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Cog wrote:Unrestricted illegal immigration is an existential threat to the Republic. Trump understands that and so do the people that voted for him. If you support open borders, and the left does, you are as much of a threat to the country as the illegals.

I don't know how true that seemingly obvious statement really is. It's not like illegals are coming here to escape a flood. There is a place they fill in the economy. It's reasonable to debate levels of immigration, but idiocy to stick to a hard line that throws it all into a category where it has to either be denied or can't be talked about for fear of reprisal. You might just as well say, and sound just at presumptuous, that the lack of immigration is an existential threat to the Republic. You'd be just as right. We haven't had the discussion as a body politic about whether the markets are the best place to deal with things like immigration. We sanctify the markets, but then rail against what they bring about. Keep this line of talk up, and you just might succeed at engaging the public in this discussion.

jedrider wrote:On the contrary, how do you explain 'white rage'? If not for it's economic roots, then what is it based upon?

We're just monkeys in a cage

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meiU6TxysCg

evilgenius wrote:

Cog wrote:Unrestricted illegal immigration is an existential threat to the Republic. Trump understands that and so do the people that voted for him. If you support open borders, and the left does, you are as much of a threat to the country as the illegals.

I don't know how true that seemingly obvious statement really is. It's not like illegals are coming here to escape a flood. There is a place they fill in the economy. It's reasonable to debate levels of immigration, but idiocy to stick to a hard line that throws it all into a category where it has to either be denied or can't be talked about for fear of reprisal. You might just as well say, and sound just at presumptuous, that the lack of immigration is an existential threat to the Republic. You'd be just as right. We haven't had the discussion as a body politic about whether the markets are the best place to deal with things like immigration. We sanctify the markets, but then rail against what they bring about. Keep this line of talk up, and you just might succeed at engaging the public in this discussion.

It is a matter of how much immigration not if. If all those who want to come to the US are let in the shear numbers will bankrupt the country trying to deal with their needs. We are some 310 million people that have two billion that want to join us.

Let’s move immigration talk over to immigration thread. I just posted some like there so it should be easy to find.

Thankyou

evilgenius wrote:I don't know how true that seemingly obvious statement really is.

Truth doesn't matter, only belief. Lots of whites in my exact demographic are pissed about something; globalisation maybe, blight of Mayberry, elimination of simple work, rise of the co-ed workplace, demise of what we were raised to believe "manhood" was all about.
Whatever. So they project that fear, frustration, impotence onto a handy target, one they feel beneath them: Mexicans, Muslims, Libtards, dopers, or just people struggling on a lower rung. Part and parcel of that is to exaggerate the threat to some extreme level, whether it's open borders, sharia law, pizzagate or whatever foolishness. Then they pound their scrawny grey chest and shake their plastic guns and fantasize a race war.

Frankly I understand the resentment of fast change and to some extent the downfall of white male dominance. I've been my share of chauvinist, racist, elitist, bigot, misogynist. But somewhere in the DNA I don't just don't seem to begrudge the people 'below' me on the ladder, it is the boot on my head from above that pisses me off.

The reactionary response was subdued on the left through most of my life right up to trump. I think the Merrick Garland nomination, losing the last 2 of 5 POTUS elections while winning the vote, McConnell and Boner saying flat out the Rs would oppose every D proposal in order to limit O to one term, and now the ultimate gingrich is in the White House. The left is now reacting with weirdness of their own,

Beto says he'll 'tear down the wall' ... LOL, what is that about besides just out-gingrich-ing the Rs?

It’s not just White Rage, there also seems to be an awful lot of White Guilt. One is as bad as the other.

But basically we are just humans, and humans are programmed to break into clutches and hate all others with a vengeance. Dallas Cowboys be Philadelphia Eagles. How stupid.

I don’t see any National axis where we can break clearly, Left vs Right. Could be wrong, don’t think so.

I see lots of local groupings where one group (ethnicity/religion/politics) can split with another.

But it is our make up and it will happen sure as we have one nose.

I don’t like it, but that doesn’t make it go away.

Pops wrote:
Beto says he'll 'tear down the wall' ... LOL, what is that about....

Liberal Ds support things like allowing more illegal aliens in the US and shutting down ICE. Beto thinks if he comes out for tearing down the wall he can win D votes in the primaries.

The D primary is turning into a contest to see which candidate can pander the most.

Beto is falling behind the other D candidates .... they are supporting things like racially based monetary reparations for black people, and $1000 per month dividend payments to working class people.

Heck, I might vote for a D if he will pay me $1000/month for the rest of my life. I'll close my eyes and pull the lever for the D and then the $1000 checks will roll in forever. I like that idea. I like it a lot.

Cheers!

Hell, a thousand dollars a month would buy a cheap Ar15 and 2000 rounds of 5.56 ammo. Where do I sign up?

"white guilt"

Another code like "bleeding heart." A pejorative given to what would seem to be positive emotion, designed to excuse and make the opposite emotion less repugnant. So empathy, respect, common courtesy even, are deemed "just as bad" as racism.

I believe everyone is prejudiced to some extent, at root we are instinctively biased to protect our bloodline foremost. Society in large amounts is new, not inbred for another few million years probably. Yet I think obliges us to at least feign civility with our fellows and fellowettes.

Excepting on social media of course.

Pops wrote:"white guilt"..... A pejorative given to what would seem to be positive emotion

If you feel guilty about being white then you don't have a very positive self image of yourself. AND if you have a negative opinion about yourself solely because of your race, then you are --by definition---a racist.

If you look at this objectively, you are being racist against yourself. And that isn't very rational, IMHO. Irrational ideas and related emotions that lead one to feel bad about themselves are usually considered to be destructive and bad.....the exact opposite of positive emotions.

Pops wrote:.... empathy, respect, common courtesy even, are deemed "just as bad" as racism.

Thats one of the wackiest statements I've ever seen. You're a very thoughtful person, Pops, but IMHO by being racist against yourself you've now got your head in a very strange place....Who in their right mind considers positive things like empathy, respect and courtesy to be "bad"?

Cheers!

Plantagenet wrote:[If you feel guilty about being white then you don't have a very positive self image of yourself. AND if you have a negative opinion about yourself solely because of your race, then you are --by definition---a racist.

So what kind of argument do you call being intentionally obtuse??

"white guilt" is a term used by the right to deny the generational effects of racism and disparage those who do recognize it. I've yet to meet a white person, liberal or not, who obviously hates themselves for being white. OTOH I've met lots of angry white racists.

Here's another take on it from Geo Will via wiki:
"white guilt a form of self-congratulation, where whites initiate "compassionate policies" toward people of color, to showcase their innocence to racism."

Telling I think that Will sees "compassion" as a result of guilt and self-aggrandizement. Sorta like bragging about paying hush money to a porn queen. LOL

Pops wrote:I've met lots of angry white racists.

Where do you hang out that you meet so many angry racists? In the university communities I hang out in I've never met such a person.

Pops wrote:Here's another take on it from Geo Will via wiki:
"white guilt a form of self-congratulation, where whites initiate "compassionate policies" toward people of color, to showcase their innocence to racism."

That sounds about right to me. George Will is saying that people who say they have white guilt are actually engaging in virtue signaling, i.e. making a big show of wanting to help black people. Of course, the whole idea that white people have to help black people is itself a racist idea. Black people are quite capable of living their own lives as they choose, without white people with white guilt giving them white help.


IMHO Ayaan Hirsan Ali is 100% correct when she said white guilt is racist. The whole idea that black people "need" white people to help them is itself racist.

Well since I introduced the phrase “white guilt” maybe I should chime in. I had no idea it was such a hot topic.

I was thinking of my many Liberal friends who fawn over every little perceived injustice perpetrated by a white male. And who go exceedingly far out of their way to celebrate and protect anything that is not WASP. To my eye they look and act silly. They immediately condemn anything done by the police, they were all over the recent Covington incident without any proof, they are coming from a mind set that presumes guilt.

They exhibt just as much bias and prejudice as any racist because they do not stop to look at facts and judge things for what they are. They make PRE-JUDICIAL decisions. They also enjoy the trappings of white privlidge. They do protests and write to their congressmen.

It strikes me that, in many cases, “White Guilt” is more of a kind of social bling, it shows your PC creed, because that is what is fashionable in some circles nowadays. And so be onto you who who mutters a blasphemous word against the creed. It’s another example of how people draw themselves into close minded communities, which exit in all stripes.

To put a personal touch on it, in a group email I called Hillary a “bitch” and was then excoriated for exposing myself as a “racist black hating misogynist.” That is how “in groups” work, tow the line or suffer excommunication.

Anyway, that’s what I meant. Here is what Wiki says.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_guilt

Pops wrote:

evilgenius wrote:I don't know how true that seemingly obvious statement really is.

Truth doesn't matter, only belief. Lots of whites in my exact demographic are pissed about something; globalisation maybe, blight of Mayberry, elimination of simple work, rise of the co-ed workplace, demise of what we were raised to believe "manhood" was all about.
Whatever. So they project that fear, frustration, impotence onto a handy target, one they feel beneath them: Mexicans, Muslims, Libtards, dopers, or just people struggling on a lower rung. Part and parcel of that is to exaggerate the threat to some extreme level, whether it's open borders, sharia law, pizzagate or whatever foolishness. Then they pound their scrawny grey chest and shake their plastic guns and fantasize a race war.

Frankly I understand the resentment of fast change and to some extent the downfall of white male dominance. I've been my share of chauvinist, racist, elitist, bigot, misogynist. But somewhere in the DNA I don't just don't seem to begrudge the people 'below' me on the ladder, it is the boot on my head from above that pisses me off.

The reactionary response was subdued on the left through most of my life right up to trump. I think the Merrick Garland nomination, losing the last 2 of 5 POTUS elections while winning the vote, McConnell and Boner saying flat out the Rs would oppose every D proposal in order to limit O to one term, and now the ultimate gingrich is in the White House. The left is now reacting with weirdness of their own,

Beto says he'll 'tear down the wall' ... LOL, what is that about besides just out-gingrich-ing the Rs?

I think that most conspiracy theory is actually a means for people to avoid their own guilt. It's a common ground of accusation that the guilty use to take their own eyes off of their condition, and redirect the emotional energy they would otherwise direct at themselves toward someone or something else. White people are not engaging in self-criticism as much as a truly self-aware group should. Instead, they have chosen to indulge in privilege. That's a dangerous place to leave one's self. It's probably a result of winning the Cold War, and not so much of getting away with being racists. I don't think whites in America have necessarily been more racist than whites in any other country. What they have been is the leading group in the most successful country of all time. But they chose to reap that reward rather than invest it in their future. Investing it would have required them to include those they came to recognize. But that also is not the reason, I believe, that they chose to reap the reward rather than invest in the future.

They aren't being exclusive of others. White people in America are stuck in an end of history moment. They can't fashion a vision for going forward, other than the one that pays the winners for having achieved the victory. Capitalism, the unifying vision of Cold War times, was successful. They could have taken the spoils of that victory and redesigned the educational system so that it pointed toward the future rather than at a working in a factory model. They could have introduced a national health service. They could have created a more entrepreneurial core of understanding, where those who didn't succeed weren't left outside the loop of policy making. They could have made understanding the basics of how and why capitalism won a universal creed, in other words. Instead of doing that they like to complain about freeloaders. That complaint only serves the same function as conspiracy theory. Instead, white people chose to pay the winners. And they are keeping paying them. And they will try to keep paying them, until the Chinese become the number one economy and they suddenly find themselves having to begin the race all over again.

Newfie wrote:Well since I introduced the phrase “white guilt” maybe I should chime in. I had no idea it was such a hot topic.

I was thinking of my many Liberal friends who fawn over every little perceived injustice perpetrated by a white male. And who go exceedingly far out of their way to celebrate and protect anything that is not WASP. To my eye they look and act silly.

You said white guilt is as bad as white rage so it looked like the typical yeahbutwaddabout— both sides, etc. In the context of "civil war" I don't think so.

But yeah, way too many wannabe victims out there. My favorite social faux pas currently is "cultural appropriation." Nobody wants to appropriate my Appalachian/Okie culture, LOL.

Not anymore anyway

Here is what I see as an early skirmish in the coming civil war.

Did the officer do the right thing by letting the suspect go? Schools of thought vary. It’s easy to say this or that when you’re calm at a typewriter and there’s no sweat trickling down your back.

But what will happen is that the guys who hang on the corners of 4700 W. Gladys will see more cops, and soon.

Two of them talked to me, as others drove past, slow, to watch.

“Yeah, yeah, I know you,” said a pleasant man who called himself “John” on the corner on Thursday. The other guy looked at my ID, and said his name was “Kass.”

“It wasn’t no ‘mob.’ But this is the hood, man,” said John.

“This (stuff) happens in the hood.”

Not this (stuff), I said.

“It do now,” he said.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/col ... story.html

Cultural approbation.

That’s what my moniker is; cultural approbation. I didn’t grow up ther though my Mom was from there. I do go back for months ever summer and hang with my Canadian cousins.

My other “culture” is “Piney”, not a lot different.

Both are just a more specific varient of “hick”.

But how different is that from being a “hoodie”? Just an urban hick.

The challenge that's coming is going to be difficult. I don't know that the capitalists are up to it. They face an onslaught from the left and Modern Monetary Theory. That's a theory that makes sense, and seems to use capitalist principles to allow for a quasi-communist state. It takes the government's power to create money and spreads it all across society, insisting that it can perform the same sort of precise work as borrowing does to expand and contract the money supply. They say that inflation is a sufficient check on such practices. But they don't have anything to say about what such thinking would do to the communal mind.

The power to make people conform would be huge, given that it comes with the decision making power of success or failure financially. It isn't that Modern Monetary Theory is some kind of false doctrine, or that it's not applicable to the US. The problem lies with human nature and the people's propensity to overreach. The banking system, through expansion or contraction of the money supply, may be telling the powers in charge, be they official or phantasmic(resting in the opinion of the net), that one initiative or another will fail but if the government insists they can make the thing succeed.

Alright, it is possible to extract a sort of utopia from such a thing. It could be used in conjunction with the banking system's role in regulating the money supply rather than allowed to pardon excess by force of will. It's much more likely, however, that, given human nature, what you will get is a strangulating force upon investment, as those who differ from the generally accepted social order's view of what should and should not be fear appealing to the powers that be for money. Right now, the invective is focused upon those who always deserve society's scorn, Nazis and the like. That could easily change, and the invective become directed at some much more mundane group which takes on society's capricious ire. Likewise, when corruption prevails there would be no check upon it, as the people themselves come to believe that without such embedded corruption things couldn't proceed. It would become part of the social order rather than blown up in stock crashes. The only sort of crash that might free the people might be hyper-inflation.

Where does this come from? You might be tempted to blame those on the left being infatuated with gory Marxism. But that's not true. The origin of this is the fact that the success of capitalism in the US should have been extended to all of its people. Instead, it has been assigned to the winners of the game. The growing and shameful inequality that has arisen is the source of this. That is because Monetarism, the current prevailing economic theory, has no way of keeping wages aligned properly with the growth of the money supply. Monetarism uses the rate structure to align the money supply with its understanding of what ought to be at any given point. The trouble is that wages are always last in that understanding, and that rates are not capable of addressing them before such a catastrophic realignment takes place, so they have hung back in the basement of the 70's.

MMT works (maybe) until it hits some real world restraints. You can print money on computers, but that’s not creating wealth. It doesn’t put food on the table or shelter over your head. And the crash doesn’t have to come in the USA but could come elsewhere, like mass migration to Europe because Africa can’t feed itself and MMT won’t make grain transactions happen.

My tiny understanding of MMT is that it is just a backhanded way of admitting our money has no intrinisic value, our system of trade is FUBAR.

Real numbers don't lie. . This thread is on it's 5th page with only 450 plus views......

The degrowth thread has 10 pages and 11,000 views. .

It seems like a very small fringe number of people really take this topic seriously