lookupthere

Definitely. Most of Sub-Saharan Africa as well doesn't have an issue with breastfeeding at all.

The strange thing for me in the US is that the left doesn't seem bothered by it. They are usually all up to point out arbitrary social constructs but this isn't an issue for them? Am I missing something?

How is violence in pursuit of freedom okay when it is done by the anti-colonial founders but not by abolitionists? In my opinion, everyone from Nat Turner to John Brown was a hero. People need to realize slavery was like the Holocaust scaled up by orders of magnitude, and then just be consistent in when their attitudes on violence. If violence against slaveholders isn't justified, then American independence can't be justified either.

It's the fundamental economics of platforms. At the same time that they are very democratic, they are also very monopolistic. It's weird and not something you should analyse without undoing your intuition about companies. The economics is very different.

Book recommendation: Modern Monopolies by Alex Moazed

Inoreader is wonderful.

This is entirely true. It's also the reason that more and more extreme ideas flourish.

The disingenuous engagement disillusions more reasonable people. People left of center see how Barack Obama was treated for the mildest of progressive ideas, and then decide that there's no point playing nice. I'm sure there is a similar analogy for conservatives.

If you don't listen to reasonable, accommodating people, don't be surprised that you are selecting for people on the extremes.

I think the point is that you are defining systemic racism wrongly if it excludes the drug war.

I always thought systemic racism means the policies that lead up to this. I never interpreted it to mean that if we look at the data for a particular institution, we will discover evidence that individuals within that institution are conspiring against black people.

Like, the drug war and mass incarceration ARE the systemic racism...

The author acknowledges every culture has its own upper strata There are selection mechanisms which can amplify or inhibit the effect of this upper strata - compare Cubans and Mexicans. For black Americans, that selection mechanism is racism. In 1921, whatever the black upper class had achieved in Tulsa Oklahoma was burned to the ground by white supremacists - businesspeople were ruined by racism. Whatever opportunities the black upper class could have made of home ownership were dashed by redlining, the creation of suburbs excluded them from the foundational middle-class wealth building exercise of the 20th century. Policy created the ghettos at large, with economic pressure for exploitative landlords which incentivized short term earnings to pay the rent, including crime. For black Americans, the upper strata have never gotten a fair break by design of policy (until very very recently). Despite this, a lot of black Americans carry the exact same ethos that the author acknowledges - go read Malcolm X. The idea of 'let's lift ourselves up first' is very old in the black community - the reason it doesn't work is because racist policy always puts the boot on it.

The author comes close to describing the problem, but fails at the solution. "Let's do better guys!" doesn't work - even when a man as charismatic as Malcolm X proposes it. Nowadays, the failure of the black family is used to argue against government intervention to assist African Americans. But the man who pioneered the idea that a failure of the black family would lead to chaos, Daniel Moynihan, actually had genuine policy based ideas on how to rebuild the black family after years of racist destruction of it: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/10/the-bla... He would agree 100% with the author and Malcolm X and others who recognize the role of family, but he would put the blame directly at the feet of white supremacy.

I agree that diversification is being weaponized. The author acknowledged he was speaking from his limited perspective, and again just as a Latino. One thing I wish would happen is that we would go back to the language of redress for past injustice, not diversity. That was the original point of affirmative action. Every social justice movement has scope creep. We go from "Here are these African Americans, descendents of enslaved people who have been plundered and abused for centuries - we owe them redress and opportunities" to "Diversity is good". From "Black People" (and their very very specific struggle) to "People of Colour" (and feel-good-ism about diversity). Happens in the LGBTI movement too. It's gone from people with very specific, very innate differences which have made them targets of brutal violence... ... to the LGBTQ+ movement which is about every other teenager feeling quirky for 'experimenting with their sexuality' and 'not using labels' to be 'progressive'. We even replaced the most observably biological group in the acronym (I - intersex; literally born with mixed chromosomes, genitalia and/or hormone levels) to the most ideological/political letter we could (Q - queer; which is literally defined as something subversive and simply 'different' in a very political sense).

At least as far as black people are concerned, systemic racism is the problem - it has killed the black upper strata for centuries. It killed the black family and created the conditions which the author properly describes in his essay. And, like Moynihan said, it needs to be resolved with policy, but instead it's being 'resolved' with policing and mass incarceration, which has exacerbated the problem.