I think this is totally fair, and I haven't even read Marx and am not that familiar with dialectical materialism, which may have a more 'bottom up' impetus than I characterized here. I'm only going off of my personal experience, what I've seen and heard from self-identified leftists in my lifetime, and whatever trends I've seen that relate to this spanning the writers from way back when. Although my impression from hearing Marxists speak generally is that they're very much in favor of 'get-perfetion-quick' schemes, as you put it (a radical communist group has been marching around town lately over here, demanding the immediate disbanding of the American government), and insofar as Marx prophesied anything like the rising of a classless society within a couple centuries at most, he would be too – history is long, very long, and a pendulum sweep into an imagined perfection very much counts as such a scheme by my lights.

Do you consider strict guidelines about how one may or may not depict God leftist by virtue of their focus on representation? — csalisbury

I see the hatred of representation of the divine to be an affirmation that reality is above representation, God being held to be reality par excellence. A distrust of idolatry is a call to never mistake the image for the real thing, or love it more. A leftist dismantles the possibility of idolatry in a principled way by disavowing that there are any realities.

The conservative, by definition, does not change. After all, the world doesn't change - the sun rises and the sun sets. But while he doesn't believe anything essential changes, he does concede that the world is in flux. So he reacts, meeting this or that irruption with force, in order to restore things to the way they were. He may not try to change the world to serve the observatory, but he's endlessly vigilant against the weeds that threaten his well-manicured garden. The conservative changes, a bit, but he changes to stay the same. — csalisbury

Maybe so, but reactive law is incredible. Again, it's what built England. You wait for a problem to arise, then judge when you have to on what ought to be done. Over the years an intricate, deeply woven house of natural institutions is built. The leftist by contrast is Cartesian, and demands (notice, the leftist always demands) that an entire constitution be written up from scratch, on the spot, and immediately enshrined, not in response to the organic problems the world rises and solving them, but from an a priori conception of the way the world ought to be.

I don't see my view as different. I see it as an articulation of what most people believe, and that academia has to systematically beat out of people.

I think the answer is to have a deeply rooted tradition of principled change. There is a country in this world (not saying it is the only one) that has done an incredible amount toward developing such institutions (Common Law), and its name is England, for which all of us, especially as Americans, should be eternally grateful.

Also, I'm skeptical generally of the notion of progress. I agree some situations are better than others, and you should try to better yourself. But 'progress' is politicized.

I don't talk about it, because that would be an unwise career move. It's implicitly understood in academia that you get with the program.

I don't disagree that conservatism doesn't lack for comic books. I do think that leftism is unable to get out of comic books as a matter of principle, in a way not quite true of conservatism, or if you like, a more neutral 'non-leftism.' Leftism is in principle committed to deep reality denial, in my view, and generally demoralizes people by telling them to revel in being weak, ugly, victimized, self-abasing, and trapped in victimhood. It's a philosophy of resentment and isn't compatible with self-respect or maturity.

OK, I will try to be clearer. 'Liberalism' is maybe not the best term, since it connotes a priority of personal liberties, perhaps to the exclusion of centralized power. What I really meant was something more like 'leftism,' and even leftists who 'hate liberals' or whatever would fall under the umbrella.

I see the basic impetus behind leftism roughly as a kind of hyper-rationalism. The leftist has an a priori idea of how the world ought to be, and is outraged that it is not that way. The leftist proposes that the world ought to be changed to be that way, preferably as swiftly and with as little compromise as possible. So leftism is a radicalism in that, insofar as the world is imperfect, it seeks to perfect it, and since it cannot be perfected, it will perpetually be calling for immediate radical change and the dismantling of deep institutions, in favor of new institutions with no historical roots that better match reality as it ought to be.

This means that leftism fundamentally privileges representation over reality in a certain systematic way. I read this cheesy fantasy story that had a great line, where the keeper of the observatory told a visitor that the model of the universe was not perfectly representative of the universe, and when the guest asked, 'so it is imperfect?' the observatory keeper responded 'the universe is imperfect. One day it will be remedied, to fit the observatory.' This is essentially what I see as the guiding impetus of leftism. It is representations that determine reality rather than vice-versa. In this it is fundamentally rationalist in the sense that it believes humanity imposes itself on the world, rather than the world imposing itself on humanity, which is the empiricist bent. The world is as people make it to be, and conforms, and will conform, to the categories constructed for it and placed upon it. This is of course the deep metaphysical source of social constructionism in its various forms, and of the perpetual leftist call to radical political action and revision.

Wherever the leftist sees something that isn't perfect, where the empiricst of conservative impulse is to change oneself to match the world, the leftist impulse is to change the world to match oneself. Rather than meeting a pre-existent standard, like the conservative, the leftist protests that the standard is wrong, and ought to be place elsewhere. Hence the leftist generally does not seek to be beautiful, but to redefine the ugly as beautiful (and even to problematize and hate beauty if it proves too recalcitrant), because he believes, at bottom, that there is no substance to the world other than what he places on it (notice that nihilism of some sort is considered self-apparent to many leftists, or more softly the belief that 'the world has the meaning you give to it'), and so there is a kind of delusion or fantasy of power and control, reflected in the desire for central planning in government and statism generally. This further leads to a conflation between intentions and ends: the leftist thinks that because all reality is malleable to representations, what one needs to do in order to achieve some effect is simply to intend to change the world in a certain way and marshal enough money or power to do so. Hence why the leftist believes that if something is bad, the best thing to do is illegalize it, and so on. There is a kind of naive believe that intentions generate realities. This, in my opinion, is why leftism is grounded on a deep denial of reality, not just as an after-effect (all of us deny unpleasant truths), but as a matter of principle. There is a sense in which the leftist believes that he ultimately cannot be wrong, and where the world bumps against him, the world must move. It also may in turn mean that there are certain things that, while true, cannot or should not be believed, because that would cause one to represent reality in an evil way, making one evil, and so unpleasant truths have systematic reasons to be denied or at least suspended in various forms of doublethink.

This is the reason that the leftist critiques tertiary social phenomena in the media, because they think the media has the power to control thought and behavior rather than vice-versa, and why they put so much emphasis on 'representation' in media and how the media can be used as a tool to change the way people think. This is also why it is utterly obsessed with policing language – it thinks, in a way, you can speak truths into being. Leftism is a top-down ideology, while empiricism and conservatism are, if you like, bottom-up in believing that there are organic features of reality that naturally arise and that one has to accept and conform to if one wants to live. The leftist is in deep denial about the way representations interact with the world, and holds out a secret hope that he can control these representations, and so control all of reality. But this will never work, and so the moral hysteria surrounding trying to perpetually doctor these representations is ongoing and perpetually radical / destructive. Leftism in a way saps adulthood, which is why it makes sense for a university to provide Play-Doh to upset leftist students to calm them after a troubling experience, while doing such a thing is confusing or absurd for conservative students.

All of these, I believe, are features of childhood. The confusion of representation and reality (lack of object permanence), the belief in the malleability of the world to one's desires, the refusal to face unpleasant truths, the insistence that everything ultimately be molded to one's wishes. This creates a desire for childlike narratives and a liking for comic books, superheroes, and so on, along with simplistic moral axes of oppressor-oppressed that create a sort of identity-based template for knowing who is in the wrong when, to emphatically and uncompromisingly support the side that is being hurt by the ones in the wrong. This in turn leads to the basic oppressor/oppressed distinction, which has no fundamental way of being questioned, but only multiplied and complicated by infinitely expanding axes of oppression based on increasingly minutely defined representational categories. And the desire to use this distinction for political gain in enforcing the privilege of one's own representation (and hence reality, since representations determine reality) leads to a weaponization of the notion of oppression, and the glorification of victimhood, weakness, emotional instability, infantilization, and so on. It also leads to the co-opting of natural human emotions, such as grief and anger, into deliberately evoked stratagems employed for specific political reforms. All of this is an endless, destructive spiral that can never be satisfied (since reality will always defeat the representations, while the leftist insists on the opposite), and makes everyone miserable insofar as nothing works insofar as it systematically denies reality.

But this is the behavior of a child – the first thing a child learns to do with its emotions is to artificially invoke them for instant gain, to make its desires a reality. Along with resentment and strategies for revenge against reality when one's desires aren't fulfilled.

––––

OK, scattershot, but that about covers it.

That sounds cool. I agree that respect comes from avoiding hagiographic lies about hero and victim races – the comparisons that have been cropping up lately that compare political figures to comic book villains is worrying. Studying a historical event deeply I think can put one in a state of appreciation for it that transcends moralizing and cheerleading. To the people who see all history and all prospects for social action as a battleground of such cheerleading, and who see sobriety as fighting for the oppressor and implicitly approving of genocide, that mindset is dangerous. But I think in the end, lies just can't help you, only the truth can, so even if the lies feel morally good, you have to face the fact that they aren't helping anyone. I think a lot of people are scared that if they don't pick a side in the virtual reality as the events are ongoing, they're bad. And it narrows their field of vision to see the only way of respecting other people as adopting the blue side of that virtual reality. I have no sympathies with liberalism whatsoever, and so I may differ with you there. But I think the important thing to emphasize is how being realistic about what actually happens in the world is a powerful way of respecting people, by showing them that you see them as adults, and not comic book characters. I don't think that's possible in any sort of liberal or leftist way of thinking, and so it has to be abandoned altogether. Liberalism and adulthood aren't compatible, so liberalism and respect aren't compatible.

You should also pay attention to when people use the word 'folks' as opposed to 'people,' if 'folks' is not part of their native dialect. 'Folks' are not quite the same thing as 'people.' And it's no accident that black people are usually the 'folks.'

Maybe I'm not representative. Maybe other white people would have seen him as asian. But I doubt it. What are your intuitions here? — csalisbury

He looks both white and black to me. It shows in his accent and mannerisms as well. He can affect both white and black English, and he affects either depending on the audience he's talking to, very naturally, suggesting native competence with both dialects. He can never go into full AAVE because that's just not allowed, but he does slip in some 'ain't nobody's' when talking to a majority black audience, and drawls his vowels appropriately.

Worth watching:



(Note the preacher's use of the word 'negro' as well)

I don't think this is a uniquely european thing. — csalisbury

OK, then we're in agreement. Desire for racial purity and mythology situating one's own ethnic group at the metaphysical center of everything are way older than history, history is a wee baby by comparison.

I honestly don't know. I live in Maine and don't have much irl experience with this. My 'many black people as well' comment is based entirely on things I've read. And I may be entirely wrong. — csalisbury

I don't really either, because I think southern California where I grew up is desensitized to certain kinds of ethnic admixture, especially white-Mexican. So all I can go off of is what people say online, and I've seen some Eurasian and white-black people report these sorts of things, and I have no reason to disbelieve them.

More recently I've lived for a couple years in a black neighborhood and then a Hispanic one in Chicago, and people generally seem to be more racist and aware of racial divides, though I'm not sure how it affects mixed people.

Yes, and no? It's certainly manufactured there, but no one coldly, rationally built the blueprint. I think it's probably more an emergent phenomenon. It comes from somewhere. — csalisbury

I disagree that it's not done rationally. Maybe not coldly, because I think emotions – even hysteria – are mixed in. But curricula are not quite the same as spontaneous cultural lore. And part of keeping it in place is actively suppressing people's natural repulsed reaction to it.

"people of color"

stopped watching lol

Yes, but that's the point. If Obama is black as America's president, yet white as just another guy in the hood, then things are very complicated here - it's not as simply as european vs african descent (though obviously it's tightly woven with real genotypic & phenotypic differences.) — csalisbury

Obama as a black president is a media creation, and I'm skeptical about that as a litmus test because the media can claim whatever it wants with virtually no basis in fact – they could have called him Asian on grounds he was from Hawaii, if that was what the narrative needed. So that doesn't speak to me about racial attitudes so much as media virtual reality.

My point was just that, the pop view of ethnicity sees mixed people as, well, mixed. And it's a universal tendency among people to favor their ethnic in-group and to dislike mixing with others. If it were true that whiteness had a special role here, then it would make no sense for half white-black and half asian-white kids to feel an identity crisis on either side, which they often do. They can feel between worlds, not firmly of the non-white one.

It's a good litmus test for the way people spontaneously understand race. Maybe it's not 95-5, but you can bet 66-33 will score 'black' for white people watching tv. And, I think, many black people as well. — csalisbury

Do you think that black people disavow mixed white-black children as non-black?

All the self-reproach basically builds on this with a dialectical twist. — csalisbury

I think the self-reproach is caluclated and manufactured in academic institutions. Not to say academic institutions aren't themselves real, but they like the media exist in a kind of hyper- or virtual reality, and you have to specifically indoctrinate young white people to be self-effacing, which is what such institutions do. In other words, it's a real phenomenon, and organic in the sense that all real things are organic, but it has no natural inertia behind it. If you destroyed the institutions, you would destroy the sentiment, whereas destroying the more grounded ethnic sentiments I've alluded to would require destroying far deeper (maybe even biological) institutions. Which, to be fair, seems to be part of what constitutes leftism as an ideology independent of any particular political position: the upheaval of older, more grounded institutions by newer, less grounded ones in order to impose a priori reorderings of the universe according to rationalistically determined lines of the way things ought to be.

One, I think it's just counterfactual that anyone abides by a 95-5 rule.

Two, I agree that there's a notion of white as the absence of ethnicity rather than an ethnicity, which plays into a host of complicated mythologies surrounding white exceptionalism on both sides – that you can't be racist against whites, that there is a such thing as 'people of color' (white not being a color, but the absence of color, in this mythology), that white people have 'no culture,' that to be white is to be a colonizer, that cultural appropriation can only flow from whites to other people, that white people are the only ones with no right to a homeland, that there are no 'indigenous' white people anywhere in the world, that Nat Geo feels that showing white breasts is for some reason less okay than showing non-white breasts (white people having transcended animality or physicality that comes with gross ethnic ties), that white people are not 'allowed' to get angry or identitarian in quite the same way as non-white people, because they are expected to be adult and above that, white virtue including self-abasement and lack of in-group loyalty, and whiteness as a moral/spiritual/social and not physical category, primarily focused on evil in a narrative of crime and redemption.

All of this is out there, and all of it is nonsense, but I think it's mostly liberals that play this sort of stuff up, and it comes out of academia, not the way people organically think. Liberalism is not the way people naturally think, and requires politically-charged educational institutions to keep it in place. On the conservative side, the notion that being mixed spoils your blood, this is just obviously not a notion particular to being white. Obama was half white, and for political reasons that had to be suppressed in the popular imagination. But in the hood, well, you tell me how black he could have stayed.

The problem is, the only way to make the conversation interesting is to equivocate: if you emphasize that it's a social identity, then you can't actually say anything interesting about white people, since as the word is actually used it means people of European descent. On the other hand, if you talk about the word as actually used, none of your social construcitonist claims are going to follow.

Notice that he did not frame the debate in terms of how white people have historically been seen, or something like that. That would have made what he said true rather than false, but it would have been totally uninteresting from the perspective of what he was trying to claim, which was that being white was itself a social construct, and this is why he didn't say it.

Marchesk, again, you're confusing the application of words as social construct with that they denote as social construct, which is a use-mention error.

Again, this doesn't strike me as interesting. The confusion of what words are used for what things, and what those things are, is a pedestrian one.

Seems the same to me. The use-mention distinction is a first test of decent philosophy, IMO, and failure to grasp it is the start of a lot of bad thinking. That you can call things "X" instead of "Y" doesn't mean that they just as easily could have been non-X's if you had done so. That's not how it works.

Which chunk of land you consider a continent is arbitrary. But the continents themselves are obviously not. You could have considered Europe three continents, or half of one, if you wanted – but Europe would have been there all the same.

I haven't really given hard thought to metaphysics in a while. I have Gnostic sympathies.

Shame is an important motivating force in the world today. I think it's a (post-)Christian thing.

Yes, the European continent is objectively real. Hahahahaah

I thought I already showed you why that was nonsense? Or where was the train of thought?

I agree except I think that we are in a post-enlightenment epistemology, since a true enlightenment spirit emphasizes the common intellectual faculty of all people, whereas this has given way to identity-based intellectual faculties split across race, gender, etc., without a common sphere of reason (or rather, reason as a universal notion is seen as 'too white' and 'too male').

It's really not a pretty world, in any sense. We can only hope for something new soon, where no one is ashamed of who they are and everyone is strong and spiritually productive and wonderful.

Oh I'm sorry, I didn't realize that was all that counted.

Are you white btw?

So were white people. Or did you not know that or something?

I think they never began or ended. It's because of vanity that white people focus on their own exploits -- being the best at being evil gives them some sort of weird masochistic hard-on, I swear.

No, it wouldn't be. The idea of being dark would be the same. People would just think different things about dark people.

In such a world, there would be light and dark skin, and black and white people, as much as there are in this world.

See how that works?

I think ethnicities exist, and are traceable to where your ancestors came from. I think they're not a social construction, that white people are an ethnic group, and that no ethnicity, white or otherwise, is definable in terms of moral reprehensibility. I think that race issues are mostly a pot of incoherent moral hysteria that have nothing to do with the issues people actually face and serve as a crutch to place a comic book ethical facade over daily life because the real world is too difficult to handle.

White people are utterly delusional about race, and all minorities know this and exploit them for it, so their opinions don't matter on the subject. As for other minorities, I can't speak for them, but having listened to them all my life I think they're delusional too.

The idea of whiteness is, not the pinkish skin pigment, or relative relatedness on the European continent. — Marchesk

Yes it is. There's literally nothing else to being white.

Which is not the same thing as saying that whiteness is a social construct or was invented to justify colonialism and slavery.

Well, considering I am an American minority...maybe I should ask myself?

So people thought that those of European ancestry were superior to those who weren't. OK, how does that mean that being of European ancestry was invented several hundred years ago? Obviously, it wasn't; something already existing was taken as a signifier of a certain status. Notice the difference and the incoherence of the competing claim.

I understand Marchesk's position but am being deliberately obtuse because sometimes that's what it takes to show that a position's dumb. I mean, I went to university, I understand that this is what people are told.

How could it have been a social construct? If there was nothing to latch onto, it wouldn't have worked, because you literally wouldn't have been able to tell the difference between white and black people, after these things were supposedly 'invented.'

Of course the reason this is so stupid is that you could tell the difference, because well...

In what way can one express racial superiority/inferiority, if there is no race to be inferior or superior to?

And what is the reason?

It doesn't mean "my ancestors were European." — TheWillowOfDarkness

Yes it does. It may also be that being of European descent puts you in a historically privileged class. That does not mean that this is the meaning of the word, or that white people were 'invented' in the last several hundred years.

For instance, if you say someone in America is white, you mean they're of European descent. You may connote that they are racist or horrible slavers or whatever, but that's not what the word means, and it can be used connotation-neutrally as well.

That's not ethic identity. It a description of where your ancestors lived. — TheWillowOfDarkness

That's what ethnic identity is.

Are you asking me why people use words to group things into certain categories?

It doesn't matter. Maybe neither. Using the vagueness of categories or exceptions of categories is not grounds for the dismissal of a category – again this is a fallacy. If the vague terms don't work, you can track their ethnic origin as precisely as the data will allow.

I mean that "black" and "of sub-Saharan African descent" are roughly synonymous, at least as I understand the words in my idiolect.

In the case of ethnic identity? Clearly not. No amount of expression will make it so that your ancestors originated from somewhere other than from where they actually did.

OK, but people from sub-saharan Africa are black. So what you say makes no sense. They wouldn't be considered inferior or enslaved, but that wouldn't make them not black, which is absurd. White people didn't invent black people by enslaving them, as your position seems to suggest.