Dakryn's Batshit Theory of the Week

[Einherjar86]

I'm going to have it be known up front that I don't consider this an argument.

What do you mean by "letting die off"? I'd rather you develop this out in more detail.

Ignoring the plight of blacks in many current conditions around the world - i.e. withdrawing any and all forms of support - will result in leaving many of them to die. That, in my opinion, is almost certain.

Judaism as a religion isn't specifically, but to be declared a Jew requires matrilineal ancestry. not only is this biological, but it is in stark contrast to the most other cultures and their patrilineal ancestry - and why? Because of all the slavery, rapes, pogroms, etc.

Matrilineality has nothing to do with biology. That's a socially constituted law for qualifying as a Jew. There's nothing inherently Jewish in one's blood or body. On the contrary, being black is a biological trait. Stop with all this fooldiggery.

There is a difference in time to recover, and moving in the wrong direction utilizing methods and cultural facits doomed to failure. The Jews repeatedly pulled themselves up by the bootstraps as it were, even in their mytho-historical writings.

Maybe this is because of a belief in a sort of divine mandate. Maybe it is because believed and/or real cultural history (Read Nehemiah for an example of both history/divine mandate). What you see is the Nehemiah story repeated over and over throughout history in settings both individual and for whole groups of Jews.

They could whine about all the illtreatment for thousands of years, or they can start rebuilding walls out of the rubble. Rebuilding the walls works a hell of a lot better.

And the Jews were provided, time and time again, with the financial means of doing so. They were even allowed to be rulers and property owners under Roman. What property owners were there under American slavery? These comparisons are worthless.

As far as everything else you've said, I feel no need to comment directly. It's all asinine. The Chinese were treated horribly, but they were not enslaved as part of an economic institution. The Irish may have been treated horribly, but they were not enslaved as part of an economic institution. You keep trying to level all forms of oppression onto a single plane, which would conveniently even allow you to lament your own hapless position.

Stop feeling sorry for yourself.

I'll comment on this last point:

I don't think you have anything to back these assertions up.

I have history, David. If the black community currently tells its children that they can only be athletes, rappers, or government employees, then it's because that's what white culture has forced upon them. Read about black employment in the late nineteenth century, or in the first half of the twentieth century. Do you think parents wanted their kids to become blues guitarists and traveling musicians? Black people wanted to work, and white people excluded them from most forms of employment within private enterprise. If you don't buy this, then it's not my responsibility to prove it to you. You go research it.

I can understand everyone's resistance toward admitting racism in the situation of American blacks. Denying it, in my opinion, is like denying evolution. It isn't worth my time to argue about it.

 

[Dak]

I can understand everyone's resistance toward admitting racism in the situation of American blacks.

No one is denying racism as a fact and facet in the situation of American blacks. I specifically referenced racism. There's just disagreement about the manifestations and workings. The removal of agency is racist, and you are reflecting it in speaking of blacks only pursuing "what is allowed".

 

[Einherjar86]

The removal of agency is racist, and you are reflecting it in speaking of blacks only pursuing "what is allowed".

I'm not removing anyone's agency. The agency is already gone.

Please tell me how my identifying a cultural atmosphere that restricts the options for employment equals me actively restricting those employment opportunities. You're misidentifying me saying "this is the state of things" as me actively perpetuating that state.

I'm not saying that blacks aren't capable of doing something; but I am saying that cultural conditions have prevented them from doing so.

 

[SentinelSlain]

From what I've read, in the past, at various points black american communities have become middle class but its lead to tension and riots. Now there's now way society would allow that kind of response.

 

[Einherjar86]

These are our biggest historical factors to compare though. Holocaust and the Slave trade. Everyone in government should say "why aren't the blacks succeeding?" But I hope their answers aren't because of their biological faults or something.

Jews were in positions of wealth during the first and second world wars, no doubt, but I would be interested in seeing how they maintained that wealth during those times. I don't know much about 'ancient' times revolving Jews, so I won't really speak on it.

As I already mentioned above, Jews who survived the Holocaust but were victims of it had an incredibly difficult time afterwards. Large numbers lived in poverty until the end of their lives. Just as slavery devastated large portions of blacks, the Holocaust devastated large portions of Jews.

But not all Jews were in the Holocaust, as I also said already. In the eighteenth century, almost every single black in America was a slave.

If your point on the failures of Africa is that their cultures did not mingle enough to create a sort of empire/economic competition, then why didn't it? Are white people more likely to be greedy or war monger? I don't think that's a good conclusion either.

Does there have to be a "why"? Any number of reasons could have influenced European history in this way; availability of materials, closer proximity to various cultures, ease of access between continents/countries.

The only African country that was really in contact with Europe during the ancient period was Egypt. Other that, most cultures didn't develop at what we might recognized as an advanced rate because there simply wasn't the inter-cultural impetus to do so. It has nothing to do with what white people are more likely to do at a biological or genetic level.

Well the duration is obviously ambiguous, but how long do you expect, another century? That's kind of outrageous.

When you consider the conditions, it isn't. After the thirteenth amendment freed the slaves, they were promised forty acres and a mule. This didn't actually happen. Then Reconstruction happened, which attempted to assign blacks influential positions in rebuilding the South, but didn't both to educate them on how the American political system worked. After that failure, blacks were left to wander the countryside looking for work, which most white business-owners denied them.

Black women became the primary breadwinners in black families; but American patriarchy (i.e. the conventional value system that places the husband/father at the head of the household) caused black males to interpret this situation as a slight against their manhood, and thus we begin to see rampant misogyny in the black community.

All these things are connected and can be explained by simply looking at dominant cultural views and conditions. There's no need to resort to some kind of quasi-Spencerian scientism.

Well...

Well...

Well...

Well...

These are all differences in quantity that I don't have numbers or data for, and don't feel like looking up.

I get the imperialism point but not really on the racism part, at least in government/majority policy.

European imperialism and colonialism is bound up with racism. All you have to do is read the documents and materials that refer to Africans during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

 

[Dak]

I'm not removing anyone's agency. The agency is already gone.

Please tell me how my identifying a cultural atmosphere that restricts the options for employment equals me actively restricting those employment opportunities. You're misidentifying me saying "this is the state of things" as me actively perpetuating that state.

I'm not saying that blacks aren't capable of doing something; but I am saying that cultural conditions have prevented them from doing so.

Everyones options for employment are restricted in some way. I know you prefer Dubois perspective to Washingtons, but was the school able to find and expand on business opportunities in the Deep South of all places? Yes. Was it easy? Hell no. But it's the best way to go about things. If Washingtons example were replicated broadly as a solution, instead of agitations and "LBJistic" approaches, I don't think we'd be having this conversation right now.

 

[Einherjar86]

I think it's almost certain we would be having it, because unfortunately there weren't enough Booker T. Washingtons to found schools like this. Why not? Because the majority of blacks didn't have the means to do so.

I'm not saying his school wasn't successful; I've never said that. I'm saying it wasn't enough.

 

[Dak]

Washington didn't have the means. That didn't stop him. He could have just sat in the dirt feeling sorry for his shitty lot in life.

 

[Einherjar86]

That's what it has to be. Those who didn't found schools or do anything productive must have just been feeling sorry for themselves.

 

[Dak]

That's what it has to be. Those who didn't found schools or do anything productive must have just been feeling sorry for themselves.

I wasn't referring only to the founding of schools, but to the attending of them etc. Everyone doesn't need to be a Washington, but there not only needs to be more than one, but the entire approach doesn't need to be denigrated as "capitulation" or miscast as "letting whitey win" or whatever other such thing.

One doesn't get along by determination alone, but you have to put yourself into positions to succeed. Washington did so, and then payed it forward by trying to create an institution to allow many more to succeed, if they would but try. He was told it wouldn't work/he couldn't do it also, but tried anyway. This beats tsk tsking or feeling sorry every time.

 

[Einherjar86]

The fact that you clearly believe the majority of them feel sorry for themselves is where the problem lies. This is your perspective, and it's clearly influenced by your experiences in life.

There are plenty of black people who work their asses off and make jack shit, and who still can't afford to keep healthy. You have this ridiculous belief that this is impossible - that if you work hard, you can get by and even achieve a comfortable position. This isn't the fucking case.

 

[Dak]

The fact that you clearly believe the majority of them feel sorry for themselves is where the problem lies. This is your perspective, and it's clearly influenced by your experiences in life.

There are plenty of black people who work their asses off and make jack shit, and who still can't afford to keep healthy. You have this ridiculous belief that this is impossible - that if you work hard, you can get by and even achieve a comfortable position. This isn't the fucking case.

There's a major problem in the US of people finding reasons to feel sorry for themselves, and it's not racially exclusive by any means.
Feeling sorry for oneself doesn't mean just sitting around doing absolutely nothing, but it does involve refusing to take steps because if an infinite litany of excuses. Just going out and logging a lot of hours at anything isn't enough in any era in history or before, whether dealing with racism or not.

I'm not saying that if everyone takes a Washington approach it's going to turn out golden every single time - but the alternative is almost certain to fail, supposedly even most lottery winners go broke again relatively shortly. Why? Because the same mentality that depends on lottery odds continues to make decisions based on lottery odd mentality - because of the ironically terrible feel-sorry idea that "nothing else is going to work".

This idea was inculcated first in black Americans because of their extreme vulnerability, but has been creeping into the rest of American society, a constantly self-fulfilling prophecy.

Edit: Both of my parents have fallen into this trap as they have gotten older, and my inlaws have been there probably their whole lives. I'm well acquainted with the mindset.

 

[Einherjar86]

I'm backing away from this entire aspect of the argument because I don't see it as all that relevant to begin with. You've swayed the entire subject toward the problem of feeling sorry for oneself and not taking proper initiative.

I maintain that a large number of blacks in this country do take the initiative and still remain under the poverty line. So this whole line of argument about feeling sorry for themselves is a red herring, in my opinion.

 

[Dak]

I think the poverty line is a red herring metric. My monthly budget is a poverty line budget and we live pretty comfortably.

 

[rms]

I know you guys might still be doing your own thang, but I saw this today and think it's really good legislation(if passed etc)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/08/obama-community-college_n_6439752.html

 

[Dak]

Corporate handout.

 

[rms]

obvious opinion is obvious!

 

[Einherjar86]

Dak doesn't have opinions, he has facts.

 

[Dak]

I would like to say it's an obvious fact it's a corporate handout, but I understand it isn't obvious. But it is a fact.

Businesses want someone else to pay for the training of their employees, and government training initiatives are a way of offloading the (increased due to added bureaucracy) costs onto the taxpayer - for employees that will in fact still require more training regardless. Ain't nothing free, just a question of who pays. Why are the increasingly unemployed individual taxpayers getting stuck with the bill for training for jobs they haven't even gotten yet that they will still need specific training in house for anyway?

Edit: And maybe one wouldn't need an additional 2 years of government schooling to be "job worthy" if the first 13-14 years were worth a goddamn.

 

[Einherjar86]

I won't admit that it's a fact. I'm wary of facts. It's only a fact if your value system categorizes it as such. I prefer conditions, processes, possibilities, potentialities, perspectives.

Speaking of debt and handouts, this is the kind of perspective we need to offset the balance:

In fact, this [federal] debt will never be paid off. Ne debt will ever be paid off. The final accounting will never take place. If our days are numbered, accounted for, the absent capital, for its part, is beyond any accounting. If the United States is already in virtual breach of its obligations, this will have no effects. There will be no Judgement Day for this virtual bankruptcy. One has merely to enter the exponential or virtual mode to be released from all responsibility, since there is no longer any reference, any referential world to serve as measure.

Provocative, somewhat sophistic (and sophisticated), and certainly not logical. But then, value was never logical in the first place. It could be that, in our modern technological age, the paradoxes of value are beginning to blossom into full-fledged absurdity. This doesn't necessarily mean we face financial implosion, however. I think it's entirely possible that late-capitalist development has struck upon a new impetus of rapid development: internal paradox, autopoiesis.

This is how systems of communication perpetuate their own existence - not resolving internal conflict, but by constructing internal conflict:

The process of communication returns to itself and communicates its own difficulties. It uses a kind of (rather superficial) self-control to become aware of serious misunderstandings and it has the ability to communicate the rejection and restructure itself around this "no." In other words, the process is not obliged to follow the rules of logic. It can contradict itself. The system that uses this technique does not finish its autopoiesis and does not come to an end; it reorganizes itself as conflict to save its autopoiesis.