https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
This thread was entirely predictably awful.
Education.
People need to believe justice is applied equally: white as well as black, rich as well as poor.
Close the extreme and growing wealth gap in the country.
Someone who is racist or fascist by definition rejects the notion that justice ought to be applied equally and just about anything else that you would likely consider moral or proper.
And fascism also is not a function of wealth inequality. Fascism has historically grown out of the middle-class. Seymour Martin Lipset identified fascism as "Extremismus der Mitte" in Germany. It's well at home in the petite bourgeoisie or in the US I guess you'd say the suburban middle class.
I see fear behind most of the worst behavior in our modern politics. Education goes a long way to address fear.
Want politically charged? I suspect the reason the U.S. has its current president is due in part to a emasculated voting class lashing out from feelings of powerlessness. Education would have gone a long way to making them feel more relevant in a constantly changing economy/society.
As to people believing that justice should be applied equally—you’ll find few Americans who disagree with that. What you’ll find is a lot of people who disagree about what that means.
The final point is a random left-wing wishlist item that has nothing to do with fighting “fascism.”
I would say the perception that the system is rigged toward the elite and that the masses will never attain any measure of wealth is directly correlated to the populist election of a president (with fascist leanings) that we see right now in the U.S.
But perhaps I am ignorant of the term "fascist".
Wealthy people will have wealthy kids (the right of inheritance), kids can use the wealth to increase their wealth because they will have more opportunities to exploit.
Poor people will have poor kids, which wont have enough opportunities to exploit and will probably stay poor.
It just snowballs from here, unless you wipe the economy and make everyone equal again. But then a couple of people will get wealthy again, does not matter if pure luck or skill, and the trend will continue.
Life is not fair and will not be, until we find a way to make everyone equal and provide equal opportunities.
We severely reduced inherited political power in the West. It was bloody and painful, but it was accomplished.
We can reduce or remove inherited economic power also. Hopefully it doesn't have to be so bloody (I am not so sure).
I also think it is likely necessary to do so if we intend for humanity to move forward.
This is not a solved problem, so I can not provide you an answer on how to fix it. Hence please see my last sentence in my previous post:
Life is not fair and will not be, until we find a way to make everyone equal and provide equal opportunities.
Tigers are animals with stripes. Zebras are animals with stripes. A zebra is not a tiger. The green new deal could be part of a fascist movement, but it’s not.
There's a kind of "horseshoe theory of politics" thing that happens with observations about Soviet communism and Italian fascism. Both systems are bad, and they share specific bad characteristics. But they are not the same; in fact, they're antithetical to each other.
I think the Green New Deal is poorly specified and ill-advised, but it is not Soviet communism and certainly not fascistic, and AOC is not a "charismatic authoritarian" in the fascist sense. It was a silly comparison to have made.
2. Because many of us had a baseline belief that the Obama administration wouldn't enact punitive policies towards undocumented people for sport, and there's clear evidence that the current administration does that. So the calculus isn't the same.
3. There are drastically more caged children now, because the current administration adopted policies specifically intended to increase the caging of children, as a deterrent. So the policies themselves aren't the same.
Bush started the use of drones in war, but Obama bears the blame for them in my opinion, because he could have backed away from it but instead he doubled down. I would say the same for the treatment of refugees at the border. Obama built the cages, but Trump uses them with a sickening joy and enthusiasm.
The exception was some misaligned activists that accidentally posted Obama-era photos of "caged" children (behind a fence) a couple weeks early, which happened before some lawsuit forced the feds to release the children instead of housing them with their parents.
Sorry, no I am actually super upset about the ongoing detention and inhumane treatment of people at the border. ALSO about family separation, but the cages are immoral to me as well. Many of these people are not "illegal aliens" but people seeking asylum which is NOT illegal.
Nonetheless, the point of my comment is that children are not being caged, they're now being separated, as happens when suspects get arrested.
> Mirian G, a mother from Honduras, came to the U.S. with her young son on Feb. 20, 2018. She presented herself to immigration authorities and sought asylum, committing no crime. During her interview, Mirian provided immigration officers with several identification documents for her child which listed her as his mother. The next morning, Border Patrol agents took away her 18-month-old son with no explanation. She did not see him again for two months.
Even if she had crossed illegally, separating an infant from its mother like this for two hours is unacceptable to me, much less two months - and I would hope it would also be unacceptable to you.
Fortunately, today the mother would be told to stay in Mexico, and get to show up later at the port of entry for her asylum hearing. So we've fixed that problem.
The only thing they agree on is they want to exploit heightened tensions to start a civil war with the belief they would eliminate the other side.
Just from the top of my hat, the latest example of a hundred-plus years worth of statements/actions that disprove that statement: https://www.n-tv.de/mediathek/videos/politik/Linken-Mitglied...
Shown there, a statement caught on tape at a strategy-summit of the German far-left party Die Linke (I freely translate): "...regarding Energiewende [German Green New Deal]… after the revolution, when the 1% has been shot, we still want to heat our homes…"
To which the party chairman, Bernd Riexinger, present on the same stage replied: "We're not gonna shoot them, we're going to put them to good use"
Maybe I'm biased, but I come from an underpriviliged background (in a first world country), yet made great strides and climbed the social ladder. Throughout my experience, people the most concerned with trying to frame my poor childhood as a "class situation" were almost always middle-to-upper-class people.
At some point it even felt like rich kids use this framing to keep poorer ones form passing them on the social ladder. But I'm convinced by now that the urge to frame groups into instituitional victims, is something more personal: Having the luxury of never having to grow up because of their parent's financial background, they rather choose to pick a fight they can't loose because it's not theirs.
I'm also from an underprivileged background (in a first world country as well), I witnessed first hand how the odds stacked against me have translated into my lived experiences.
Maybe unlike you, I have fought and lost against people with better parental financial situation I have a perspective that this is an issue, not something that can just be gritted through. Not all success is through hard work.
If I were to be just cynical, I could argue that your loss may be due to processing your uphill battle via this whole marxist framing and not via a more independent "OK, how can I improve my situation?" (e.g. switch companies/sector/trade/town/country).
But I agree, Not all success is through hard work. . Absolutely. My success is a proof of this, because I'm a mediocre programmer at best. Which invigorates my disbelief in programmers advocating the ultra-left Marx: In the programmers job-market how can one feel disadvantaged at all? The financial crisis 2008 left us untouched, while the majority of society were furloughed or fired. Same story this year.
My advice: This odds-stacked-against-you-framing is your biggest waste of time. Financially and spiritually.
What I would call "ultra-left" are militant anarcho-communists who believe in abolishing strong systems of centralized control in favor of community rule. So no nations, only self-governed communities of some arbitrarily small size. This jives with "ultra-left" in areas with leftist militia uprisings. Not saying it's practical, but there are well-established schools of leftist thought at play that predate Stalin and Mao.
Liberalism is a center-right ideology that tries to marry right-wing capital control economies with left-wing social values. Many on the left regard liberalism (and neo-liberalism) as a failed project, because with any clash between economics and social values, the economics tend to win out. I'm not saying communism is the answer, but a move away from a scarcity-based economy would be a good start.
What exactly is someone who spent their whole life in coastal Oregon or rural Iowa supposed to do when they see rioting and looting in Seattle, Portland, Chicago, etc., and then hear people say we can’t condemn it because of structural racism. They’ve never seen the block-by-block segregation in Chicago. They’ve never lived in east coast cities where highways were built where cities had previously been divided on segregationist lines. They certainly didn’t vote for the municipal governments that hired the cops that killed black property with impunity for decades. Their experience with the police, meanwhile, is with small town cops, not big city police departments with body armor and armored vehicles conducting no-knock raids.
I happen to agree that people in Osceola County Iowa (where my wife grew up, and which according to the census has six black people in a county of 6,000) should educate themselves about what’s going on in the rest of the country. But saying they’re using “dog whistles” is ascribing to them a state of mind that’s completely unwarranted.
Oh come on, at this point you have to be living under a rock to think that "Black lives matter" means other lives don't matter. At this point, that is just not excusable and the folks who say 'All lives matter' are unbelievably insensitive in saying so, and they are very much a part of the problem.
And we have a president with a penchant for dogwhistling thanks in part to folks like those from rural Iowa, so we really shouldn't cut them any slack (that's no knock on you/your family personally, I'm just sayin').
There have been multiple people killed as a result of the riots, including two police officers, but nobody on the news is talking about those deaths. Instead, people are talking about how those riots are justified. Every single store on the block in DC where my wife has an office had its windows smashed in. But the mayor of DC is focused in painting a giant “black lives matter” sign on the street. How are people supposed to take all that, other than as an assertion that “other lives don’t matter?”
One of the great virtues of Americans is that they don’t condone social upheaval. It’s not like the country where I’m from, where they have strikes and violent rioting after every election. You need some really grave to justify rioting in America. I think there is a strong argument that the oppression of black people in America is that grave. But it’s really asking a lot for people to appreciate why based entirely on some clips they see in the news, and assertions from talking heads in the news that they don’t otherwise trust.
I’ve got two cops who live within a couple of blocks. One just had a baby boy. Our closest neighbor friend is a former cop. Wonderful guy, knows everything about being a dad. The last time I live in a predominantly white largely suburban/exurban county. The last time I personally got pulled over by a cop, the officer was almost apologetic, explaining that he was pulling people over because some folks in the neighborhood had complained about people speeding through on the way to the freeway interchange. We have a few officer involved deaths every year, and it’s usually a mentally ill old white guy. But I’ve lived in Chicago, New York, Philly, Baltimore, DC, and Atlanta. Over the years, being constantly faced with the economic disparity between blacks and whites was crushing. It’s so bad and so wrong and we are so woefully far from fixing it. There is a pit in my gut that counteracts my natural instinct to condemn what I’d otherwise perceive as a grave attack on the social fabric. But would I feel this way if I didn’t see the injustice first hand? What if I had only lived somewhere where all the homeless people are white? Could I really even begin to understand just by being told or reading about it?
https://www.inquirer.com/news/stan-wischnowski-resigns-phila...
Napear responded: "Haven't heard from you in years. ALL LIVES MATTER...EVERY SINGLE ONE!!!"
Later in an interview Napear claimed to not know what that meant. "I’m not as educated on BLM as I thought I was. I had no idea that when I said ‘All Lives Matter’ that it was counter to what BLM was trying to get across."
The guy has had a sports talk show for years. Black Lives Matter was founded in 2013, and even if Napear had never made it out of the sports section in the news, should have known about it via issues like Kaepernick. it is absolutely implausible that Napear didn't know what his one-tweet, all-caps reply meant. If I were his bosses, I would have fired him just for being bad at lying. And even if he were somehow being honest, that is a) admitting to an incredible level of ignorance for a guy whose job is covering a sport where 75% of the players are black, and b) incredibly poor judgement to jump into the top political issue of the moment without even knowing what he was saying.
[1] https://twitter.com/boogiecousins/status/1267271720282415104
So, I think that the correct answer to your question may be "nothing" - unfortunately, it's already too late.