat sheet for understanding Trump’s “2nd Amendment People” speech.
A friend put this up on Facebook and I just can’t let it alone. Again, I’m liberal politically, and I long for us all to get along. But there is a self destructive streak in the tolerance movement which blames people for reacting in ways that aren’t blindly accepting.
1. Beards: I don’t think the beard thing is an especially big problem for Muslim men, but to answer WHY, which seems to be the question: I might guess a jewish fellow with a full beard was a bit extreme, but it wouldn’t matter to me because they represent no threat to me, historically or statistically. When that look is part of the uniform for the very high profile danger of Islamic terrorists our brains connect it to risk. Our brains are shaped by evolution to look for patterns that mean danger.
2. Habits vs Burkas: Very few nuns still wear the habit and when they do it’s part of the uniform for an order that takes them OUT of normal society. In cover-up cultures it isn’t devotion to god, like the nuns, it’s an inflexible societal norm. There are many Muslim women who feel OK about covering up but in many places no choice is allowed and physical danger or at least loud and intimidating disapproval is a likely outcome to NOT dressing that way. Hence, oppression.
3. Defending the homeland: The Palestinians seem to be the focus of the third picture and while right wing Israelis may call them terrorists, much of the rest of the world sees them as oppressed victims, albeit victims who often make hot headed poor choices. If it (the picture) represents any place with an Islamic culture where there’s a battle over territory then it probably does have at least some terrorist influence at play because they have inserted themselves as players in these situations.
Self-driving trucks are being tested and refined as a technology and are already understood to be safer and less expensive than human drivers: They’re coming in the near term. Self-driving trucks are inevitable.
Now, look at this image of the most common jobs by state and consider the implications. I’m not against this change, but our political leaders still believe that wealth forms as magical dewdrops on the bodies of the 1% before cascading as a god-ordained blessing onto the far less important people down below.
We have no plan for the unavoidable, transformed near-term future. Worse yet, America has a cold, cold heart towards the poor and unemployed. Worse yet, unemployed lower-middle-class guys like these soon-to-be former truckers vote for pseudo-fascist idiots like Trump.
The problem with the rich is that they believe their own stories about where money comes from. When an unemployed American stops sending money to insurance, medical care, internet providers, etc, and stops buying nearly as many products of all kinds there is a tiny disturbance in the force for the 1%. Multiply that times all these truckers, and you have way less income for the rich. Where is your trickle-down now, assholes?
- The line down the middle only exists in reference to the positions of the parties. It is always defined by their argument. There is no state of perfect conservatism or progressivism. There is no platonic ideal for these. It is always defined by the current cultural and political context. You can’t state a political platform for either lacking that context. But they do have basic predictable roles.
- The Venn overlap is what we pretty much all agree on (except for loonies)
- The white horizontal line is “The middle of the road” the somewhat disputed territory we can talk about with bargains and compromises.
- Between the thick dotted lines and the black lines are areas of pretty fundamental disagreement. Moving outward toward either edge comes a less acceptable AND less accepting range.
- The extreme edges (with the solid black lines) are important because they represent the borders of the field where anything further is “out of bounds”
Social network moralizing is a Punch and Judy show.
Listen to us, every fucking thing we say about politics and philosophy is about who is good and who is bad.
You literally cannot ask or answer any question that isn’t shaped by your hardwired domesticated primate brain. You have free will, but only inside a box of rules.
It never includes a higher insight into why things like racism and war are clockwork for us. These are species quandaries, the well known and poorly understood “fine messes” we are perpetually getting ourselves into. Until we see how they really work and why they truly happen, nothing we say about them helps to change anything. The problem is that war and racism (for example) are aspects of our operating system, they are problems we are not supposed to answer. From inside the human operating system, they are features, not bugs.
Imagine if dogs had competing societies. They would totally relate to the idea”I’ll build a wall!”. Some would say “We need to do a lot more barking!” & some would say “We should all just roll in fish TOGETHER”. They would glamorize alphas and make fun of betas and deltas. They would make inappropriate “racist” statements about cats. And all of their damn Facebook comments would be about how “somedoggy” was or was not a good boy.
I believe many of the answers to the questions that torment and enslave us are available one or two floors above where we do our thinking. I don’t mean it in a strictly spiritual way, or in a strictly biological way. Whatever higher consciousness is and wherever it is found we must achieve it or never rise above this tiresome moralistic echo chamber.
The basic question of existence is whether you will join with something to form a greater level of complexity.
The more complex question is: Where do you stop?
- Matter is the greater complexity of atoms.
- Chemistry is the greater complexity of matter.
- Life is the greater complexity of chemistry.
- Sexual reproduction is the greater complexity of life.
- Species are the greater complexity of sexual reproduction.
- Humanity is the greater complexity of species.
- Tribes are the greater complexity of individuals. City states are the greater complexity of tribes. Nations are the greater complexity of city-states. Did you think it would stop there?
A multicellular microbe is a negotiated community; deals were struck, some individuality was sacrificed, a brand new cooperation of diverse elements was required. A single human being is a negotiated community cubed, cubed and cubed. We are massive mobile towers of cooperative complexity.
At every stage, some will bond higher and some will hold back. They hold back not because they are bad or wrong, but because they are holding the line of the highest complexity they have any faith in, or can understand. Every simpler established level of complexity is both a platform for the future and a safe fallback. When a new stage of complexity is forming, all who don’t want to join see the new form as crazy and unreliable: A cockeyed, unstable monstrosity. Life does not saw off the branch it’s climbed onto.
The forces driving Brexit and American nationalism/ fascism are the same forces driving Islamic fundamentalism and all the other defensive retro-reality movements worldwide. There is a terror of a new level of complexity that is comparable to the fear of death. There is a sense that borders of self are broken, and floodgates have opened which will dissolve the recognizable and wash away what we love, what we are.
Don’t be discouraged, friends. Bond higher. If you don’t want to though, this is where your optimism ran out and you took up a new career as ballast. Your cement has set. The end of optimism isn’t a hard fact, it’s a choice. You are the current high point expression of all the daring recombinant synthesis that lead to your existence. This seems an arbitrary moment to lose faith in the road you took to get here.
Not Racism.
Scientists have been explaining for years that race, as people think of it, doesn’t exist. What we think of as race is just a single frame from a movie of human traits, determined by locality, conditions, and culture. These are traits that are selected for by a group over time until they share many common points. These traits could be as changeable as a cloud over time. The time required would be generations long but our enormous human genome could supply as much variety as people want (to mate with). The group usually doesn’t change though, and continuity is the default. Why?
It is deep in us to identify down to our very souls with our local people, customs and styles. We prefer them and strive to protect them. It is second nature to jump to their defense. A better name for these defended traits is “culture” but we should recognize this use of “Culture” as a deadly serious “this is me, don’t fuck with it” business.
In fact, culture is a bigger and more elemental thing than we’ve grasped. All of us have two overlapping states of being. The Individual self; The daily us, with our stories, personal history, etc. This is the self we identify with. The other state of being is a “cell” in a cultural body. Human animals are preset to focus constantly on their personal journey and struggles. It’s difficult to wrench our perspective upward and look down on the massive being we are a tiny part of. Our culture is an organism made of members. That organism uses culture as the definition of self. This definition is used to recognize those who belong and don’t. It’s a pheromone for the hive; a membrane of inclusion or exclusion. In other words, it is the foundation of the immune system of our cultural, community organism. When a cultural immune system goes on high alert it sees enemies in all that is other. This is the ugly moment that outsiders are described as vermin, an infection, etc. Cultural “purity” and nativism surge, driven both by hatred of outsiders and fear of being mistaken for one.
Culture creates a matrix of behaviors, styles, and preferences. It describes beauty and what makes a good man or woman. The phenotypes of people in a given culture are not coincidental, they are part of the culture. It’s like studying nature/nurture within a single family, how do you know where one leaves off and the other begins? People initiate the culture, but then the culture generates and maintains a particular style of people…who then maintain the culture! It is a chicken and egg cycle. the people shape the culture but no more than the culture shapes the people.
We all feel stressed when placed in another culture that does things very differently. That culture is not wrong for being different and we are not wrong for feeling stressed. If you’ve been lifted out of your Monopoly game and dropped into a game of “Hey, that’s my fish!” or “Twister”, you won’t be feeling quite yourself…literally. You have stepped outside yourself…you are an isolated molecule of your own culture, drifting in the wind far from home. This is why “travel is broadening” it is basic brain stretching and it can feel good or horrible, depending.
Think about the early 20th century immigrants who entered New York City through Ellis Island from all over Europe. These droplets of different cultures rolled as quickly as possible straight for the “Little [insert country here] Neighborhood”. There they could fuse with a tiny colony of their own people; the people whose cooking smelled right, whose voices sounded normal. An ethnic neighborhood might be as small as a single block and kids had to be careful coming and going because if they got caught on the wrong side of the street they’d be behind enemy lines. Even later when groups were more settled and established there’d still be for example an Italian neighborhood bordered by Polish and German neighborhoods. Finally, second to third-generation kids would identify enough as American to not make a point of staying in the neighborhood.
These European immigrants were obviously more acceptable to the white and European based mainstream culture of America. The borders of difference were relatively permeable from both sides and group after group eventually became “Normal People” to standard America. Who found it harder? People whose features weren’t European. Asians found the borders unyielding and the other side of the border all too often, dangerous. But the virtual walls around the many Chinatowns and Japan towns were well maintained from the inside as well. Ethnic neighborhoods are reality islands created by pressure from inside as much as out. Continue reading