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[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

The right wing is significant contributor to institutional racism. A significant reason that the right wing ignores information about institutional racism is because it thinks the media that tells them about such racism is full of shit.

They may say that, but that's just stupid. No one needs the media to see institutional racism. It's a part of everyone's lives.

But arguing to me that I shouldn't be telling you what I hear from righties in a discussion where we're trying to understand why righties do what they do is a tad counterproductive.

I never said that you shouldn't be telling me what you hear from righties. I'm curious.

All I said there was that the left and right do not understand what the other side is thinking? How is that whataboutism?

We were talking about the right. Are you capable of talking about the right for any length of time without observing that what you are saying is true of the left too? I should think so, but who knows?

A good bit of what irks righties is listening to people like you tell them what they think.

That's certainly true, but I don't think it has much to do with whether I'm right or not.

You simply don't know. I don't know.

I think I know a fair amount, and you do too. You can be a keen observer. If you think I'm not right, it would be more interesting to have that conversation than to have you raise epistemological doubts about how any of us can know what anyone is thinking. That's boring.

But here's the difference between what I'm saying and you're saying: I'm simply repeating what I hear and guessing at the thinking behind it. You flip off these pompous and often clueless pronouncements ("they're all reactionary") as if you know. You don't. That's why we're having the discussion. What makes the right wing tick is a complex subject.

OK, wait a second. I was specifically reacting to what you described. *All* of the comments about racism that you attributed to them (except the last about social media) were dismissals of the idea that concerns about racism are real -- all attributed those concerns to some kind of pretext or false consciousness. That's what you described. That's reactionary. It's not a real set of views about racism, it's a set of reactions to minimize concerns about racism. If you heard them say something else, share it.

And the point about social media is surely correct. There is much more attention now to the fact that cops shoot black people for no good reason because there are so many cameras around now, including on mobile phones, and those stories can get spread through social media instead of having to get picked up by a local newscast.

I don't know what a false consciousness would be...

Ah, OK, you didn't understand my point. You said,

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

On the other side of this debate are a bunch of arguments that fasten together in various ways:

-Wokeness is just victim fetishization
-Metoo, Wokeness, Democratic Socialism's emergence are signs of a declining society, with analogues in every previously collapsed society
-Metoo, Wokeness, Environmentalism are new secular religions (I agree with this to some extent, in regard to certain people - a sentiment best articulated by Alain de Botton elsewhere)
-This is all just a play for a bigger piece of the economic pie via redistribution
-Social media is connecting disenchanted people

The first three of these are different ways to say that people who complain about racism are expressing meritless complaints because they are blinded by some sort of false consciousness -- victim fetishization, a declining society, secular religions. In other words, you can ignore what they say, because they are deluded. The fourth (redistribution) suggests that complaints about racism is just a play for economic benefit. All of these reactions are efforts to delegitimize complaints about racism as grounded in irrationality or bad faith. The fifth is too, because dismissing people as disenchanted suggests they aren't thinking straight.

...I do think the right has a very unlearned view of racism. The question is why. I suspect from what I have heard, some of it is intentional ignorance of the subject. Some of it unintentional. And some of it stems from the left lumping racism in with a million other grievances.

You had me until the last sentence, which is bullshit. It is the fault of no one on the left that the right doesn't take racism seriously. When you pick up the Philadelphia newspaper in the morning, the score of last night's San Jose Sharks game is lumped in with a million other pieces of information, and you have to turn to the Sports section and look in the right place to find it. Anyone who is even slightly interested in the Sharks can do that, and will not lack information about the Sharks simply because there's a lot going on in the world. Anyone who is "unlearned" (an odd word, because we are talking about the world we live in, not something you need to go to a dusty library to see) about racism doesn't care.

You know very well what eating the elephant means. The systemic inequities in our country are myriad, from wealth inequality to racism to sexism. I could fill 300 lines of text with valid complaints many different groups legitimately hold.

When you try to discuss all of these issues at once, the conversation becomes incoherent.

Newspapers are famously incoherent, right, because of the way they cover all sorts of issues at once? This is why they have gone extinct, ushered out in favor of this new internet technology that helpfully permits you to only think about one thing at a time.

You cannot, as the left often does, mix racism into a stew of other issues which are not as pressing and expect any change. If our huge list of problems in this country is an elephant, then as the saying goes, you must eat the elephant in bites. Not in one bite. If systemic racism is the most important problem of the moment, and I think along with our economy it is, the left should frame it as priority #1. Like Obama framed health care as his priority #1.

This is inane. Our country has a lot going on, and a lot of problems. "The left" is not one thing. Once the USSR fell apart, we stopped having a Central Committee to take orders from and all started to have our own opinions about things.

It's great that you think systematic racism is a big problem. To make progress on combatting it, you should figure how to respond when people say they can't do anything about it because the left has grievances and that global warming is problem too, etc.

Corey Booker, Rand Paul, and Trump just pushed through the biggest crim justice reform in the past 30 years. And when it was done, Booker and Paul both said it's not enough. The Kochs' and their foundation, which has $500mil dedicated to electing people with their free trade conservative mission, is pushing for crim justice reform in statehouses right now. Florida just passed a bill giving felons the right to vote, and Rick Santorum campaigned for it.

Yeah, it confuses the hell of me, too. But as I said, I'm not looking that gift horse in the mouth.

I'm not confused, I just don't think there's much political commitment to it on the part of the Right. Do you disagree with any of this? Do you think that any of the GOP supporters of that bill will get more votes in GOP primaries because of their support?