Quote from: Ian Warner;426128The Mafia too.

Interesting that the only one that meets the criteria of the US Government so far happens to be that one.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;425948It's true though, the contemporary States' Rights position is mainly about being able to discriminate against other minorities than blacks (mainly gays, non-Christians, and women). But it's a shitty idea with a shitty pedigree.

No, that's the current left-wing straw man argument about States' Rights, though there are certainly some racists that hop on the bandwagon for those reasons.  For many, it's about limited government and local control of a variety of policies including education, land management, business regulations, and so on.  While States' Rights has it's problems, so does centralized management and it's no mistake that the more power gets concentrated centrally, the less democratic and accountable governments become.  And I suppose I should add that one can make a States' Rights argument from the left to support a variety of issues that play well in liberal states like Massachusetts, New York, and so on but would never fly on a national level.  After all, haven't several states legalized gay marriage?

If your argument is that the term "States' Rights" is forever tainted by it's association with the Confederacy and it's defense of slavery, I'll acknowledge that's a problem, so what do you suggest it be called?

Have to agree with John here. There is some blame that belongs to the States Rights position just like there is some blame resting squarely on the shoulders of the support for a centralized Federal Government. The dichotomy is actually at the heart of the United States, and I think it is a good thing on the long run, not a bad thing. Just like there is a separation of powers, or two chambers of Congress, this is part of these repartitions of responsibilities that create dynamics which, in the end, benefit society rather than impede it.

Quote from: John Morrow;426199No, that's the current left-wing straw man argument about States' Rights, though there are certainly some racists that hop on the bandwagon for those reasons.  For many, it's about limited government and local control of a variety of policies including education, land management, business regulations, and so on.

Education is a loaded one from what I can see... from the revisionist stuff the Texas state school board was pushing on textbooks... there is a definite attempt to push fundy Christian religious agendas like Creationism, re-contextualize the ACW, pave over civil rights issues in U.S. history.
Most of the people I see shouting about that stuff seem worthy of suspicion to me. Especially when just about all of them appear to be older white people with a comfortable life-style.

See? This is why politics should be outlawed on this site! Everyone has their ideas, and not a single one has been changed, nor will be. It just creates an atmosphere where people will really start to dislike each other.

i.e. This thread is Tangency in microcosm. It just needs someone to come up with gay rights and kittens to finish it off.

Quote from: danbuter;426207It just creates an atmosphere where people will really start to dislike each other.

I'm guessing that by "people" you mean, in fact, you. If you can't agree to disagree on important matters like religion and politics, then you need to take a course in basic human interactions. You can disagree and argue with people without hating them, as persons. You can even be FRIENDS with people and disagree and argue with them! Unbelievable! I know! Thinking that just because someone would be a socialist, or tea-party activist, this makes them "bad people", is completely, utterly stupid.

People are more complicated, deeper, and richer than that. It's just a matter of being mature about it.

Quote from: Simlasa;426206Education is a loaded one from what I can see... from the revisionist stuff the Texas state school board was pushing on textbooks... there is a definite attempt to push fundy Christian religious agendas like Creationism, re-contextualize the ACW, pave over civil rights issues in U.S. history.

It's always a problem if you don't agree with it and great if you do.  And don't think that there aren't people with political agendas for pushing science education that's explicitly hostile to religion, making civil rights issues a primary focus of US history, and so on.  The question is, who gets to decide what your children are taught?  You?  Someone in Washington, DC?  Someone in the UN?  And what can you do about it if their agenda doesn't match yours?

Quote from: Simlasa;426206Most of the people I see shouting about that stuff seem worthy of suspicion to me. Especially when just about all of them appear to be older white people with a comfortable life-style.

Do you have a problem with older white people being comfortable or maybe you think they all need to be punished for the sins of their race?  And, of course, you expect them all to allow others to punish them and ruin their lifestyle without complaint, right?

Quote from: danbuter;426207See? This is why politics should be outlawed on this site!

Well, you can thank the owner/operator of this site for tossing out this political hand-grenade.  It's pretty difficult to discuss the topic of this thread without delving into the politics of it.

Quote from: John Morrow;426222It's always a problem if you don't agree with it and great if you do.  And don't think that there aren't people with political agendas for pushing science education that's explicitly hostile to religion, making civil rights issues a primary focus of US history, and so on.  The question is, who gets to decide what your children are taught?  You?  Someone in Washington, DC?  Someone in the UN?  And what can you do about it if their agenda doesn't match yours?

I'm fine for teaching all sides of a controversial issue... but not so good with one state wanting to basically ignore things that are pretty much standard curriculum in 'first-world' countries... such as evolution being accepted scientific theory and creationism having no place in a science classroom.
I don't think parents should have the final say on what their children are taught, no... but if parents don't like what is being taught they have every right to offer their children the opposing viewpoint.

QuoteDo you have a problem with older white people being comfortable or maybe you think they all need to be punished for the sins of their race?  And, of course, you expect them all to allow others to punish them and ruin their lifestyle without complaint, right?

Neither, but I do think they are basically acting out of fear of the 'other'. Believing themselves somehow persecuted while actually being privileged.

Quote from: John Morrow;426199No, that's the current left-wing straw man argument about States' Rights, though there are certainly some racists that hop on the bandwagon for those reasons.  For many, it's about limited government and local control of a variety of policies including education, land management, business regulations, and so on.  While States' Rights has it's problems, so does centralized management and it's no mistake that the more power gets concentrated centrally, the less democratic and accountable governments become.  And I suppose I should add that one can make a States' Rights argument from the left to support a variety of issues that play well in liberal states like Massachusetts, New York, and so on but would never fly on a national level.  After all, haven't several states legalized gay marriage?

If your argument is that the term "States' Rights" is forever tainted by it's association with the Confederacy and it's defense of slavery, I'll acknowledge that's a problem, so what do you suggest it be called?

I suggest the widely used term "devolution", which is what it's properly called anyhow.

Also, comrade, I'm an anarchist. My position almost certainly involves a more radical devolution of power from all levels of government than anyone else here. You don't need to convince me that the capitalist bureaucratic state is a bad idea.

Quote from: Simlasa;426227I'm fine for teaching all sides of a controversial issue... but not so good with one state wanting to basically ignore things that are pretty much standard curriculum in 'first-world' countries... such as evolution being accepted scientific theory and creationism having no place in a science classroom.

Much of the reason why creationism is being injected into science classrooms is militant atheists positioning science as being in opposition to religion.  Telling people that evolution invalidated religion didn't convince people to abandon religion.  It convinced them to attack science.

Quote from: Simlasa;426227Neither, but I do think they are basically acting out of fear of the 'other'. Believing themselves somehow persecuted while actually being privileged.

I've read various essays and sites about "privilege" and the whole idea is really nonsense, especially as an assumption based on a single trait like race or sex.

Do you have any idea what my father's generation endured during the Great Depression?  My father recently showed his neighbors how fathers made their daughters toy cradles out of cylindrical cardboard salt containers during the Depression because they couldn't afford to actually buy them toys and his neighbors never heard of anything like that.  Many of my relatives had jobs before they were 10, not for spending money but to support their families.  The only reason my father had a bicycle is that he did deliveries and the guy let him use the bicycle when he wasn't working.  He had to work for the movie theater to be able to see movies.  He had no hot running water, no electric refrigeration, no television, and no air conditioning.  My mother's sisters remember living in a tenement with their family with two rooms and a shared bathroom in the hall and her brother sold flowers when he was 9 to help support his family.  Classes in my father's school had up to 45 students in them.  And during that period, white people discriminated against other white people on the basis of ethnicity, religion, and class which limited the opportunities people had (my father would have chosen a different career if his ethnicity hadn't been an issue).

I can go on and on with this stuff, but don't you think they might be a little annoyed by having some college-educated punk who never held a real job until they were in their late 20s telling them that they lived a life of "privilege?  In fact, one of the things that annoys my father the most is that welfare recipients were placed in apartments that would have been too good for my grandparents and proceeded to destroy them.

By the way, I've lived as a minority in Japan and, yes, being a minority and not speaking the language makes life difficult, but to blame the majority for that or demand that they specially accommodate other people is absurd.  Should I have demanded that the Japanese provide English translations for everything and institute quotas for non-Japanese workers so it would have been easier for me to find a job so I could have stayed there?  Should I have forced my way into rentals where the landlord didn't want to rent to a foreigner?

Minorities and the poor have always had a way to rise up and become comfortable.  They do that by advancing themselves rather than tearing other people down, which is exactly what poor white people did after the Great Depression(*).  Remember, the Irish were once discriminated against as badly as blacks were and the reasons why Irish mobs murdered blacks during the Draft Riots in 1863 was that they saw the blacks as competition for jobs.

And if you haven't noticed, Asians are kicking everyone's butts in the United States because they spend more time working hard and telling their kids to get educated and work hard than they do trying to figure out how to take someone else's money or win the lottery.  The formula for success is pretty clear.  Education.  Hard work.  Thrift.  That's exactly what my father's generation did to get the "privilege" you begrudge them.

Some more food for thought.

(*) Yes, there was discrimination and still is, but they did not succeed because of that discrimination (the largest income rises and expansion in available occupations for blacks occurred during the 1940s and 1950s).

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;426239Also, comrade, I'm an anarchist. My position almost certainly involves a more radical devolution of power from all levels of government than anyone else here. You don't need to convince me that the capitalist bureaucratic state is a bad idea.

While I'm not an anarchist, I do believe that the concentration of power is a problem, whether it's concentrated in rich people, corporations, churches, schools, or governments and that, too, sometimes leaves me the odd man out in political discussions.  The important thing to remember is that governments and corporations are both run by people and psychopaths and other unsavory individuals migrate to where the power is, whether that's government or business or the church or school.  So it's always best to assume that any power might be wielded by a psychopath.

Quote from: John Morrow;426243While I'm not an anarchist, I do believe that the concentration of power is a problem, whether it's concentrated in rich people, corporations, churches, schools, or governments and that, too, sometimes leaves me the odd man out in political discussions.  The important thing to remember is that governments and corporations are both run by people and psychopaths and other unsavory individuals migrate to where the power is, whether that's government or business or the church or school.  So it's always best to assume that any power might be wielded by a psychopath.

Sort of. The system of organisation we use in these fields disproportionately places power in the hands of the most ruthless exploiters of that power, who then use it to crush alternate systems of economic and political activity that would otherwise out compete them in a variety of ways.

Mondragon, for example, is a world leader in producing white goods despite being run as a worker's democracy with high levels of participation by its employees and a commitment to their wellbeing over the accumulation of profit for shareholders. Power within Mondragon is not within the hands of psychopaths, and it provides us with one possible model, amongst many, of how we can and should structure our economic and political activity to avoid that fate, as opposed to simply handing it over to entities like federal or regional governments.

The only reason that there aren't more of these sorts of arrangements than already exist (and there are thousands of them anyhow, albeit mostly smaller than Mondragon) is that they are usually crushed violently and / or colluded against by the powerful who at risk of losing their power to them.

Getting from the one system to the others is the whole process of "dual power", which is a bit outside the scope of this thread and discussion.

Quote from: John Morrow;426241Much of the reason why creationism is being injected into science classrooms is militant atheists positioning science as being in opposition to religion.  Telling people that evolution invalidated religion didn't convince people to abandon religion.  It convinced them to attack science.

I'm not sure how that supports letting Kentucky raise a bunch of kids who know their Bible... and not much else.
(I've never had any scientist or teacher try to tell me that 'evolution invalidated religion'... but I know that's how a lot of church folk see it).

QuoteI've read various essays and sites about "privilege" and the whole idea is really nonsense, especially as an assumption based on a single trait like race or sex.

When I say 'privilege' all I mean is that they have been members of the group that was dominant culturally for the last... big block of time. It doesn't mean they stole what they have out of the mouths of poor black babies... but it does mean they were born with that little bit more going for them (white European heritage). My father grew up in the Depression too... I've heard the stories. They were a tougher bunch than we are.
Doesn't change the fact that during that whole time, if he went up for a job against an equally skilled black man/hispanic woman he stood a better chance of getting it because he looked like the guy doing the hiring.
Now that's not so true and it's scary for them (us).

Quote from: Simlasa;426249So yay, two wrongs make a right! Let's let Kentucky raise a bunch of kids who know their Bible... and not much else.

The solution is to teach evolution as the mainstream scientific explanation for things and acknowledge that it's a theory that does not necessarily invalidate the religious beliefs of students and their parents.  In other words, "This is what we are teaching you and you will be tested on, but you don't have to believe it."

Quote from: Simlasa;426249When I say 'privilege' all I mean is that they have been members of the group that was dominant culturally for the last... big block of time. It doesn't mean they stole what they have out of the mouths of poor black babies... but it does mean they were born with that little bit more going for them (white European heritage). My father grew up in the Depression too... I've heard the stories. They were a tougher bunch than we are.

The problem is that generalizing like that is doing the same thing that racists do when they assume that all black people are criminals.  You can't possibly know if the plight of an individual white person was more privileged than those of individual minorities.  I certainly didn't have an easier childhood than Barack Obama's daughters and my daughters aren't likely to attend Sidwell Friends.  My father never went to Harvard like Thomas Sowell did.  And this totally ignores that what people now think of as one "white" culture wasn't, and sometimes still isn't.  Irish, Italians, and Eastern Europeans were all heavily discriminated against as immigrants.  My father tells me about an Irish guy who was dating an Italian girl who was told by the priest, from the pulpit, to get back to the Irish-Catholic church where he belonged.  And there are still various classes of white people.  Ever hear the name "trailer trash"?

Quote from: Simlasa;426249Doesn't change the fact that during that whole time, if he went up for a job against an equally skilled black man/hispanic woman he stood a better chance of getting it because he looked like the guy doing the hiring.

Perhaps you missed the part where I mentioned that my father had to abandon the career he loved because he was the wrong ethnicity and didn't have the connections to compete.  He did something else with his life.  So should he get reparations and resent someone else's success?  Does he get a pass on being categorized as "privileged".  Or do you, knowing almost nothing about my father and a hypothetical black person, really believe that you can justly determine who is more "privileged" and use that judgement to take away from one person and give to the other?