I am familiar with the concept of reality TV, which only speaks to my point. But I take your correction.
Blonde is the canonical apex of the white woman hierarchy, at least in the West.
Correct. Postmodern reification of what is "truer than true" (c.f. Catch-22, All the Things They Carried) can have its place, but when your message is 'Africa is eo ipso dangerous and it is not racist to interject so', embedding a video containing multiple classically racist tropes as an authentic article of an African mugging a European woman as supporting material is counterproductive. It would be bad enough to condemn a continent and a race on the basis of a single crime, but that it was a TV scene makes it worse.Quote:
2. You summary of the video: it was a staged one
This is why I scoff at people who assume everyone always marks a sharp divide between fiction and realty. Representation matters, and scenes like this one and the clip from National Lampoon's Vacation I embedded earlier are enduringly absorbed as reality by many viewers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwBoa-NbNL8
By the way, here is a very real video of aggressive police unjustly harassing a group of young men of color.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KN_98uXT0qk
I disagree that Harlem is dangerous. But being a purely subjective label, it could be that you have applied some legitimate definition of danger to include Harlem. So what is the context in which you brought it up? You were dismissing the poet Chukovsky's eremiad on Africa as being innocuous and non-racist in its stereotypical concern with the people and animals of that place, in the expectation that it would also be uncontroversial and non-racist to enumerate Harlem as a dangerous place. (The logic of the juxtaposition was never clear in the first place.)Quote:
A short rundown of your stance: there are a lot of dangerous places in the world (including Kyiv and Ukraine - I agree, why not?), but you can't mention some of them (Africa and Harlem) not to sound racist.
I tried to get at why you would mention Harlem in the first place, and why you thought it should go without elaboration that Harlem is dangerous. Of questionable relevance to the discussion of the poem thought it may still have been, why was your first instinct to invoke Harlem, rather than Mt. Everest or a football riot? Why was your sole articulable criterion for danger the existence of crime, which I have not known to be a sufficient condition even in casual conversation? In the end the common overriding element of danger was that both places are famously populated by black people. In a thread about racism, where you've relentlessly discouraged the framing of racism as a sop to undeserving agitators.
Can you see it from the perspective of someone who minimally accepts the existence of anti-black racism, why they might scrutinize someone who works from the premise that blacks are overly-entitled, dangerous, coddled, attention hogs in a thread about, among other things, systematic police violence against black persons?
Choosing to emphasize them suggests one thinks they are a relatively-important issue, which demands justification.Quote:
Because many people tend to play them down not to sound racist.
Your words don't match up to the stated ideal. For example:Quote:
You intentionally try to put into my mouth words that I never said or forget what I did say. I more than once repeated my stance on ANY boots on ANY necks. But you choose to see what fits with your :shrug:
It is up to you whether you want to view a unanimous jury decision acquitting a black man as greatly racially-motivated, but one could take that for given arguendo. You would still be leaving unexplained what the racial implications of the acquittal are, how they manifest anywhere in American society, and why you ultimately perform insistent concern over the possibility that a black person somewhere might get an undeserved break while giving not an ounce's worth of regard to the millions who suffer documented material and moral oppression. Isn't that - starkly differential consideration?Quote:
It is true, his race wasn't the reason for acquittal. Yet race factored greatly into the verdict, which it shouldn't. [These two sentences may contradict each other] That is why we should be concerned about the racial implications of OJ's acquittal. You seem to be concerned about the racial implications of all other events - from children's doggerels to cannibalism. Not about OJ, somehow.
Would you prefer X number of patriotic Ukrainians become disappeared in the hunt for a Russian spy? You have the spirit of a true Stalinist if so, I guess. Our much-vaunted Enlightenment ideals have led us in a different direction, distinct from any racial politics.Quote:
It is a matter of disgrace if a single gulity person should be acquitted. Race doesn't matter. For you it seems it does - because there are four centuries of slavery behind them. So you try to weigh up hundreds against smaller numbers. The counting doesn't matter. The guilt does.
https://www.cato.org/policing-in-ame...ckstones-ratio
https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=23648Quote:
The American system, grounded in the British Common Law, has long erred on the side of protecting innocence. Thus we presume an accused person's innocence until they are proven guilty. As the preeminent English jurist William Blackstone wrote,"[B]etter that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer."74 This principle can also be found in religious texts and in the writings of the American Founders.75 Benjamin Franklin went further arguing "it is better a hundred guilty persons should escape than one innocent person should suffer."76
[...]
The survey posed dilemma to the American people, asking respondents which of the following scenarios they believe would be worse:
Having 20,000 people in prison who are actually innocent; or,
Having 20,000 people not in prison who are actually guilty
The survey found that a majority (60%) of Americans say it would be worse to have 20,000 innocent people in prison, while 40% say it would be worse to have 20,000 people who are actually guilty but not in prison.
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As noted before, nearly all of these individuals were arrested for having fit the profile of a potential enemy, not for things they had actually done. Stalin proceeded from the belief that innocent people would inevitably be repressed in the process of destroying enemies and that it was better to arrest innocents than to let the guilty go free. As he stated during the Great Terror, “'every communist is a possible hidden enemy. And because it is not easy to recognize the enemy, the goal is achieved even if only 5 percent of those killed are truly enemies'” (p. 196).
The invocation of doublethink is poetic set against the Stalin excerpt.Quote:
That's doublethink at its best: you can't remind blacks about their skin color which you can very well do with whites.
Of course that's not remotely what I said. You can remind anyone of their skin color as such. What you may not do is pretend that being reminded of your skin color (and associated privilege relative to others) is a form of oppression against whites.
When you are so dismissive, while declining either to defend or substantiate your statements nor rebut my own, you only demonstrate your unseriousness and vindicate all my complaints about your posture.Quote:
I see. My arguments are always either red herring or working too hard. Except that they aren't arguments but facts.
Your arguments are a paragon of objectivity and are never far-fetched. Rock on.
Just below is an example of a red herring, pointing to the existence of cannibalism in some parts of the Pacific as though it could be a defense of persistent reference to Hawaiians as cannibals in spite of repeated notice that they were not.
No, I have largely remained planted in the realm of fact while probing your insoluble personal sentiment. See above. My moral status does not enter into the conversation.Quote:
Isn't the bold a?
A translation of this stement of yours:
Being on a moral high ground (as you think) gives you unmitigated temerity to be right even before the debate starts. Something like "Don't you dare to question the correctness of my opinion". :hail:
It's exasperating that I take the trouble to carefully and repeatedly explain to you the deficiencies in your stances and you think you can just "Nuh-UH" your way clear.
To the contrary, you might be too emotionally invested in your innocence and unassailable rectitude. Even by now you've hardly deigned to engage with a thing I've said. I'd hoped at the least we'd found shared understanding of "Black Lives Matter," but even there you retracted. Yet you act as though you have standing to demandQuote:
The importance and relevance are gauged agaisnt the result. The latter boils down to my realizing after tons of words even more that being emotionally invested you tend to see one side of the story only, get angry at people who try to dispute your attitude, and simplify the versatility of motifs by reducing them to racism. Is this what you have been trying to prove? Hardly.
Полное издевательствоQuote:
This is not the first attempt to try to sound teacher-like to me. Do differently
You wouldn't tolerate this from either a student or a peer in your own life. Please have the courtesy of addressing the substance of what I post if you're going to comment on it. Paraphrasing it back to me in an ingenuous and accurate way would be a start.
Some things that racism is, for reference. Racism is the belief that one's prejudicial attitudes are based in observable fact, when they actually reflect taste-based aversion. Racism is reinforcing systematic benefit of the doubt for one race against another. Racism is condoning ethnic hierarchies. Racism is the anxiety that it is worse in principle to be associated with the word "racism" than to uphold racism.