The tension between ambitious outsiders and disillusioned insiders

 Our society has a lot of problems, and the problems you see depend of where you sit. I'm basically an 'insider' -- current American society works pretty well for me on a day to day level. One advantage of insider status is that I can get my hands on a lot of information and see the inner workings of the system. From this perspective, I see that we have lots of problems and that they won't be solved by slight reforms or simply trying harder. At its worst, I fear that our society is not sustainable and the perception that society 'works for me' is an illusion based on social constructs that could disappear over the course of a few years -- like my retirement account and health insurance.

One of the big factors prompting my concern with sustainability is that our society was built on the strategy of excluding and exploiting various people (esp. Black Americans), and while we have officially decided that we are no longer interested in excluding them, we have not done a good job of including them. This brings us to a phenomenon that I'll call 'the ambitious outsider'. This is basically a person who feels compelled to gain status/wealth/power as a way of supporting a marginalized community. This mentality is promoted by Stacy Abrams in her book "Lead from the Outside". This strategy has been getting a lot of attention recently among the anti-racist movement, where establishment liberals promote leaders from marginalized communities, and anti-racism often just seems like another strategy that a hypocrite can use for their own self promotion. (Note: One reason I respect Abrams is that after losing the Gubernatorial election in 2018 she turned her efforts to improving minority representation in government rather than simply looking for the next high office she could run for -- like U.S. Senate).

The tension between disillusioned insiders and ambitious outsiders arises from the recognition that status seeking and self-promotion are central to the problems of our current society. 

(I may finish this later. For now, this I all I can get onto the page).

 

The Holocaust statement

I'd heard the fuss over the fact that Trump did not mention Jews on Holocaust remembrance day (while simultaneously blocking refugee entry to the US), but only looked at his statement now. Perhaps just as disturbing is how he frames the Holocaust as an issue of the relative military strength between "good" and "evil".

Here it is (I underline the major quotes):

“It is with a heavy heart and somber mind that we remember and honor the victims, survivors, heroes of the Holocaust. It is impossible to fully fathom the depravity and horror inflicted on innocent people by Nazi terror.
“Yet, we know that in the darkest hours of humanity, light shines the brightest.‎ As we remember those who died, we are deeply grateful to those who risked their lives to save the innocent.
“In the name of the perished, I pledge to do everything in my power throughout my Presidency, and my life, to ensure that the forces of evil never again defeat the powers of good. Together, we will make love and tolerance prevalent throughout the world.”

This contrasts with with the more conventional calls for self-reflection, presenting the Holocaust as the consequence of German cultural/moral collapse (and the failure of other nations to provide refuge). Obama emphasized this strongly in 2015 (the only other statement I looked at):

On the tenth International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the American people pay tribute to the six million Jews and millions of others murdered by the Nazi regime. We also honor those who survived the Shoah, while recognizing the scars and burdens that many have carried ever since.
Honoring the victims and survivors begins with our renewed recognition of the value and dignity of each person. It demands from us the courage to protect the persecuted and speak out against bigotry and hatred. The recent terrorist attacks in Paris serve as a painful reminder of our obligation to condemn and combat rising anti-Semitism in all its forms, including the denial or trivialization of the Holocaust.
This anniversary is an opportunity to reflect on the progress we have made confronting this terrible chapter in human history and on our continuing efforts to end genocide. I have sent a Presidential delegation to join Polish President Komorowski, the Polish people, official delegations from scores of nations, and many survivors, at today’s official commemoration in Poland.
As a founding member of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, the United States joins the Alliance’s thirty other member nations and partners in reiterating its solemn responsibility to uphold the commitments of the 2000 Stockholm Declaration. We commemorate all of the victims of the Holocaust, pledging never to forget, and recalling the cautionary words of the author and survivor of Auschwitz Primo Levi, “It happened, therefore it can happen again. . . . It can happen anywhere.” Today we come together and commit, to the millions of murdered souls and all survivors, that it must never happen again.

Talking to kids about race

(peekaboo)

The recent bullshit brouhahas about race ("Is Santa Clause white?") have gotten me thinking about how to explain it to kids. I'm sick of words like "black" and "white" being treated as meaningful categories, when they are just the remnants of an system of exploitation.

I found several websites providing advice on how to speak to kids about racism, and describing scenarios about how the discussion might come up:

parenting.com
katie couric
civilrights.org
Hand-in-hand parenting

One thing I will not do is tell my kids that "we're all the same on the inside". I find that idea to be demeaning; we are different, and it is our differences that make society work by allowing us to complement each other's strengths and reducing the competition that occurs when we all seek the same thing.

I'm hoping I'm lucky enough to get a straight-forward question from my kids, like "Joe says he's white, what does that mean?"

My answer might go something like this...

"Long ago, a group of greedy people wanted to steal from other people. They labeled their victims "black" because of how they looked and called everyone who looked like themselves "white". They said that it was okay for whites to steal from blacks. These greedy people were in charge for a long time, so they convinced everyone else to use labels like "black" and "white". They aren't in charge anymore, but people still use those labels because they've gotten used to the labels. Now those words are just a quick way to describe how a person looks, but they are sloppy words and you should be more detailed when describing what a person looks like."

The product of America's mass-incarceration policy: racist gangs

The Aryan Brotherhood; the Mexican Mafia; the Black Guerrilla Family.

All three of these gangs originated in American prisons and gained influence by providing protection for inmates in the context of the state-imposed war of all-against-all that occurs within the prison.

What Republicans don't get about racism

The racist "Ron Paul" newsletters are in the news again (just heard about it on NPR). If you know the story, basically Ron Paul and his supports claim that the racist comments were written by a staff member and slipped by Paul's lax editorial oversight; Paul disagrees with all of it, and there's nothing more to say. Unfortunately for Paul, there is more to say, and I doubt that he will say it because -- like most Republicans -- he doesn't understand the totalitarian danger that lurks in racism.

Most Republicans recognize that "racism is wrong", but it is the wrong sort of "wrong". They think of it as an intellectual error. Or a type of meanness. Either way, they think of it as a failure of the individual who is  racist. They ignore any  social aspects of racism more profound than self-segregation. They ignore that racism is fundamentally a political ideology, justifying the oppression of some people by others. They ignore that its continued prevalence is a social failure, not just a personal failure.

Most Republicans have internalized the conclusion that racism is "very wrong", but they way they apply this conclusion illustrates that they still don't get it. They still focus on the individual expressions of racism, while ignoring the social structure behind it. If one black racist acts threatening towards a white guy, they throw a fit and then get all self-righteous when the traditional anti-racist coalitions don't see it as anything more important than regular street crime. Republicans do this because they don't see the political nature of racism, and they can't distinguish between racism that is politically impotent (i.e. black racism) and racism that could lead to tyranny (i.e. white racism).

This is the stuff that Ron Paul doesn't get about racism, and why he too often tolerates the company of racists (e.g. the people who wrote his newsletters and his 2008 anti-Latino advertisements) -- he doesn't get how these individual acts fit into a larger system of oppression.

For more thoughts on related issues, see Gary Chartier's summary of the relationship between "left-wing market anarchism and Ron Paul"

Are you on the inside or the outside?

Many commentators have been describing the new forms of segregation in American society -- where people are either members of an "in" group with special privileges, or you aren't. Much of the talk has focused on the segregation of workers into "protected" jobs from which they cannot be fired, and the rest who cannot get steady employment, in large part as a side effect of the protection system.

However, we are also seeing increasing segregation of Americans into the group with security clearance, who have access to massive government databases, and the rest of us who are forbidden to access this information. This segregation has troubling similarities to the system of the Chinese Communist Party, which maintains separate media systems for privileged insiders and the ignorant masses.

The Washington Post has taken the lead in exposing the scale of "Top Secret America", first by revealing that hundreds of thousands of Americans have this clearance, indicating that such clearance is increasingly a requirement for a decent job (like Party membership in Communist countries). Now the Post has described a massive database of "suspicious" Americans, which is available to pretty much every law enforcement agent. So next time a cop stops you for some trivial reason, he can check to see if you've ever done anything suspicious, and adjust his behavior accordingly. This is a good reason to use a pseudonym on the Internet.

A summary is here: Monitoring America: How the U.S. Sees You - CBS News

The best quote:

"The old view that 'if we fight the terrorists abroad, we won't have to fight them here' is just that - the old view," Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told police and firefighters recently.

Apparently the mainstream media is finally waking up to what commentators like Kevin Carson have been describing for years:

Technologies and techniques honed for use on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan have migrated into the hands of law enforcement agencies in America.

Anyway, this reminds us that the main resistance to this trend is being attacked by "the authorities" as we speak, and these authorities are called out by John Wilkins in Statism and Wikileaks.

the real lesson is the extent to which the professional political classes of the west are statists. They have no concern for their citizenry. They have no concern for their economies or even for the corporations or big labor organisations they nominally represent. They only care that they are in power, or might get into power, and so the state is what they care about, so they can have that power.

The last thing on my mind today is the fact that the Dream Act failed to pass. It sounded pretty innocuous to me, but there are enough authoritarian nationalists in Congress that even this law couldn't pass. Not a big surprise, but the likely hypocrisy of these nationalists was conveniently illuminated by the contrast against a recent essay describing the pseudo-liberal argument against affirmative action that conservatives trot out so often -- "since we're all equal, all discrimination is wrong". Of course, this ignores the central role of group identity in our society. Sometimes this group identity is implicit (e.g. cultural affinity), sometimes it is explicit (e.g. citizenship, family), but either way it is very important. If a person can't recognize that and consider how this factors into our decisions, then they are pretty naive. If they continue to advocate for group identity in one situation, even as they dismiss its complexities in another, then they are just hypocrites. I don't know what this particular author believes about nationality and migration, but if he's like most conservatives who use terms like "equality" or "individualism", then he's just an opportunist who will use whatever argument he can to secure privileges for himself and his favored identity group.