@Unenlightened's answer, "leisure" seems on the mark; and in another sense, it means the 'psychological space' to afford thinking about radical alternatives (at least, socialism is viewed as a very radical alternative in the US, where I come from). People with a reasonable level of education and connections generally do well enough to obtain that leisure. But, as @Jgill observed, people who have access to enough welfare benefits can also afford to think about radical alternatives.

Another factor, I think, is a having a certain amount of personal liberty to pursue what are (in places like the US) quite unpopular ideas. One has to be 'inner-directed' enough to ignore the disapproving frowns and comments of work associates, friends, and relatives.

Lots of people (not in the US) have examples of 'socialistic policies' available to them, which are generally valued by their society. Many countries have had more favorable policies toward the working class, providing good health programs, liberal amounts of vacation time, and so on.

it's worth noting, however, that not too many people in the EU are calling for, hoping for, or planning for the abolition of capitalism (speed the day), which would be necessary for full-fledged socialism (at least, as far as I know).

In order to use a time machine to change the course of history, one has to kill quite a few babies, not just one. Suppose one wanted to protect the Western Hemisphere from Europe. Strangling Columbus in his cradle wouldn't be enough; sinking the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria wouldn't do the trick either. Exploration of the world by Europeans (for purposes of trade) was underway, and eventually somebody else would have tripped over North and South America. After all, Lief Erickson had landed in the future Canada a few hundred years earlier. Had that Norsk contact taken off, history would have been different, but it didn't.

Germany was not a happy place in the 1920s into the '30s, and Hitler was by no means the only capable player. Germany didn't need Mein Kampf for a lot of people to hate Jews, for instance. Millions of Germans resented the terms of the WWI peace treaty, and so on and so forth.

But whatever reality is, alternate history has produced quite a few great stories.

Well, that's OK. I was just suggesting that abstractions aren't always as understandable as we might like to think. If it doesn't help, it doesn't help. Anyway, I wasn't trying "to fix you".

It's your idea in your terminology so, of course, it would (and should) seem quite understandable to you. Abstractions can be brilliant while we spin them our own heads. Once we spill them out on 'paper', the brilliance sometimes vanishes.

Good lord, you have got to be kidding me? I think you mean, the workers? — JerseyFlight

TRY INTERACTING WITH THE QUESTIONS I POSED IN THE SECOND PRIVATE PROPERTY POST (you can find it on pg4 of this thread). — JerseyFlight

Do you have any ideas on how this could be countered? — JerseyFlight

With all due respect friend, you have much more educating to do. — JerseyFlight

not because it is so incredibly profound, but because it is so incredibly naive. — JerseyFlight

Pity, I really don't think the objectors will be able to comprehend it. — JerseyFlight

You know, you could stand a refresher course in attitude. I'm glad you have immersed yourself in difficult intellectual study. It's dirty work, but somebody has to do it. However, just because you have read much, studied hard, and have accumulated many theoretical insights doesn't prevent you from being a learned fool. I'm not saying you are a fool, learned or otherwise, mind you. I'm just suggesting that you could be--and you wouldn't necessarily know it. It could be that the environment in which you developed led brought you to an unfortunate amount of misplaced self-confidence.

Marx's materialism is neither biological nor psychological. He thought that the laws of dialectics, which in nature were concretized in one way, in history were concretized in another. — David Mo

This statement may contain gobbledegook.

A lot of those in the Bourgeoisie are what basically now belong to the middle class. Marx in his Communist Manifesto argues the following:

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with
reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science,
into its paid wage labourers.

The priest sounds dubious here as belonging to what Marxists see as the intellectual Opium dealers from a bygone era (and Capitalism doesn't reject religion, just look at the US). The fact is that functioning capitalist societies have not impoverished the physician, the lawyer or even the man of science (with poets I don't know). — ssu

SSU: how do you define "worker"? Isn't a "worker" someone who is dependent on the wage he or she receives in exchange for labor? The wage, and the ability to labor, is everything to a worker.

A member of the bourgeoisie is not dependent on exchanging labor for a wage. God forbid! The bourgeoisie, at least as I understand it, owns the factory (or warehouse which Amazon rents) and receives the profit from the factory or rent. It isn't that the bourgeoisie do not expend mental and physical effort: some of them work their fingers to the bone, especially during the period of their 'original accumulation'. But if they are wealthy and still driving themselves, maybe they are merely suffering from OCD.

Granted, a lot of people (just about everybody, it seems like) think they are "middle class". Granted, some people occupy class-ambiguous positions. Is an Amazon, Target, Walmart, or Boeing upper-middle-management person really working class? I'm sure they don't think of themselves that way, and they may receive a fat enough benefit package to blur the factivity of their paycheck being tied to their ongoing performance of their work, or the profitability of their product area.

As for the American farmer, blessed be the small farmer with less than 250 acres and only 40 cows to milk, most of them are bourgeoisie. True, they may drive a tractor in the spring and a combine in the fall (both equipped with air conditioning, GPS, computer tracking recording how much corn, soy, or wheat was gathered from each square yard (square meter) of the field) which starting purchase price is around $500,000. Or probably they hire farm workers. But the bigger their land holding, the less likely is it that they are actually laboring in agriculture. What they are doing is much more a managerial function. Selling on the futures market, figuring the angles on government subsidies, deciding when and where to buy more land, and so on. If they have milk cows, it's likely that there are more than a thousand in their herd. Even superman would have trouble tending to the 4000 tits of 1000+ cows, let alone dealing with manure, feed, breeding, diseases, and so on.

But even the small family farmer may be quite well off, IF they own their land, IF it is good land, IF world demand for food is strong, and IF everyone else is not enjoying high yields. At least, on paper they may be worth quite a bit, even though they might have to liquidate the farm to see the cash value in hand.

Human Nature" does not exist, human brains exist, and they are exceedingly sensitive, what your brain experiences and how it develops determines who you are and what you become — JerseyFlight

The claim "Human nature does not exist" has never made sense to me. All other animals come loaded with a range of characteristics that does not finally or totally define them. I do not accept the idea that humans, evolving along with other primates, have no characteristics arising from their genetic heritage (which is rooted far deeper than primate species).

Granted, our intellectual capabilities exceed other species--indeed, put us in a category by ourselves--as we like to remind ourselves quite often. But pliable intellect isn't all of human nature. There are also the powerful emotional properties of human beings which are malleable only to some extent. In all, the way we exist as physical beings owes much to our genetic inheritance--that is, our nature.

The mention of "human nature" seems to be a triggering event for some people. True enough, there are unhelpful doctrines out there that excuse a lot of bad behavior, like original sin, war-like human nature, unsatisfiable acquisitiveness, and so on and so forth. We can ditch original sin and like theories if it helps (though we humans seem to validate the doctrine that we are prone to error (and major error at that) a good share of the time).

Obviously, the environment in which we experience the world is a factor in our individual realities, apart from what we inherit. Environment and experience are important--no denying that.

We are conscious beings, but we have no idea how, in some event long past, consciousness began to become a feature of human beings. IF we have no idea how a biological being becomes conscious, then it would seem highly unlikely that we could propose methods by which a computer could become conscious.

Even for us, consciousness doesn't spring into being in a fully developed form (as far as I know). Consciousness has a way forward to fulfillment. Can you think of anything, even a minute development, that would contribute to consciousness? Can that minute development be duplicated in a computer?

For instance, we (and other animals) have proprioception, which informs our brains of the arrangement of our bodies in space. iPhones can tell whether they have been picked up--the screen becomes active. There's an accelerometer in the phone which senses movement. It's a very trivial feature, but it is an example of what I am getting at.

How could a computer not only register that it was upside down, but also 'know' that it was upside down, and maybe even 'care' that it was topsy turvy?

What do you think?

Ok, but it can be said that the need is greater now. You know, modern civilization can now be destroyed, perhaps by mistake, in just a few minutes. — Hippyhead

Indeed. You're right. Our capacity to destroy is much greater than in the past (nuclear weapons) and our willingness to change our energy consumption levels and form of energy seems insufficient to save us from our ecological doom. Another thing that's true about these days (as opposed to the 13th century, say) is that a handful of people are in a position to launch the nuclear-tipped missiles, or to effectively block sound ecological policy. It doesn't take many irresponsible people to fuck everyone en masse.

It's strange that this assumption repeatedly surfaces as I have discussed this topic throughout the years. — JerseyFlight

The assumption keeps surfacing, one might suppose, because you keep "sounding" like you are peeved. But I'm glad you are not peeved. I, on the other hand, am profoundly peeved, so maybe I read peevishness into your phrasing.

Negative Dialectics. Get the lectures not the book, though the book is superior, it will be rough going — JerseyFlight

At this point in my life, I think I'll skip negative dialectics. The time remaining is short and there are other avenues I wish to pursue.

Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx — JerseyFlight

Have you read a lot of their stuff? I confess: I have not, though of the three I've read and enjoyed Marx most.

Intellectual responsibility is missing from our time. It is no surprise, therefore, that barbarism has proliferated itself. — JerseyFlight

Nonsense. Intellectual responsibility isn't missing any more now than in the past. As for barbarians -- they have been running things for millennia.

In this sense thinking is a painful and consequential activity. — JerseyFlight

Consequential, certainly. Painful? Let's say, 'difficult'.

High level thinking is about negativity, if you don't know that then you don't know thinking. — JerseyFlight

Can you expand a bit about that? Why is high level thinking about 'negativity'?

Are you feeling peeved about not getting enough attention as an autodidact? I can understand that--there are many unofficial intellectuals who get no respect.

We could perhaps separate out "intellectuals" (autodidacts or degreed and paid, whatever) from the the institutions that are in business to produce more knowledge and more knowledge producers, as well as 'think tanks' that hire intellectual types to produce policy and influence. Also, let's set aside corporate and governmental agencies that hire intellectuals, and put them to further their various and sundry interests.

Thinking is generally a friendly activity; running institutions may be, but isn't always, friendly.

An intellectual may contribute to greater class consciousness, if he or she is so inclined. But he or she may also opt to help suppress class consciousness, In both cases, this will generally be from a post within some institution. And, of course, many intellectuals--llike other people--have no class consciousness to speak of.

OK, so I agree that the elite that is running the country has been doing a piss-poor job of it, not just in the last 4 years, but for decades. HOWEVER...

Who are you going to replace that elite with? Are you going to do away with "experts" too?

Running a wealthy, nuclear-armed nation of 320 million people is not something you want to turn over to amateurs. It's a matter of finding the right elite -- which has been done in the past, and can be done again. Most countries are run by elites; the difference among nations is "which elite is in charge?"

One of our central problems is the theology of neoliberalism which is barely able to tolerate half-hearted government, let alone effective, well-run, well-funded, competent government.

The rationale, as stated by the mayor, Jacob Frey, is that the police withdrew (on orders from HQ) to avoid a violent confrontation which might result in deaths by gunshots.

The rationale wasn't altogether mistaken. Had the on-duty contingent of police stayed and prevented the mob from entering the precinct station, almost certainly somebody would have gotten hurt -- on both sides. However, the police at the fifth precinct station faced a worse mob 24 hours later which had just torched a bank, post office, filling station, and some other buildings, and they stayed on their roof, fully armed; later (90 minutes or so) they were backed up by a contingent of national guard troops. The 3rd precinct officers could also have been backed up (by the guard, sheriffs, other police officers, or the fire department (people don't like getting wet).

It was a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't kind of situation. While certain elements within the mob led the destruction, the demonstrators as a group played a strong supporting role in the destruction. There had been 3 days worth of "fuck the cops", "cops are killers", and "destroy the police" rhetoric being spoken, graffitied, and chanted. I watched the protestors/mob/rioters, whatever they were, wind themselves up on Wednesday afternoon. By nightfall they were at a fever pitch. THAT is why the police were avoiding a confrontation. Then the burning started.

The Rolling Stone article is quite a laundry list of dirty linen. I'll speak to Covid 19, with a local application. That first:

Minnesota and Minneapolis have a good track record of economic stability and progressive policy that has stood us in good stead. On May 25, we began a high-speed unravelling which has left holes in our reindeer knit sweaters. The rioting, arson, looting, and demonstrating that happened after Mr. Floyd was killed owed a great deal to a lack of cogent policy and strong leadership.

Things turned really bad when the police abandoned the Third Precinct building. I'm sure the cops felt picked on, being the target of 3 days of demonstrations, but really: why would quite adequately armed police back off from a not particularly large demonstrating crowd? What the police demonstrated (disingenuously, actually) was a sickly unwillingness to use force to protect a $10,000,000 city asset (the cost of the building which was torched).

Their precinct abandonment was more or less accurately interpreted as, "Hey -- the police are gone; it's open season!" Within a few hours of the police withdrawal, the riot started, along with the arson, burglary, and general wrecking. It was a colossal failure of leadership within the Police Department, and within the (pretty much liberal) city government. Not only the police left, but so did the fire department--whose fire suppressing capacity was sorely needed. Hundreds of millions of dollars of damage was done in just a few hours.

COVID-19

The failure to mount an effective public health response to Covid-19 was the result - again - of the absence of a cogent plan and effective leadership. What happened in the United States is the direct result of "getting government off our backs" as the conservatives like to say. Trump certainly didn't have to lead the charge. There is an agency (CDC) well stocked with people quite capable of responding to pandemic and epidemic disease, but they have to be unimpeded in their exercise of public health measures. They were VERY MUCH impeded and interfered with.

We have been here before. When AIDS appeared under another semi-demented conservative president, something similar happened at the federal level: inept action or no action at all, and a lack of cogent policy. By the time the government came to terms with the fact of AIDS it was way too late to stop it. It took 15 years (1981 to 1996) to come up with a reasonably effective and tolerable treatment.

Same thing in 2020: Trump has (apparently) acknowledged that Covid-19 is a real problem. But with 5 million cases in the country and 162,000 deaths here, nothing that could or should have been done in the beginning will be effective now. We are in even more uncharted territory, currently pinning a lot of hope on the as yet non-existent safe and effective vaccine.

Bad leadership and stupidity is entirely sufficient to cause unravelling.

So is the developing brain simply following genetic rules. — Benj96

My guess is that the developing brain does follow genetic rules, but that's not the whole story. For one thing, the mother's body is also following genetic rules, and her execution is likely to have some effect on the fetus. For instance, a slight increase of hormones might tip development in direction A, B, or C... If the mother drinks and smokes (the criminal pregnancy) alcohol and various products of combustion may affect the fetus. Obviously, using hard drugs won't help the fetus either. Diseases can interfere with the fetus.

I don't know whether fetal brains are much influenced by the environment outside the womb. Does hearing Mozart affect the fetus? Some people think it does (no idea, myself). What about punk rock?

So, yes: DNA is followed. But there is more to it. And it stays that way for life. DNA governs the brain, but lots of other stuff also affects the brain.

And is the composer of the music you liked practicing rhetoric on you by way of notes?

I have some difficulty applying the term 'rhetoric' to music or abstract art. I can imagine drama or novels, poetry--the verbal arts--employing rhetoric effectively. In the TV drama MAD MEN, Don Draper displays his advertising campaigns (which are sometimes very artful in the way advertising works can be) with rhetorical force. The show writers didn't invent one very effective piece--Eastman Kodak did--where Draper presents the slide carousel (a carousel of color as Disney later put it).

Hmmm, I guess in a broad way a lot of our creative activity involves rhetoric, including music.

A regular Jesus you are. Have you considered announcing your deity status or at least sainthood? I can see a new religion growing up around you: Hanoverism. For instance, guys wearing 5 layers of pants so that they could make big sacrifices several times a day before ending up in holy commando style.

It would be an unusual religion, of course, featuring a liturgy of snarky comedy performed by pantless practitioners. Going out for the day stark naked would be an act of necessary piety in order to create the need for pants-off-your-ass donations, as well as shirts off your back, shoes off your feet, etc.

If we're honest with ourselves, the internal monologue of our minds is often very different to the words we speak out into the world or the actions we do. — Benj96

Some people think there isn't more to the internal monologue than idle mental chatter; I don't believe that.

Freud, and others, proposed a 3 layer model: id, ego, superego. In addition he described the unconscious and conscious mind. There is a lot more to Freud's theory, and you don't have to accept any of it. It is, however, a useful model.

The id is composed of our most basic, persistent, powerful, and quite often most socially unacceptable desires-the rampant sexual, self-aggrandizing, physical and emotional hungers. The superego represents the internalized societal standards for proper behavior--opposite from the id. The task of the ego is to mediate the id and the superego. The subconscious might be considered the residence of all the emotional turmoil we experience.

From Freud's POV, we are a mess of wishes, urges, drives, aspirations, fears, hopes, desires, etc. that are NOT compatible with polite society. Most of us, most of the time, are able to keep a lid on the simmering mess and meet social requirements for politeness, propriety, customs, etiquette, other people's feelings, the law, and so on. We have occasional lapses when unedited thoughts are expressed, bad behavior is displayed, and naked desires or fears are displayed.

In Freud's view, "niceness" is achieved by channeling the destructive power of the id into socially acceptable and constructive activity. Raw sexual energy which might prefer to fuck whoever wherever whenever can be channeled into intellectual achievement or meeting social expectations. This isn't a rare thing -- lots of people do it every day, all day.

Freud was a pessimist. To put it plainly, he didn't think happiness was in the cards.

I voted "no" because in most cases violent protest is counterproductive. There are cases in extremis where violence could certainly be justified, such as the assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler. It failed (Hitler survived the bomb), and the group involved was executed. A revolution (1917, Russia) may well involve violent protest, but if successful, the heroes and villains change places.

people of color, appear to feel a sense of disenfranchisement, that the US government has failed them on myriad levels (systemic racism, lack of social mobility, no nationalized health care, insane income inequality, the excesses of capitalism, etc.) — Aleph Numbers

The title of the thread, Disenfranchisement and the Social Contract, got lost very quickly.

The US Government and Capitalism didn't fail blacks -- they intended that blacks (and other undesirable minorities) should get the short end of the stick, and they have.

Some will raise objections that there is no such thing as a social contract to start with. I think there is a social contract, embodied in custom and law. Just because it exists, a social contract doesn't have to benefit everyone. For instance...

Our social contract has proscribed whites and blacks from occupying housing in close proximity to each other. Guilt-burdened liberal types may strive for housing integration, but most white folks are reasonably content with the arrangement. The social contract works for them, pretty much.

In practice, our social contract called for removal of Native Americans from the land which we wanted to occupy. We succeeded, and most people (other than Native Americans) find little reason to think they should give the land back. The social contract is working as intended.

The founders of America, the first drafters of our social contract, were not very fond of poor people--whether they were white or not. They didn't like poor people in England either, and even though they allowed poor people to migrate to the colonies (cheap labor), they still didn't like them. They considered our poor forebears "white trash" and have generally arranged things so that poor white trash (PWT) never were in a position to take over.

As it happens, the rich white trash (RWT) were very successful in their efforts. Even poor white trash find it difficult to imagine overthrowing their rich white betters, even though they--PWT--theoretically could.

Keeping blacks poorer than whites (for the most part) turns out to be a considerable comfort to PWT, and who cares what poor blacks think, anyway.

Our social contract has a sharp, jagged edge. The Golden Rule it is most decidedly not.

I remember hearing about the study that showed that the US is an oligarchy. — Aleph Numbers

More a plutocracy, I think. — Ciceronianus the White

Very much a KAKISTOCRACY right now. Government by the worst--i.e., Donald Trump (with other kakistocrats waiting in the wings)

Yes, it's important to disambiguate terms like "authority" and "authoritarian". Thank you.

I was very inspired by Emma Goldman's writing, some 40 years ago. Also inspired by anarcho-syndicalists, and various strands of anarchist / socialist thinking. The trouble with all of these movements is that they existed on paper almost exclusively, not in reality. There are a few anarcho-syndicalists around--associated with the IWW. But they are so few that it doesn't matter.

One can (so I am told) be a solitary monk and do good things (like pray) but being a solitary anarchist, anarchy syndicalist, industrial unionist, or for that matter, a solitary Neoliberal is pointless. Even being a solitary monk or a solitary Lutheran has severe limitations. We are made for community, for work, play, thinking, and mating -- all that stuff -- TOGETHER. Same for being gay; being the only gay guy in the world is very troubling; fulfillment comes in finding others of the same kind.

I was a member of a leftist party of two or three dozen people for some 20 years. We were as ineffectual as everyone else on the far left, but at least we weren't flat-out solitary marxists.

There are a few thousand Americans (maybe enough to fill a soccer stadium) who are seriously interested in socialism, anarchism, and the like. We all insist on our various narrow programs and methods. Too bad, but we can't get together and be community, because we all insist on our individual group's direct pipeline to the truth.

I voting for Biden, but holding my nose. It is essential to get Trump out of office in November, just as it will be essential to get Biden out of office 4 years later. Bad choices. Bernie Sanders is a more attractive politician, but like most of the candidates, he is too old. So is Trump. So is Biden.

I'm of a strange sort of syncretic political that is neither revolutionary, radical, nor reformist and, yet, all of them at the same time, or at least, was. — thewonder

Strange indeed. I think you are utilizing too many labels in your thinking. Pick a label, any label -- communist, neoliberalism, libertarian socialist Pacifist, crypto fascist, or Republican Assholes, and one finds that they really don't fit the intended target all that well [which I don't like because it irritates my discomfort with excessive ambiguity.]

I am an anti-authoritarian whenever the powers-that-be are getting on my nerves, but otherwise I don't see that big a problem with a fair amount of centralized power and authority. We humans are an unruly lot, and it takes a certain amount of centralized power and authority to keep a lid on, and prevent us from wrecking the means of our existence.

All that said, we could certainly do a lot better for ourselves and for the world. We have to find a way of prying the Republican Assholes, crypto fascists, neoliberal death cults, and so forth from their ensconced positions in office.

This assumes the work of evil manipulative geniuses. A better explanation is that whites simply chose to move. — Hanover

The "conspiracy" was entirely open and well documented.

• restrictive title covenants including bans on selling homes to blacks and Jews in both urban and suburban settings
• explicit (in writing, found in FHA documents from its creation in the 1930s, and in effect until SCOTUS ruled them unconstitutional, restrictions on lending or selling to blacks in urban and suburban locations
• zoning rules which established urban 'sacrifice areas' designated for black residents (aka redlining)

There is ample public documentation; this isn't the work of your conspiratorial evil geniuses, unless you were referencing southern Democrats who, in the 1930s and 1940s, burdened housing law and policy with explicit racial restrictions. These same extra ++ conservative senators also moved to keep domestic and agricultural workers (largely black people) from coverage by Social Security.

The significance of housing discrimination plays out in the many aspects of life that is heavily influenced by housing policy -- education, for example, and wealth. The white families that bought new housing in the 1930s-1960s in the suburbs were able to use their growing housing equity to further improve their and their children's lives.

Blacks housed in new rental housing (those big high rise housing projects in Chicago, St. Louis, and other cities) were, of course, unable to accumulate equity. The high rises were generally neglected by the responsible city/county agencies, so... they gradually fell apart. [Some cities took good care of their high rises, and they are still going strong.] The Pruitt (for blacks) Igo (for whites) project in St. Louis deteriorated unusually fast -- not because of poor construction, but because of predation by metal recovery gangs (who ripped out working plumbing, resulting in floods in the building), and the usual gang warfare. The blacks who moved into the buildings thought they were really good housing, and LIKED their units. Still, the implementation of Minoru Yamasaki's design was poor. (Yamasaki also designed the World Trade Center I and II.)

Any of these books will explain much to you:

• The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
• Manufacturing Decline: How Racd the Conservative movement crush the American rust belt
• Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City
• Abandoned in the Heartland: Work, Family, and Living in East St. Lous
• Pruitt Igoe (Images of America)
• Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and and the end of Progress toward Racial Equality
• The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit
• New Deal Ruins: Race, Economic Justice, and Public Housing Policy
• Chicago Race Riots, July 1919
• Detroit City Is the Place to Be: The Afterlife of an American Metropolis
• Not in My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City [Baltimore]
• Demolition Means Progress: Flint, Michigan and the fate of the American Metropolis
• Tear Down: Memoir of a Vanishing City
• When American became Suburban
• Crabgrass Frontier: The suburbanization of the United States
• Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City [Milwaukee]
• The Ghosts of Johns Hopkins: The Life and Legacy that Shaped an American City [Baltimore]
• Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story
• When Affirmative Action was White: An untold history of racial inequality in the Twentieth Century

Why would anyone want to be treated like blacks are treated on a bad day in the criminal justice system?

One of the benefits of having some sort of privilege (wealth, education, good environment, etc.) is that one isn't subject to the worst indignities available. It isn't my privilege that is wrong; it's the way the criminal justice system treats blacks that is wrong.

I'm not so wealthy, so white, so educated, and from so good an environment that I haven't gotten the crappy end of the stick on more than a few occasions. I think I have a pretty good grasp of how blacks have been subjected to not only the criminal justice system. Further, I have a pretty good understanding of how black poverty and disadvantage has been engineered and maintained by contemporary (20th century) systems of real estate, banking, city zoning, urban "renewal" (negro removal), education, and so on.

The "white privilege" of working class/middle class people like me (and a couple hundred million other white folks) isn't the cause of discrimination against black people; it's the relative result. it isn't white privilege that puts more than 1 in 4 black men in prison (According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, at current levels of incarceration a black male in the United States today has greater than a 1 in 4 chance of going to prison during his lifetime, while a Hispanic male has a 1 in 6 chance and a white male has a 1 in 23 chance of serving time).

The coordinated 'management' or 'control' of black people grows out of the logic of slavery and post-civil war suppression and exploitation of blacks.

Over time the consequence was a black population that was deemed essential to industry (off and on) but personally irresponsible and dangerous.

All that was engineered. It didn't happen by accident. Who did it? The usual suspects: powerful ruling class operators who had and have the capacity to write housing policy (back in the 1930s and following), for example, that was as much about race as it was about square footage and construction codes. It was no accident that whites were sent to new housing in the suburbs, and that blacks were sent to new rental high rises in the city. The policy was to keep the races separate. Putting blacks in even quality rental housing helped insure their lack of wealth later on.

It was no accident that housing segregation increased after WWII. The federal government coordinated segregation by financing policy and housing codes. State, federal and local planners, zoning boards, city councils, county governments, and states followed suit. So did real estate companies, banks, S & Ls, construction companies, developers, et al.

It is stupid for us white folks to beat ourselves over their heads for having "white privilege". Our "privilege" is just people's misfortune. If white folks want to do something useful, we can at least try to change the way this fucking society works, and stop nattering about our dubious "privilege".

Is privilege a burden from which one needs to be relieved? Why would anyone in their right mind wish to relinquish their privilege?

I've got a little privilege here, got by luck, got by effort, got by the good graces of low-cost state university education, got by immigrants, got by the subjugation of a few aboriginal peoples.

Celebrate my privilege a little? Sure. Give it up? Nah.

How actually privileged are poor white trash? Definition: White, but broke for the last dozen generations; lacking in education, job skills, or helpful social connections. Down and out. Uncultured, untutored, untaught. Lumpen.

They may think themselves better-by-way-of-skin color than middle class blacks, but nobody--white or black--would consider them "privileged" or would want too much contact with them.

Real privilege requires wealth--either wealth in hand or wealth in usable heritage. A monk may have taken a vow of poverty, but he has access to a great store of cultural wealth. An indigent person, minimum 5th generation of poverty, like as not has a access to a far poorer store of cultural wealth. Real wealth, usually gained in the dirty pits of wealth accumulation, provides the power to project privilege. No wealth, no projection of high status.

Getting wealth is a game with a stacked deck. Major accumulation usually requires access to capital, or requires useful inventiveness. Bill Gates, for instance, had both--else he would not have become a titan of software. It takes privilege to gain access to capital. To paraphrase scripture: Those with privilege get more privilege. Those without privilege lose what little they thought they had.

Maybe "business' is just to... I don't know, real and substantive, down to earth.

The following statement is certainly not true for everyone interested in philosophy, but it IS true of some: some philosophers are not rooted in their own bodies or in the material world. They yearn for the abstract 'other world'.

In my opinion, philosophers need to be well grounded in the physical world of their mammalian bodies -- including their mammalian brain -- and the sensory environment to which the body is very sensitive. Get grounded before you get into too much abstraction.

Acceptance of one's embodiment and groundedness can be difficult to achieve.

I am now departing for a week on the north shore of Lake Superior. I'm taking along plenty of printed matter so I don't have to be too embodied and grounded in cold lake water and skin-frying sunshine, hordes of mosquitos, and all that hideous physical stuff.

I question the wisdom of fighting hate by silencing hate speech. This silencing includes banning, deplatforming, PC culture, cancel culture and all that stuff. — DingoJones

I also question whether those tactics have a significant effect on ideology, as practiced, as thought, as written and read. And even if it were effective, I still don't approve of these practices.

Is silencing hate speech the best tactic against hate? — DingoJones

A communist, socialist, or anarchist could easily run afoul of hate-speech suppression during a rant about the ruling class, about rich people, about people with lots of real power. As it happens, the banners, deplatformers, PCers, cancel cultists--that whole crowd--come from the quasi-leftist side of town. That's my home address, too, but I still disapprove.

In an open society--which is what we supposedly have--it is permissible for Neo-Nazis to march around. Lots of people don't like it, but the ACLU was right to defend Neo Nazis when they wanted to hold a rally in Jewish Skokie, Illinois. (This was back in 1978; apologies for referencing ancient history.). White Supremacists, a group recently concocted in the minds of quasi-leftists and racial activists, should have as much right to air their views as Neo-Nazis, BLM activists, defenders of illegal immigrants, and so on.

What I really, really dislike about banning, deplatforming, PC culture, cancel culture, and so on is that it is too crude to be useful. Portraits of "white supremacists" have been drawn with nothing more subtle than paint rollers, where sharp pencils are in order. Who, and what, exactly, is a white supremacist? Or a transphobic? Will the real fascists please state your party platform? Abolishing whole police departments (composed, in Minneapolis, of 900 officers) because a small minority of them are brutal thugs, is another example of crude thinking.

REAL CHANGE, if that is what we really want (and I'm not convinced we do) won't involve reorganizing the symbolic and linguistic deck chairs on an ill-fated Titanic. It will involve fundamental changes in the industrial and financial core of society. The monumental pile of wealth belonging to Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, and a few thousand other very rich people, will have to be redistributed; production for profit (first and foremost) will have to be shifted to production for people's needs [hey, I can use a paint roller too!]. All this involves massive change which will be resisted most vigorously.

Today on National Public Radio The World program, the name of the Washington Redskins was deemed unsayable. It wasn't unsayable just a week ago on NPR. I'm fine with changing the name of the Washington team, or other teams whose names belong to groups of people. But some principled people are against censorship of any kind, for any reason. I'm more in agreement with opposition to censorship than support for it.

The trouble with censors is that they tend to have fairly broad definitions of speech they don't like, which provides them with considerable latitude in decided what to censor. You want to ban very specific words, like 'fuck' for instance? Fine. Make a list of words that you want censored and we can talk about it. But "hate speech" can be whatever you don't like. That just leads to another kind of tyranny.

I don't have a Black Lives Matter lawn sign, bumper sticker, or pin and won't be getting one. I'm white; maybe I have a touch of white supremacy, or something... I don't know. At any rate,

Racial histories, giving racial groups undue significance or irrational objectives and emotions, identity politics, so silly. — Judaka

Yes, I agree with that; on the other hand, a not-overly-sympathetic white guy can see that black people have consistently been discriminated against--maybe not all individually--but as a group, certainly.

Working people--black, white, and brown--have been the recipients of exploitation and discrimination across the board. That's the nature of capitalism: exploit, accumulate, conquer, rule. When you are broke, you are broke -- and it means very similar things whether one is black or white. Black people have been aggregated in certain places more than white people (by segregation), so they are more visible in their suffering.

I've always thought that most of O K L A H O M A was a petroleum soaked shit hole. It's a good thing Oscar Hammerstein II never ventured out there. Had he, the play would have been about oil patch roughnecks, whorehouses, oil wells, and grease all over everything. Probably would have gotten bad reviews in the New York press and never made it on to Broadway from Off Off Broadway.

There is, by the way, a nice Frank Lloyd Wright building in Bartlesville, OK--the Price Tower, which started out as an office building and is now a hotel.

There was a huge pogrom / race riot / arson and bloody massacre in Tulsa, OK on May 31/June 1, 1921. Read about it here.

About 300 blacks were killed, the large and prosperous black Greenwood community was burnt to the ground, and many were injured. There was even some straffing from the air--a little WWI tech brought to bear on the situation.

In the aftermath of the white attack on Greenville, there was some national news coverage, which quickly faded, and then there was silence. Nobody--white or black--wanted to talk about what happened, out of fear and shame. There were several unmarked mass graves that have not been found, and a few that have.

An investigatory commission was set up recently to finally investigate the event.



There were very large race riots in several cities around the time (2 or 3 years either side) -- Chicago, East St. Louis, Detroit, and so on.

Just wanted to go on record, here.

I heartily loathe the military industrial, corporate business culture of not just the US, but of much of the world. It's various devious, detrimental unto diabolical designs are loathsome in their entirety. I've spent quite a bit of time since the mid 1960s thinking about the MIC.

How important do you think those numbers were in the Civil War compared to how important they are to modern warfare. — Athena

An interesting side, here: During and after the civil war, there was considerable difficulty identifying how many, from what company, from what state, and names of dead soldiers. There was no system of identification. Beginning to solve the problem of identifying soldiers (dead or alive) was a major impetus to the growth of the Federal Government. If benefits were to be paid, accurate information was needed

I think the problem is a failure to understand the Military-Industrial Complex. — Athena

Sure, because the MIC is co-extensive with the mid-20th century culture on to the present. That's an immense amount of complexity to get one's head around. Just for example, people who are dithering about the militarization of police departments are not always aware that the drive to load up your local police with tanks is coming from the Pentagon, not from your local police station.

Why are we singing the national anthem before pro-football or pro-baseball games. Because somebody in the pentagon thought that would be a good idea.

The US was basically a nation of innocent children living for a love of God. While the Prussians who took control of Germany were living for the love of military might. — Athena

Come now, Athena! The US has never been innocent. No other country has either. Let me divide this up: There are the leaders (from the Mayflower on down), there are the gung ho followers, (the core group--not too large) then there are the masses.

The English Colonies, and then the US, has pursued some highly guilt-producing practices: mass genocide conducted against the Aboriginal peoples, enslavement, wanton disregard of civil rights, ruthless exploitation, waste, fraud, abuse, and so on. The leaders and core group set the policies and the masses are roped into supporting and/or carrying out the policies.

When we talk about nations--Germany, Burma, Liechtenstein, the United States, whichever... we might want to avoid using language appropriate to morally responsible agents. Nations don't have friends; they don't have morals. They have interests, and they tend to pursue their best interests.

George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, Teddy Roosevelt, Warren Harding, Dwight Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, on down to Donald Trump are, for better and for much worse, moral agents who are responsible. I'm a responsible moral agent; you're a responsible moral agent. The pentagon, as such, is not. General Motors is not. The chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (some moral agent) IS. So is the CEO, CFO, CETC. of General Motors.

I also write too much verbiage, so I'll stop here, and start again.

The MIC and the NDEA is one of your abiding concerns, and it isn't altogether misplaced. However... The NDEA did have some democratizing effects by enabling people to attend college who otherwise would not have been able to afford tuition, housing, and books. My siblings were beneficiaries of NDEA grants, as were many of my fellow students. Me too. All that was back in the late 1950s and mid sixties.

Don't overlook the insidious effects of VA education benefits that sent many, many former soldiers from WWII (and later) to college.

I quite agree that the Military Industrial Complex (MIC) was. is, and probably will remain alive and well. I would like to quarrel with your chronology and widen your target aperture.

In focusing on the post WWII MIC, you are overlooking some other malignant influences: Don't forget about rampant capitalism: exploitative, often ruthless, anti-union, and focused on necessary (from their perspective) class warfare (which is what their anti-unionism is about, among other things). The manipulation of the public got a big boost in the work of Edward Bernays (1891-1955) the 'father of public relations'. Bernays was the nephew of Sigmund Freud.

The "bigger half" of the MIC is big business, the globe-circling ouroboros, infinite tail-swallowing snake. When a handful of capitalists (literally, less than 11) hold more wealth than 1/2 of the global population, you are dealing with something pretty powerful. Not to mention there are another couple thousand inordinately wealthy individuals out there, protecting their interests.

But getting back to the NDEA: Wasn't one of the benefits of the NDEA and VA education benefits a tidal wave of students (and income) that lifted all university departmental boats? Were not the humanities and/or liberal arts departments in much better shape after WWII on into the 1970s, then they later became (put on shorter rations at best)?

Another concern you have is

With the focus on technology came specialization and the Behaviorist Method of education which is also used for training dogs. — Athena

Sure, simple conditioning works better for training dogs than having long discussions with them. I've had long discussions with my very smart dog, and I can report that it didn't improve her behavior one wit (she was, of course, a very good dog).

It happens to be the case, like it or not, that human beings, dogs, monkeys, rats, and crows share many neurological characteristics. That's why we also learn in ways not much differently than other animals. Psychology's first big (and successful) project was to understand how we learn. So it is that the methods of the rat lab became the 'image of psychology'.

In saying that, please note, I am not equating a human mind with a dog's mind. The scope of human mental activities is far vaster than a dog's, and our brains are far more complex, and utilize additional methods of learning, knowledge acquisition, imagination, and so on and so forth.

Hey, Athena: I think we share a lot of discomfort, dissatisfaction, and disagreement with the world as it has been made. My disagreement here is that there are just more villains than the Military Industrial Complex.

As well they should! After all, it is well known that English majors reading Milton leads to nothing but trouble.

People singing about liberation and bringing peace to the people but then they just do the most heinous shit. — Lif3r

At the heart of the human condition is a contradiction: we have had, do have, and will have both good and bad impulses at work at the same time. That is just the way we are. You don't like it; I don't like it; nobody likes it; BUT that is how we are.

Most of the time, most people try to keep the bad impulses under control. Unfortunately, the environment we live in often makes that difficult. Still, even the best environment for humans will not bring about perfection -- just less douchebaggery. Or would that be douchesacerie, in French?

BLM is legitimately described as a working class group, pretty much, in terms of their demographics and many of their aspirations. Their espousal of "trans rights" is hard to square with anything. "Trans rights" has, for some reason beyond me, become a major cultural enterprise. Bizarro world.