Ferguson

CT could also just link to Jelani Cobb’s and Jeffrey Toobin’s comments in The New Yorker as well as the excellent editorial in the New York Times (perhaps written by Brent Staples). Or it could instead provide readers with links to Jonah Goldberg

My daughter spends her days (and nights) defending often guilty people (the guilty have their rights, too!). All this is a travesty. An adversarial system has its pluses and minuses, but like any system, it can work well in its own way. When it stays true to itself. Where were the adversaries here, when the prosecutor has acted as a defender of the potential accused? (My daughter has innate suspicion of prosecutors, but that’s based on the expectation that they’ll go after the accused no matter what. Where was that here?)

I am sorry. You’re black and male, you have no defense. You’re white and young male, you have a defense if you’re from a sufficiently wealthy or established family. You’re female — well, let’s not visit UVa.

This CT blog has real problems, and seems unwilling to fix it.

We got a Grand Jury, but the prosecutor obviously did his best to damp down his native, ham sandwich-indicting reality distortion field, to discourage the Jury from indicting.

Is this obvious though? One reason for doubting it is just that it’s not at all clear (from a cursory look at the transcript) that there was any sense that the prosecutors were leading the jury to a particular result. Of course, it’s certainly unusual to have a grand jury examine the entire body of evidence so thoroughly, and true, one possible explanation is that doing so allowed McCulloch to tacitly reduce the chances an indictment. But that seems awfully risky — juries have minds of their own, and it’s not obvious why presenting them with all of the evidence would inevitably lead to acquittal (or whatever the analogous thing is called for grand juries).

Isn’t a much more plausible explanation that McCulloch realized the level of media interest in the case and thought it’d be expedient to hand-off any (inevitably controversial) decision to an anonymous grand jury instead of taking personal responsibility?

We kind of already have something like a wergeld system. Settling a number of police brutality cases has cost Chicago, which is admittedly an extreme case in a lot of regards, half a billion dollars in the last ten years.

And the taxpayer, perversely, foots the bill. This is most perverse in cities like Ferguson that are effectively occupied by a hostile police force.

While we don’t have grand juries in this country, I assume that what’s been decided isn’t the guilt or innocence of the officer in question but whether he has any case to answer; if he’d been indicted he would still have been innocent in law, up to the moment he was found guilty. So everyone talking about presumptions of guilt, not trying an innocent man, etc, is really missing the point of what’s gone on here.

What we have here is a semi-detached prosecution-by-police-only-not-quite system. The Crown Prosecution Service (est. 1985) will bring a case – an indictment, if you like – if it judges that the case the police have put before it (a) has a better-than-even chance of getting a conviction and (b) is in the public interest. Homicides by cop are much rarer here – I mean, much rarer; orders of magnitude rarer – but when they do happen they’re very rarely prosecuted. But the reason for leaving those defendants unindicted isn’t reason (b), ‘public interest’ (as indeed it shouldn’t be – the public interest in maintaining respect for the police would surely be outweighed by the public interest in not having a cop going around killing people for no good reason). It’s (a), probability of conviction. Juries just don’t like convicting police officers – and any case where the likelihood of an acquittal is well over 50% is a case the CPS won’t bring, purely on the grounds of not wasting everyone’s time.

And wergeld is paid. Simon Harwood, the violent police officer who caused the death of Ian Tomlinson, was tried for manslaughter three years after the event; the trial was distinguished mainly by the character assassination of Tomlinson, and ended after a month in an acquittal. The innocent man was then discharged from the police for gross misconduct, after which the police paid the family an undisclosed sum in compensation. There was no homicide prosecution when the police shot the unarmed, innocent and unsuspecting Jean Charles de Menezes six times in the head (although the character assassination of the victim started almost before the body was cold). Two years later the Metropolitan Police were collectively found guilty of breaching their duties under health and safety legislation and fined £175,000; two years after that they paid the family £100,000.

The only thing I’d add is that none of those payments just happened; in both cases the police would have been quite happy to leave things as they were, on the basis that nothing bad had actually happened (although perhaps mistakes were made), and after all the victims were no great loss. The families and supporters had to fight for those results. This is actually much worse than a ‘wergeld’ system.

Brett Bellmore: Libertarian.

But if that’s how you play it, don’t be surprised when a certain amount of tribal, eye-for-an-eye thinking results. If it seems like protestors are out for payback … well, what were you expecting?

This seems to lump the looters and rioters together with peaceful protesters.

I think it’s extremely important that these two categories be separated.

Looters and rioters are opportunistic criminals, nothing more. They are not social justice vigilantes, they are not representative of the community, and in fact their actions have gravely harmed the community. The biggest failure of law enforcement in this affair has not been the confrontation between Wilson and Brown, but the failure of law enforcement to protect the lives and property of the people of Ferguson. In my view, the inability of law enforcement to provide such protection has been far more corrosive of police/community relations than the shooting.

As to police/community relations in Ferguson, clearly they’re troubled. However, given the number of apparently false rumors that were treated as central facts in the initial outrage of Ferguson (e.g. Brown had his hands up and was surrendering), I think drawing conclusions beyond that the relations are troubled from the events of the last several months is a complex undertaking. I’ll wait for the Justice Department review on the longer history of police/community relations in Ferguson.

On one additional note, I don’t think that those in Ferguson would accept the “two tribes” characterization if presented with the alternatives of three, four, or more tribes characterizations. Let’s remember that Ferguson has 21,000 people, the vast majority of whom were not throwing bottles, firing weapons, or destroying businesses. That doesn’t mean they trust the police, but it does make it unlikely that they view this as a purely police vs. community problem.

Mike Starr:
“So rather than a presumption of innocence, we should adopt a presumption of guilt because everybody knows that grand juries would never indict law enforcement officers?”

Please talk to a friend who passed high school civics. The purpose of the grand jury is alledly to determine if there should be a trial to detrermine guilt or innocence.

From what I understand, the prosecutor could have proceeded with charges without first going to a grand jury, and I was wondering why he didn’t do that. Now people here are saying he’s part of the problem, which certainly seems to be the case. It is astonishing that there will be no charges laid in this killing—Brown was shot six times! I really found this almost literally incredible when I heard the verdict.

Lynne @ 27–Grand juries are only required in the federal system. State prosecutors can charge by information, and state grand juries are rare and unnecessary. When a state prosecutor refers a matter to a grand jury, it’s an infallible sign that the prosecutor is looking for political cover.

This is a good summary of how fantastic and unbelievable Officer Wilson’s story is:

http://www.vox.com/2014/11/25/7281165/darren-wilsons-story-side

the weregild system sounds great and all, but I do wonder what the result would be with zero policing in some of these communities. like, still have the fire dept and such, but no police presence. i honestly have no idea what the consequences would be, other than fewer traffic citations. but i am interested. if one is going to defend the police presence in Ferguson, i would imagine you need to at least consider the relevant counter-factual. have people explored this? my intuition says that it would be short term chaos but eventually people would devise local solutions to go on with their lives. seriously curious here.

of course, the model in place is not rationally chosen from a list of alternatives with the intention of delivering the highest benefit to the affected population. but it is can be fun pretending like things are thus, as it gets rather tiresome ending every political discussion with some permutation of ‘if our economic overlords deem it thus’

When replying to Mr. Bellmore, keep in mind that just a few weeks ago he was pushing the phony “orbital eye socket fracture” picture that tuned out to be an utter fake. That’s his standard of evidence.

@34

toxicology report found THC in his system – just re-read the articles, no mention of anything else, and i fully expect that they would have noted as such (esp fox news).

if you are insinuating that smoking pot causes this sort of behavior, well, that is very very silly.

i don’t see why the robbery is relevant. unarmed people don’t need to be shot, not when your injuries from the confrontation look like this http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/24/darren-wilson-injury-photos_n_6216208.html . also don’t see what bearing any of the above has on the post-incident response by the authorities, which is more significant than the potentially aberrant/exceptional actions of 2 random individuals.

BTW, I’ve lived in St. Louis County and members of my community have had occasion to deal with “Death Penalty Bob” McCulloch. The level and depth of racial hatred by white people toward blacks in STLCo has to be experienced to be believed. Since 1980 the leaders of the (white) power structure have learned to conceal it in public,but as an Anglo-looking guy who can pass for politically neutral I occasionally hear the behind doors stuff. I sometimes wonder if the racism in St. Louis is worse than the Deep South.

“In Ferguson, the police are (by design) an outside force imposed on the community, not really a community force. Citizens don’t trust the cops, and rightly not.”

The usual way that liberals handle thinking about this is: racism without racists. Everyone can see that the system is designed in a particular way, and everyone knows the history involved, but saying that the deeply shocked conservatives are racists who want to maintain a racist system is just not done. This is how respectable liberals distinguish themselves from dirty hippies who are always right but in the wrong, uncivil way.

The most classic example of this I’ve seen recently is this Chait article. It goes through all the voluminous evidence about how the GOP depends on racism. But still:

Yet here is the point where, for all its breadth and analytic power, the liberal racial analysis collapses onto itself. It may be true that, at the level of electoral campaign messaging, conservatism and white racial resentment are functionally identical. It would follow that any conservative argument is an appeal to white racism. That is, indeed, the all-but-explicit conclusion of the ubiquitous Atwater Rosetta-stone confession: Republican politics is fundamentally racist, and even its use of the most abstract economic appeal is a sinister, coded missive.

Impressive though the historical, sociological, and psychological evidence undergirding this analysis may be, it also happens to be completely insane. Whatever Lee Atwater said, or meant to say, advocating tax cuts is not in any meaningful sense racist.

Those crazy hippies! And now your post, with its logical contradictions between politics-as-tribes and politics as liberal structure in which people are treated fairly and individually. You characterize it as “Conservatives who are passively OK with 2)” — i.e. passively OK with the racist system of control, which 1) is really part of as well. They aren’t passively OK with it. They actively want it. It’s the core of their politics. By not saying this you’re able to make a clever hypothetical about weregild. What’s the point?

http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/international/people-who-knew-nothing-about-ferguson-riots-able-to-work-out-exactly-why-they-happened-2014112593141

who reads/takes seriously Chait on race anymore? i though T. Coates put an end to that for good?

(also, since when is ‘this is wrong b/c it is insane’ an argument? maybe at the national review)

“In Ferguson, the police are (by design) an outside force imposed on the community, not really a community force.”

I don’t know anything about Ferguson. Who designed it that way, and why? Isn’t it the case, typically, that the mayor nominates a police chief, and then things flow down from there?

One issue weighs on me and I would be curious to hear the CT commentariat’s views.

The authorities in Missouri — I haven’t followed the doings closely enough to identify the roles of individuals, but I presume the Governor and his minions — chose to announce the Grand Jury decision at 8 pm at night and to withhold the full contingent of the National Guard on night 1, deploying them on night 2, despite the noisy preparation of police, Federal and national guard forces for deployment. (I’m following Ian Welsh here.) In other words, after promising the local business community protection and making a show of preparing to provide it and having manpower at the ready, chose to step aside.

The conservative authorities acted according to a plan, which would result in some rioting and damage to business property.

Of course, they have the bare minimum of deniability. They say they were responding to previous (liberal) criticism of police militarization and did not want to provoke bad behavior with excessive presence.

The timing of the Grand Jury announcement, though, is a significant tell. Given that particular choice, you have to be a pretty stupid liberal to persist in, “Are they stupid or are they evil?”

just a slight addendum to @49 – police have one additional claim they can use to justify the employ of deadly force: namely, they can fire on a felon who is fleeing.

but this is not relevant here, obviously, as DW’s claim is that MB was charging at him like the hulk (he specified hogan, but the ‘black people have super bullet-resistant powers’ element is still there).

gianni @38
if you are insinuating that smoking pot causes this sort of behavior, well, that is very very silly.
I’m not. (I didn’t know the toxicology report found only THC, which I presume is pot.)

i don’t see why the robbery is relevant.
MPAVictoria linked to the Ezra Klein column that argues that Wilson’s grand jury testimony is very difficult to believe. Acc. to Klein, it’s difficult to believe b/c Wilson describes Brown doing things that are irrational and make no sense. I agree w Klein on this point. The robbery has perhaps some marginal relevance in this context b/c *if* it occurred and *if* it was out of character for Brown, *then* it may perhaps indicate that he could have done other out-of-character things, though likely/probably not things as irrational as the things Wilson claims Brown did. (Obviously, the mere fact of the robbery standing alone, assuming Brown committed it, does not justify shooting him; not even the defenders of Wilson are arguing that it’s ok to shoot unarmed robbery suspects who do not do anything of a threatening, aggressive or etc character.)

My comment was not addressed to the broader issues, which are very important, but to the narrower issue of what actually might have happened. In my view, btw, Wilson should have been indicted (or charged via information or whatever) and tried, even though chances are he would have been acquitted given juries’ tendency to acquit cops and given the conflicting testimony (and given the apparently somewhat polarized race relations in the region).

” Any prosecutor up vs. a competent defense attorney in a criminal case would be ill-advised to rely on just one eyewitness, or even two.”

If the world was perfect sure they would be unwise. In the world we live in the testimony of a jailhouse snitch is often enough to send someone to the chair.

JH: “My post is about about the absurdity of the proposition ‘if the system works the way it is designed to, that should restore trust’; but, just because I don’t mention racism by name, that doesn’t mean I don’t believe in it. Not every post can be about everything, and sometimes you take the obvious stuff for granted.”

It’s not at all obvious that you’re taking the same meaning from the contradiction that I do. Your item 1)”the law trusts cops” is part of a racist system of control. Your item 2) “police are an outside force force imposed on the [black] community” is part of a racist system of control. Conservatives being concerned “that Darren Wilson not be indicted just to preserve or restore order” (perhaps an implicit item 3) ) is, again, part of a racist system of control. There is no contradiction and no absurdity: conservatives are being completely consistent.

The only thing that they are being inconsistent with are principles of justice and fairness. But conservatives don’t believe in justice or fairness: the conservative coalition is based on racism. So you think it’s absurd that conservatives are not liberals?

Ronon(rf): “Chait is explicitly trying to distance himself from what he perceives as the LIBERAL critique (where LIBERALS *do* identify racism as a major orgainsing force in US society, both in political/societal structures and their political opponents ie specific individuals.) Why not respod to individuals rather than strawman ideologies ?”

Chait is distinguishing between respectable liberal opinion, as defined by him as part of the DC pundit elite, and crazy hippie liberalism. The U.S. has no set distinctions between people to the left of center, so you have to accept that some slippage of labels is going to occur. But you can where the group definitions come in functionally.

Chait goes through the historical, political, and sociological evidence that all shows that the GOP coalition is based on racism, that talk about lowering taxes is a code word for racism, and so on. That’s what he has to treat as respectable liberalism, pretty much, because it has so much academic and rational backing. But then he says that you can’t treat this conclusion as a conclusion. Whenever any individual conservative talks about lowering taxes, you can’t treat it as a code word for racism. That’s “insane”.

This preserves the respectability of people who Chait deals with, because they are always presumptively individually innocent, even though they are collectively guilty. And the people who have been saying for decades that it was all about racism are just as crazy as they always were, even though they are also just as right as they ever were.

Ze Kraggash:

Generally an election is a political change, but it’s not a revolution. If a municipal government is built to enrich itself at the expense of its citizens, then an electoral change is still basically just putting a system of banditry in a new set of hands. If the people of the town are lucky, they might see some modest improvements. But the police aren’t elected officials, and the criminal justice system keeps churning no matter who the mayor is, and they are going to take their money from the residents . People who were paying out court fees and such before the election are still on the hook after the election.

The problem is compounded when the residents of a lot of towns like Ferguson are semi-transient, usually renting for a few years and then moving on.

Rich – sure, I read his article. But your problem is with Chait, not ‘strawman liberal’.

Dan 14: “One reason for doubting it is just that it’s not at all clear (from a cursory look at the transcript) that there was any sense that the prosecutors were leading the jury to a particular result.”

All reports I have read on this account agree that the prosecutor treated Wilson with “kid’s gloves”, asked soft ball questions, and didn’t challenge the contradictions in his testimony, while (oddly, for a prosecutor) challenging incriminating testimony.

Links in moderation (sigh).

Another method: start by gerrymandering districts. Next impose requirements making running for office very expensive. Power structure backs and funds one not-horrible candidate it controls and one Rand Paul-level horrible candidate. No one else can afford to run. Who wins?

But these methods were well known to both Richard J Daley and Casaer Augustus alike. Ze knows of them as well; he’s just funnin’ us with some eristic Socratic questions.

But then, what’s the point of talking about “an outside force imposed on the community” if there is no community.

Because people know there’s more than one definition of a word.

About rioting: the people who live in these kinds of communities have been completely failed by their local systems, but they also completely depend on them. They can not afford to trash local businesses, because those businesses will go away, and what few local jobs are available will go away too. Rioting may or may not be a good way of generating policing reform, because riots affect white people and white people have an interest in discouraging them. But I’ve never seen anything that suggests that economically, areas affected by riots ever recover on any kind of short or medium term scale. The people who live in these communities are well aware that rioting is self-destructive, but different members of the community come out in different places in terms of how much rage they can swallow and how much they have to lose.

“Because people know there’s more than one definition of a word.”

Sure, but it’s a bit misleading. If there is a town – a community – with an outside force imposed on it, that sounds alarming, like an occupied territory or something. But if it’s a transient place, it’s a different story. It explains the 12% voter turnout. And the ‘tribe vs. tribe’ model of the conflict isn’t that clear anymore, since it’s also ‘migrants and locals’.

Just as we shouldn’t assume we know why the grand jury did what they did until we see the evidence, we shoudn’t decide why the riots started until we get the detailed info.

Very often bad police work turns peaceful protests into riots. Of all the places in the USA where you might expect bad police work, where does Ferguson fit on the list?

So, the officer claims he was punched by a man of incredible strength yet showed no injuries as reported by the hospital that examined him. That’s evidence of individual corruption, which the Law can not bring itself to even witness.

But then, shortly thereafter, the officer has his gun and a car whereas the alleged attacker has neither…why not just put the car in reverse and protect yourself and others until the alleged attacker’s alleged rage subsides? There isn’t an assumption that police should de-escalate? That’s evidence of systemic corruption: we are supposed to just assume that cops are brawlers (when the suspect is black: we assume a police officer would understand the principle of de-escalation if we’re talking about a suburban white teenager in a psychotic rage).

And not only the Law but Society can’t even ask the question. To me, that’s question #1 coming spontaneously from every journalist and media celebrity: “Umm, so why didn’t Wilson simply distance himself IN HIS CAR, and observe from a distance for 90 seconds to de-escalate the situation rather than treat the alleged attack as an excuse to continue firing? If you’re being attacked you protect yourself and your attacker, right? You’re an officer of the law, not a co-belligerent!?!”

If there is a town – a community – with an outside force imposed on it, that sounds alarming, like an occupied territory or something. But if it’s a transient place, it’s a different story.

Not really.

@80
but those assumptions are totally contrary to the reality of the situation, which is that gun deaths for police officers are at the lowest since the 19th century. that is in absolute figures. you talk relative to total population size or number of officer hours, the decline since the 1970s is nothing short of remarkable.

the idea is that professionals would be able to control their psychological pressures in order to properly perform their job duties.

if you are not comfortable assuming personal risk in order to pursue proper caution and procedure, you should probably look for a different line of work.

or just shoot them and count on your buddies in the fraternal order and the state house to bail you out. if you are all about calculating risk – yes, even with the remarkably low numbers of police deaths on duty, all the risk is still with not shooting; there is nearly no risk of legal consequences associated with shooting.

More, from the NYT via Digby:

The officer’s testimony, delivered without the cross-examination of a trial in the earliest phase of the three-month inquiry, was the only direct account of the fatal encounter. It appeared to form the spine of a narrative that unfolded before the jurors over three months, buttressed, the prosecutors said, by the most credible witnesses, forensic evidence and three autopsies.

But the gentle questioning of Officer Wilson revealed in the transcripts, and the sharp challenges prosecutors made to witnesses whose accounts seemed to contradict his narrative, have led some to question whether the process was as objective as Mr. McCulloch claims.

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/

Jeff R. @84:

Yes to federalizing police brutality*.

And there should be no constitutional problem, since it could be done by amending existing civil rights laws. If being wrongfully beaten or shot by a government agent is not a violation of one’s civil rights, then there is no such thing as a civil right.

*Assuming, of course, we ever again have a federal legislature that is not bat-shit crazy.

That Vox piece is a hoot.

Who would believe that an 18 year old would ever react so irrationally and violently it asks?

Apparently the author has never been nor spent much time around 18 year old males – of any race.

Had there not been video footage, no doubt the author would have said “Who would believe that this 6’4″ guy would feel the need to assault a much smaller shop keeper just to steal some blunts? There is simply no logical reason for such behavior.”

Dave H:
I feel that this is at least partly because the police know where the jurors live, and the jurors know that they know.

That had actually never occurred to me; it’s certainly a possible factor. But… well, there are a lot of people out there who will tend to believe what management says over what the union says (until they get sacked), and there are a lot of people who will tend to believe what the nice policeman says (until they get into trouble with the law). Random jury selection is liable to put some of them into any group of twelve – and Henry Fonda isn’t always on hand.

Rich Puchalsky @ 74: about rioting

I would draw your attention to my comment @ 52 and the notion that riots can be the policy choice of reactionary authorities.

John Holbo @ 93: I think my approach is more realistic, in that it is geared to the way the conservative mind works, rather than some fantasy Dr. Evil version of the conservative mind.

What test suggests to you that your approach is realistic? Why do you think you know the way the conservative mind works? I’m not trying to be argumentative. I’m just wondering if you subscribe to a particular view of conservative psychology.

I know from fiction that the idea of conscious, deliberate evil holds a certain fascination, but it also assumes something like the sometimes alleged function of paranoia, that if you imagine they are out to get you in some bizarre way, you don’t have to think about the possibility that they really are out to get you in some mundane sense — paranoia as a psychological defense, in other words. The charge of “conspiracy theorist” is sometimes used to dismiss certain uncomfortable ideas.

Bruce at 52: Sorry to jump the intervening posts where this observation may have been made.

“The conservative authorities acted according to a plan, which would result in some rioting and damage to business property.”

The gain could be political control of the State of Missouri for the next 10-12 years? longer? And possibly tip the national electoral scales? A small stakes gamble with a potentially huge payoff.

I am not particularly sympathetic to the “racist” theory in this sense: My view would be that racism is a means of manipulation, one of many. The goal, so to speak, is a hierarchical, authoritarian society, and manipulating people with the attitudes of right-wing authoritarian followers is a road to such a society. Making people fearful tends to shift more of the population in the direction of right-wing authoritarian attitudes, which in turn makes them easier to “lead”.

Seeing a lot of new buildings pop up in Tottenham in the areas that bore the brunt of the London ‘Riots’. I guess a £70 million fund for gentrification is a regeneration of sorts. Meanwhile, Croydon is being turned into a whole new Westfield shopping mall.

Herbert Gintis, a lefty economist of considerable repute, who writes a great many quality reviews on Amazon, gave Baumeister’s book, one star. Nasty reviews are fun.

I don’t really understand the Holbo/Puchalsky dispute. By way of clarification I was wondering whether either or both of you would agree with the following:

People who self-describe as right wing or are well described as right wing typically tend to hold objectively racist attitudes that they themselves do not think of racist.

I’d like to think that both of you will agree with this (because it seems fairly obvious to me) but I somehow fear that neither of you will.

Police brutality is already federalized, under the Klan Act, also known as the Force Act. It’s usually used in lawsuits against officers who commit police brutality, but can be used criminally as well. The FBI is currently investigating, according to the NY Times.

Ronan(rf) @ 103

I saw someone pull out an interesting statistic the other day: they compared how much the real value of the minimum wage changed during the last four Administrations: the two Bushes vs Clinton and Obama. The real value of the minimum wage rose somewhat during the Republican Administrations and fell slightly during the Democratic Administrations.

It has seemed to me for a while that many Democrats are strongly attached to an identity, which is anti-racist and so on, without actually caring very much about substantive economic policy. A phrase like “economic inequality” could hardly sound more bloodless to my ears. On substantive economic issues, one might as well vote at random. I know we’re supposed to believe that the Democrats are better for the common man, but that hasn’t been true for quite a while — at least since the end of the Clinton Administration when Clinton was de-regulating the financial sector and ending welfare “as we know it”.

Bruce, precisely. It matters not whether they genuinely consider blacks inferior, they want to maintain the city/state establishment as their domain. So they set the conditions for a night-time riot, which makes a spectacle in the national media, helping to convince locals that “the blacks” are indeed as violent as they suspect. Support flows to the city government and Republican party.

John, you start out with “I wouldn’t want people to think I think what you think I think”, and then you finish with: “And I think my approach is more realistic, in that it is geared to the way the conservative mind works, rather than some fantasy Dr. Evil version of the conservative mind.” In other words, you think exactly what I thought that you think. You think that conservatives have confabulatory false consciousness, and that when I say that they’re fundamentally unconcerned with justice or fairness, I’m a crazy hippie with Dr. Evil fantasies.

So you think that although Ferguson is all about racism, conservatives aren’t really conscious racists. Here’s what I wrote about this above:

The usual way that liberals handle thinking about this is: racism without racists. Everyone can see that the system is designed in a particular way, and everyone knows the history involved, but saying that the deeply shocked conservatives are racists who want to maintain a racist system is just not done. This is how respectable liberals distinguish themselves from dirty hippies who are always right but in the wrong, uncivil way.

So how did I get you wrong, exactly?

@115:

B.W., I’m not such I get your point. Do you mean to suggest that one side relies solely on illocutionary force and the other side is possessed of pure semantics?

“People who self-describe as right wing or are well described as right wing typically tend to hold objectively racist attitudes that they themselves do not think of racist.”

As John predicted, I disagree. The worldview encapsulated within this statement is that people on the left are smart enough to see what an objectively racist attitude is, while people on the right are stupid enough to fool themselves. They’re racist, but they aren’t stupid (or, at any rate, any more stupid than people in general are). They know what they’re doing. Their entire political strategy is based around them consciously knowing what they’re doing.

RP @118:

Sorry, I don’t think they’re fooling themselves. At all! I do think that they typically have some deeply false beliefs about the nature and causes of certain kinds of social phenomena. And I don’t at all think that this makes them stupid, for one thing because having more or less systematically false beliefs about a range of interconnected phenomena isn’t quite that uncommon and certainly isn’t exclusive to right-wingers. I mean, I even agree with you that it’s in some sense a strategy for social domination, but your view seems to make it impossibly coherent.

“I know we’re supposed to believe that the Democrats are better for the common man, but that hasn’t been true for quite a while — at least since the end of the Clinton Administration when Clinton was de-regulating the financial sector and ending welfare “as we know it”.”

The average person has done much better under democratic administrations. Unemployment is usually lower, there are less attacks on labour rights and, lately, you are less likely to be sent to some rat hole to get shot at. These all matter.

/And the millions of people who now have health care thanks to the democrats might have something to say to you as well.
//As would the millions of immigrants who no longer have to fear deportation.
///Plus all the environmental and civil rights differences.
////slashes!

The worldview encapsulated within this statement is that people on the left are smart enough to see what an objectively racist attitude is, while people on the right are stupid enough to fool themselves.

Just want to note here that you’re a very strange person if you haven’t fooled yourself some time in your life. Racism is just stupid, but I’ve believed a few stupid things before and probably have to be disabused of many more. It’s not necessarily self-elevation to think someone else can be delusional.

So the Southern Strategy didn’t exist? The GOP just happened to luck into the fact that appeals to racism work? The Willie Horton ad: wow, who would have thought that that one took off?

Yes, I agree that unconscious racism is still racism, and that everyone growing up within a racist society has some degree of implicit racist bias. And only people on the left have ever thought of this? People on the right have never thought “Gee, I wonder if I have unconscious racist attitudes” in 2014? Admittedly some people never really psychologize themselves in this way, but the pundits who you quote are pundits, presumably well-educated and all that.

Let me rephrase this. Anyone who would get what you mean by your elaborate setup about weregild has already considered the am-I-an-unconscious-racist idea and come to terms with it. And guess what, they’re fine with it, which makes them — I think you can guess where I’m going here — a conscious racist. Maybe they don’t really believe in racial superiority, and indeed believe in the power of racism as Bruce Wilder describes it — as one tool of domination or authoritarian control among many. But it’s clearly the most salient one within the U.S. So, no, they aren’t going to read one of your pieces and think “Oh my gosh, maybe I’m a racist after all!” Instead your pieces provide cover for them by continuing to deny that they consciously know what they’re doing.

Well, Rich is one of the minority of commenters genuinely worth arguing with, so I for one hope he sticks around.

“Well, Rich is one of the minority of commenters genuinely worth arguing with, so I for one hope he sticks around.”

100% Agree! I don’t want him to leave at all and always find his comments interesting and well argued (not that I agree with all or even most of them). I just feel like this must be exhausting and frustrating.

“MPAVictoria recommended the piece b.c it showed, according to MPAV, how fantastic and unbelievable Wilson’s grand jury testimony was.”

Well according to Ezra as well….

I tend to agree with Holbo and js. that the majority (not all, but the majority) of white conservatives are not conscious racists. The comment of tub @125 is unconvincing, unless white conservatives have explicitly uttered sentiments to tub that wd support tub’s claims (which he doesn’t say they have).

“Humans are self-deceiving, self-flattering creatures.”

We also have language, and, if you talk to conservatives, instead of gedankenexperimentalizing them from afar, they’ll tell you racist jokes and expect you to think that such jokes are funny because they’re true.

There is nothing to figure out. Basically, your whole project boils down to occupational psychosis: you make a living off of too-clever-by-a-quarter analyses, so you confront every phenomenon as if it’s a little more than a quarter short of cleverness. You’re trying to invent a need for yourself.

Well, there is no need for yourself in this case. Conservatives really will tell you who they are, and who they are are people with values different from yours–clearly articulable values, which they themselves knowingly, clearly articulate.

They are not like you, and they cannot be made to be like you.

This strikes me as the rational actor put into political terms. It’s hard to believe that people calculate so thoroughly.

Really? Doesn’t take an Einstein to know that releasing the verdict at night-time would make for some interesting fireworks that just might happen to defend the position of the establishment.

I was speaking broadly: no, I don’t believe everyone, in their brilliant self-insight, calculates what the correct political action is. I certainly believe that some politicians are good a politics, but that doesn’t necessarily speak to what they think they’re trying to accomplish.

Ronan @107

I read the Gintis review of the Amy Wax book that you linked. It’s a little hard to evaluate a review without knowing anything independently about the book, but it seems to me you have not very accurately described the Gintis review. From the review and some of the ensuing back-and-forth, he seems to be impatient with (what he takes to be) both standard conservative and liberal positions. He does suggest at the end of the review that Wax is too quick to say that *everything* can be done by ‘self-help.’ Nowhere that I can see does Gintis say in that review that Jews “just pulled their socks up and ended their oppression through force of will” (your words).

I think I’m happy with my conception of Lee Atwater actively working for evil.

which isnt to say i dont enjoy his reviews, or think there’s noplace for random natterings. I was just implying, in response to Bruce’s mention of him above, that everyone should err on the side of scepticism.

“So tub has talked to some white conservatives”

Puts me ahead of 99% of the commenters here, empirically speaking.

@Ronan:
The review isn’t esp. profound or anything, so yes, I agree to that extent. I have not read Gintis’s Amazon reviews (with one or two exceptions). The only Gintis/Bowles book I’ve read is Democracy and Capitalism, published almost 30 years ago. So I can’t really comment on their recent work.

I think I might hold amazon reviews up to an unreasonabe standard

I think when you guys talk about “Republicans” you are usually talking as if they are all the same.

Of course there are Republican strategists who follow a strategy of appeal to racism because they think it will win. After all, other things equal an increase of a couple percent in the voting can make all the difference. This doesn’t say what the politicians will actually vote for, that’s a different question entirely. But appeal to racism looks like it can get Republican voters to vote.

And there are Republican voters who consciously vote racist because they care about race. I don’t know what percentage of GOP voters does that, and what percentage isn’t really aligned on that issue but doesn’t mind it because they think it will help Republicans win.

Then there are “unconscious” attitudes. I think a lot of Republicans have ideas about poor inner city blacks, and a lot of them don’t have a lot of experience with that. They think poor blacks are poor because they were raised wrong. If they had been raised with good middle-class values — work hard, be honest, support the system, don’t ask for any handouts — they would quickly become middle class. These people typically have met some black middle-class people who have middle-class values — they’re doing fine, and you couldn’t tell they were black at all except for their skin color. Conservatives aren’t prejudiced against *them*. Proving they aren’t racists, right? And that their beliefs about it are right, it isn’t your skin color that matters, it’s your family values.

They believe that blacks commit a lot more crimes, which is why a lot more blacks get convicted of crimes, and that’s why the prisons are full of blacks. It isn’t racist to be concerned about criminals.

Black males kill other black males far more often than white males kill other white males. White males kill women much more often than black males kill women, but that doesn’t count. It isn’t that the system is racist, the statistics are true. (They might not be. If the police frame a whole lot of people for murder, they could be racist and frame a whole lot of blacks. But the legal system accepts the evidence the police provide, and they wouldn’t convict all those people if the police were wrong, would they? Anyway, it’s only tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorists who would even consider such a possibility. Of course our police are honest. Every reputable person believes that.)

So there’s nothing anybody can do about it except wait for black families to start teaching their children middle-class values. Until then all we can do is accept the burden of policing them and arresting and jailing them.

Now I’m ready to quit channelling BB. I say it’s a coherent set of beliefs. They fit together, and the news gets interpreted through those assumptions. What news would it take to challenge the assumptions?

I can’t think of any. If there’s a possibility that the police behavior was necessary, they will assume he was doing what was necessary. Why waste any sympathy on poor blacks who are criminals?

If the police behavior was obviously wrong, they will sympathize with him for having such a hard job, occasional mistakes will of course happen and we can’t hold that against the people who protect society.

If the police behavior was obviously corrupt, they might agree that this particular cop was wrong and should be fired, but it does not indicate any bigger problems. Like, if there is a video of him accepting a contract killing — he will kill somebody and frame some other civilian for it for a sum of money, and the person is killed just as he said and he is caught accepting the money — then that does not imply any policeman has done anything wrong except him.

I think it’s pretty much airtight. There are no facts that could get in to challenge the starting assumptions.

But entirely apart from that, likely a lot of Republican voters are not much interested in racist comments from politicians. They just think it’s a good thing because it encourages other Republicans to vote.

Although tub is being more than a little obnoxious about it, speaking specifically of St. Louis County I have to agree with much of his 2:40 am comment. That’s what happens behind closed doors at the Missouri Athletic Club.

Now many will immediately object that my experience is anecdotal and therefore not academically sound. And I can’t object to that. The problem being however that the rulers of eastern Missouri will only speak of these things behind closed doors to people they have some trust in; they will never fill out a statistically valid survey saying ‘yes, I fire black people whenever they overcome every obstacle I have put in front of them and request a promotion to senior management’. But I’ve heard key parties in STLCo say just that.

” of thinking that, since clear-thinking is the norm”

I quite obviously do not believe that clear thinking is the norm, because the belief that white people are biologically superior to black people does not come from clear thinking.

I am saying that people know what their values are. You are saying that they do not. Or, rather, that people who have bad values do not know what their values really are.

Of course, I do admit, performatively, here, that some people can fool themselves about some things: I am telling you that you have developed a rather elaborate means of fooling yourself about the conservative mind and your role in changing it.

Nobody, not every BB, thinks of themselves as a villain. Most people when asked agree that racism is bad. Therefore they cannot be racists because they are not “bad” people. Seems pretty straightforward to me.

JH: “What’s your evidence that I am fooling myself in this case”

You keep writing posts that you yourself admit don’t work.

Note to ungrammatical self: when you add an and phrase to a subject, look again at the verbs and pronouns. If you can’t manage that, an occasional mea culpa may help ease your conscience, in this case the ghost of your fifth-grade English teacher.

MPAVictoria: “Well you keep arguing with him about it….”

His preconceptions and values are pretty close to mine, so it’s theoretically possible that my arguments might eventually convince him of something. I generally think that when he argued with people similar to him: i.e. other academics more or less on the left, he wrote posts that were pretty thought-provoking.

The main time that I remember him “arguing” with a right winger and producing something lasting was with Frum, who tellingly later himself had to defect. The Donner party conservatism post. (Yes, I know, “dark sanatic millian liberalism”.) He quoted Trilling on irritable mental gestures and continued to discover that every right winger only wrote about irritable mental gestures, but could never take the obvious conclusion from this. Of course I sound like someone going on about why can’t all the later albums sound like Dub Housing.

All right, I hereby give up trying to convince people of this. Except, now as the final punishment that I will exact, I’ll make people read (or skip over) a poem that’s about exactly the failure of logic and knowledge to change anything. I wrote it about Katrina in 2005, and here we are again. It’s not intended as a criticism of JH. Here the introduction to it from my poetry chapbook _9/11 was 2001_:

There is a tradition of dialogue, in science fiction, in which characters tell each other things that they already know about the world so that the reader will know them. This became mockingly known as “As you know, Bob.” “As you know, Bob, now we fly around in jetpacks.”

Bob is uncanny, you see. He knows everything, yet people persist in telling him what he already knows. All of his life, people have been telling him things he already knew; it’s the only way he’s ever related to people. So he tells people things, assuming that they already know. Sometimes they don’t really already know, but it doesn’t matter.

There’s nothing they can do, so it doesn’t matter whether they know.

As You Know, Katrina

It was in New Orleans
That he first appeared
He was white, in his 50’s
With wild hair and a strange fixed grin
And burn in his eyes
Somehow he was always facing you
He never said much
Just stood there, ticking
No one knew him

We were sitting on the curb
When someone’s radio played
Weather
And we didn’t pay much
Weather alert
Attention, but he was standing there
His eyes got brighter, his mouth opened
“As you know,” he said
“We live in a bowl”
A bowl? People shrugged, smiled
To each other, but he went on
Something about how we knew
About global warming and
Hurricane cycles and the
Corps of Engineers and the
Levee system
No one could laugh, quite
So we went home, or just away

Over the next days
When we couldn’t find a car
And were standing, talking, looking
For some wood, there he was
The first wind
Blowing his hair every way
“As you know,” he said
“We live in a racist society”
And one old man said all sour
“We know that,” but he went on
No stopping him, about how
As we knew
The city, the police, the plans
Were made for certain
To get out
Certain to not
We couldn’t get away
But the sound of hammering wood
Drowned him for a while

The next days
Some said they’d seen him
Standing in the water
When you ran for the Superdome
He’d be by the side
“As you know,” he’d say
And all about Bush and some
Man we didn’t know named Brown
And about corruption
His eyes glowed so you could hardly look
It seemd like his smile
Might freeze forever
People waded by as fast as they could
Making hand signs
And somehow we knew
What was waiting

When we were trying to get out
After the food was gone
People would see him coming
And drive him off if they could
It was all jammed together
As you know
About the weather and crony capitalism
And how
As we knew
We’d never see that reconstruction money
“Stop it, stop” people would yell
But it was the same eyes, grin, hair
Always the face
The words

When we got out
We’d meet sometimes at the shelters
“Did you see him?” someone’d say
And someone’d say they saw him
Dead, water flowing through that grin
Or shot at last
Or just gone away
But we knew

We knew he’d come back

Are all of my comments actually getting blocked? (Um, if they all show up in a bunch, I would humbly ask Johnto delete all the nonsense ones–just a couple, really. Thanks.)

Speaking of poetry I noticed yesterday that this thing Byron wrote called “My Dear Mr. Murray” is all limericks. I’m sure it’s very funny if you can figure out what he’s talking about.

Oh, wait, then the first 2 lines wouldn’t rhyme the way they’re supposed to. Never mind.

“Now I’m ready to quit channelling BB. I say it’s a coherent set of beliefs. They fit together, and the news gets interpreted through those assumptions. What news would it take to challenge the assumptions?”

Think maybe you’ve got a coherent set of beliefs yourself, that are roughly mine inverted, and could be described as perjoratively as you described mine? And maybe you interpret the news through them, which is why you read about somebody robbing a store, and shortly after getting shot by the police, you leap to the assumption they were wrongly shot? And defend it relentlessly? And maybe there isn’t much that could challenge your assumptions, either. I get that impression

I don’t think racism is necessarily about hate. But that doesn’t mean the liberal definition of racism, carefully crafted to define away racism on your side, is accurate.

Racism is about making racial generalizations, and thinking they tell you what you need to know about individuals. That’s all it is. And everybody is capable of it, yes, even liberals, even minorities.

The left insert into their defintion of racism all sorts of irrelevancies, like “power relations”, (And not real power relations, either.) in order to define away inconvenient racism. Because you want racism to be something that is only present in whites, and conservative whites at that.

You don’t want to think about blacks being racist. Though every bit of evidence says they are, perhaps understandably, more racist on average than whites.

You don’t want to think about liberals being racist. Though what liberals say about race drips paternalistic racism, the racism of low expectations.

Yeah, there’s racism all over the place. And conservatives don’t have a monopoly on it, any more than everything that divides liberals and conservatives derives from it, on either side.

#182 BB

“Now I’m ready to quit channelling BB. I say it’s a coherent set of beliefs. They fit together, and the news gets interpreted through those assumptions. What news would it take to challenge the assumptions?”

Think maybe you’ve got a coherent set of beliefs yourself, that are roughly mine inverted, and could be described as perjoratively as you described mine?

Everybody who thinks they understand the situation has some sort of beliefs. Mine are not much like yours inverted, but I’m sure some people’s are.

But OK, I’ll talk about mine. I say that people fit into social roles, and they try *hard* to fit those roles. It takes incredibly strong family values to overcome the nonfamily pressures to fit other roles.

A few people can get ahead by very hard work and precise attention to detail. Opportunities will come up for them, and they will grab them. Even when there are a lot of racists around, a few poor black people who are willing to work extremely hard can find opportunities and do well. There may be more opportunities like that than there are people taking them. But not a lot more. It’s a niche role, and if a whole lot of people competed for it then most of them would get crowded out. It feels bad to put your whole soul into doing a perfect job for somebody else and then you make one little slip and you’re out, somebody who didn’t make that slip has outcompeted you. The big majority — black or white — don’t really try because they don’t want to put in a giant effort and fail, particularly if the rewards are not that big. If they didn’t mind doing that they would go off and be grad students.

Lots of people work basicly as warm bodies. They do whatever trivial tasks need to be done, and they wait around for them. “They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.” They think it’s normal. Their friends do the same.

There are different roles assigned to poor whites versus poor blacks. If they don’t take initiative they can be part of the crowd. If they do take initiative, whites have more opportunities beyond selling drugs. Life is boring for poor young men, and there’s a certain attraction to burglary. It’s exciting and you actually get something from it. I don’t know whether young poor black men do more burglary than young poor white men, but they get arrested for it a lot more.

Likewise with drug dealing. I grew up in a small town, and we had one semi-official drug dealer, a girl who had an arrangement with the police. She gave them most of the money, and she was their girlfriend — I think she didn’t have two police boyfriends in the same month, but I don’t know details, probably her sister didn’t know that. Anybody who tried to compete with her got arrested fairly quick. She was white because the police wanted a white girl. Blacks didn’t want to buy from her because her prices were high and she was white. They kept getting arrested for dealing and using. See, it was partly a social thing. I can imagine it could be like that bigger places, where it’s harder to find out what’s going on.

People everywhere have a big incentive to fit the roles that are provided to them. Nerds pretend to have no social skills because that’s how people expect them to be. Frat-boys know how everybody expects them to behave, and they mostly conform. Soldiers risk their lives to fit the expectations they have accepted, to be good soldiers. It all fits together.

Sometimes some poor black men mug somebody who’s walking around clueless, looking like a victim waiting to happen. It’s expected of them. Some feel an ethical obligation never to do that, and others don’t. It’s a lot easier to do what people expect you to do. The stereotypes we have of people tend to draw them in. In a weird way, everybody is more comfortable when you do what they expect, and not when you surprise them.

I once spent some time working at a warehouse in Birmingham. The white employees tried to act competent. In the slow times they sat around and discussed philosophy. (They didn’t call it that.) The (only young) black employees acted like clowns in front of the whites. They talked in a made-up accent just for them, and kind of danced around. Their leader was careful to get the instructions clear. When nobody they cared about was listening, they talked more like the whites.

One time my car broke down. I called in and the boss sent three of the blacks to take care of it. They had me open the hood and they started doing precise tests, quick. They knew a whole lot more about engines than I did, and they skipped the funny talk. Then a white guy I vaguely knew called me from across the street. “Do you need help?” I looked at him. These guys looked real competent, why would I need more help? He called again. “Do you need help?” One of the black guys poked me. “Quick! Tell him no!” He looked terrified. I called back, “No, I’m fine.” I was slow. Three black guys having an interaction with me on the street. Unless I said it was OK they could get in trouble quick.

We have to deal with each other’s expectations. It isn’t easy to change those expectations. A vast network of expectations that constrains everybody, and if you do the wrong thing the best you can expect is that people around you will be put off and disturbed and they will look at you funny.

“Even overlooking the fractured syntax, this is an absurd claim.”

That isn’t an argument. That is just contradiction.

/An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition.

// Would you be happier if I said almost nobody thinks of themselves as a villain?

“If you knew what you were about, you’d qualify ‘generalizations’, not try to say that generalizations, in general, are pointless.”

Look, making invalid generalizations, even about race, is a mistake, but it is not racism. If I were to say, “Blacks are, on average, more likely to suffer from high blood pressure.”, this would be a generalization, and supportable by data. If I were to say, “Blacks are, on average, better at basketball than whites.” this would be a generalization, and maybe valid, maybe not.

If I then asked my black neighbor across the street, Randy, how his blood pressure treatment was coming along, having no individualized reason to believe he has a high blood pressure problem, THAT would be racist. In exactly the same manner it would be racist to presume that he had a criminal record, just because blacks are more likely than whites to have that.

I think liberals don’t like to acknowledge that racism consists of wrongly applying generalizations to individuals, because you do it all the time.

I would have thought that those who thought blacks deserved a leg up into college because they couldn’t do well on the SAT, were those who thought blacks were stupider, lazier, and more impulsive. Guess not, for the same reason we don’t talk about Fiji and Malaysia as the last remaining outposts of Jim Crow.

One’s rights as a citizen are not dependent for their exercise upon any particular quality. Why we are making a conversation about rights dependent on one of similarity? Why are we ignoring the impunity with which all policemen get to inflict violence? After all, “But don’t let it be a black and a white one//Cause they’ll slam ya down to the street top//Black police showin out for the white cop”.

Beyond Ferguson, police use far too much violence and kill dozens of people of every race each month. But I don’t see protests in the street, or riots when a superfluous SWAT raid burns a toddler, or the Chicago cops kill 40 people over the summer.

Why is Mike Brown, robber, shot after a violent confrontation, the face of police brutality, and not the black man shot at a gas station in Georgia for obeying police instructions by a trigger happy cop in broad daylight, with the interaction captured on camera?

“This isn’t about saving future Michael Browns. It’s about keeping blacks pissed off at whites, so they can be stampeded into supporting one set of whites over another set.”

In breaking news, are white liberals secretly using orbital mind control lasers to induce hero white cops to shoot and kill unarmed black men, as part of their secret plan to inflame racial tensions? That story, and our exclusive interview with the victim cops, is coming up next, right here on Fox.

where to begin with Brett Bellmore?

Ianal but I believe this is referred to as a ‘leading question’.

(Thanks for the information though.)

I think this sums it up pretty well. Yeah, it ‘looked like an easily provable case’ before there was any hard evidence.

Another way of putting it is that some people jumped to a conclusion, and didn’t want to abandon it after the facts came out.

Yeah, I’d say he wasn’t badly injured in the attack, as some stuff that was originally put out claimed. But that he WAS attacked has been clearly established.

For all that people who want to deny that will continue to fantasize that he was shot down while surrendering.

I think Ezra Klein did a pretty good job of sussing out contradictory narratives.
http://www.vox.com/2014/11/25/7287443/dorian-johnson-story

Also, it occurred to me in the shower this morning that that Byron thing has the same form as “Old Mother Hubbard.”

Yeah, conflicting witnesses, gotta go with forensics. Bizarre coincidence, that all of the shots that hit showed wound patterns consistent with the not-surrendering scenario, and consistent with the charging back scenario.

Homicide by Police Officer in USA is not rare, I’ve read the number 3%. And that’s the tip of the iceberg. There’s a whole lot of injury, property damage, and other losses too.

A Grand Jury is not required to get an indictment. A district attorney has the choice of simply issuing an indictment. Isn’t the purpose of the Grand Jury system to protect the rich, well connected, and/or higher caste individuals from the trouble, embarrassment, and potential libel of a real trial?

Prosecutors and police effectively work on the same team. The depend upon each other’s loyalty on a daily basis. In cases where police violence is alleged to be illegal, the appropriate step would seem to be having an independent investigator/prosecutor.

I actually agree with much of what you’re saying, Charles, but this is an awfully lousy case to make a fuss over. Just because police do murder people, and the system can be rigged, doesn’t mean THIS was a case of somebody being murdered by a cop, and a rigged outcome.

Plenty of people who didn’t just commit robberies get shot, why focus on the guy who did just commit a robbery?

Well, I’ve got an explanation for that, but it doesn’t cast Mr. Brown’s defenders in a good light.

“Plenty of people who didn’t just commit robberies get shot, why focus on the guy who did just commit a robbery?”

Among the many facts with which you’re apparently unaware, is the fact that Wilson made no connection with any robbery when he instigated the interaction with Brown and Wilson. This is per Wilson’s own testimony. Brown’s theft of cigars is entirely irrelevant to the question of what happened.

“Among the many facts with which you’re apparently unaware, is the fact that Wilson made no connection with any robbery when he instigated the interaction with Brown and Wilson. This is per Wilson’s own testimony. Brown’s theft of cigars is entirely irrelevant to the question of what happened.”

That’s extremely misleading. Wilson’s testimony is that he made the connection midway through the interaction. It wasn’t there when he told them to get off the road. When they refused he took a second look at the situation, made the connection, radioed for backup (which is verifiable), then reversed the car to cut them off.

tub, do people suffering from Down’s syndrome not deserve respect and rights? The question of how people are different does not matter for the question of what the rights of man are. No degree of incapacity justifies the enactment into law of a caste system or exclusion from social life.

“Am I not a man and a brother?” is not a plea for some trial by combat to gain the rights of equality. It is a statement that then and there, back bent from the work of the fields, crippled by the whips of the master, mind wasted by enforced illiteracy, that they deserve the rights of every man.

Many East Asians have issues with lactose intolerance. Many whites have issues with skin cancer. Some forms of anemia are only found around the Mediterranean. When we come to mental differences, an entire encyclopedia has been written about disorders causing mental retardation, many found in only a few ethnicities. There is a wide range of variation in abilities among people no matter where they live. This in no way affects their right to be treated the same before the law or their demands to be full members of society.

Racism can be based on fears of superiority of the discriminated against, as well as fears of their inferiority. In Malaysia, the Malay leaders say that Malays are lazy and Chinese industrious, and so enact restrictions upon the rights of the Chinese. In Fiji the native islanders run a voting system that disenfranchises the descendents of Indian laborers.

Racism is wrong because any form of treating persons differently based on accident of birth is wrong. Everyone deserves the right to be judged according to their own merits, not those of a caste identity. This has nothing to do with the validity of such stereotypes. How weak your commitment to equality must be, if only those you judge worthy are entitled to it!

“Because stealing 10 bucks worth of tobacco products isn’t a sufficient reason for a summary execution by an officer of the state?”

No, it wouldn’t be, if that were what happened. But, of course, it doesn’t appear to be what happened, except to people determined to see something like that.

Yeah, and Ashkenazi Jews are, on average, born with greater intellectual capacity than white people

That makes everything okay then. Black people are stupider than Brett but Jews are cleverer. No hint of racism in that division of prejudice.

It’s funny. Seeing a CT post titled Ferguson, iirc the only Crooked Timber post there’s been touching however obliquely and disinterestedly, on a shocking miscarriage of justice and a series of events which has caused anger and mass protests across the US and the globe, and forced back into the centre of public consciousness the US’s history of racism, injustice and brutal state violence, I had the vague hope people might be discussing, you know, Ferguson. Silly me. It’s been been Bellmored.

“Silly me. It’s been been Bellmored.”

Self-referential there, complaining about people replying to BB while replying to BB.

I’m always happy when he turns up. People are always going on about how conservatives aren’t really consciously racist, and then he selflessly comes in to show them the truth. On a day of Thanksgiving, I give thanks to Brett for helping to make me not look crazy.

Oh wow. This actually got flat-out offensive. Brett Bellmore, fuck you.

The Temporary Name once again proving why I love it when you post.

:-)

“This isnt behaviour representative of the population at large.”

And here I thought that conservatives basically hated fluorescent light bulbs because liberals liked them, that they were making a special push for Keystone XL because liberals opposed it, and so on. You’re not an American, right? Because you seem a little bit clueless about our politics.

“Brett *doesnt* see himself as racist. ”

Come on, Ronan(rf), now you’re just being cruel. Brett already specifically awoved age-old beliefs in racial superiority, just for the people here, and now you want more? He’s going to strain something. I think we can agree that by any conceivable definition of racism, Brett is a conscious racist, and so what if he doesn’t want to embrace the term itself.

“His politics are largely incoherent and driven more in opposition to the left than in favour of any ideology in particular.”

Wait, I thought you said he was an ideologue? I think the word you’re looking for is “reactionary”. You know, there’s someone else who writes somewhere near here who wrote something about how this is characteristic of conservative minds.

“And here I thought that conservatives basically hated fluorescent light bulbs because liberals liked them, that they were making a special push for Keystone XL because liberals opposed it, and so on. ”

No. I think special interests and a small group of ideologues could explain something like a push for the Keystone pipeline. I would think this is beginners politics , no ?

@ BB: “No, not at all. It should, if you are rational, weight your evaluation of the odds. It demonstrates that Brown was a criminal, and not merely capable of violent attacks on people, but inclined to commit them.”

In a similar vein, you once promulgated lies about Wilson’s injuries. As I’m rational, I must weight my evaluation of the odds whenever I read your words. After all, it demonstrates that you’re a liar, and not merely capable of lying, but inclined to lie. Thus, in every case where there’s any doubt, I must assume you lie. Isn’t that the essence of your methodology here?

In addition to his duties as the county prosecutor, Robert McCulloch is also the president of The Backstoppers, Inc., an organization used to fundraise for the men and women in uniform in both Missouri and Illinois. And, in August, his organization was affiliated with a t-shirt drive featuring a picture of Missouri and the statement “I SUPPORT OFFICER D. WILSON” which was set up to raise money for the Darren Wilson Defense Fund as well as The Backstoppers.

National Bar Association Calls for Federal Charges Against Darren Wilson

Protesters storm city hall as Ferguson fury spreads
NY: Bratton hit with paint as protesters shut down 3 bridges
Londoners chant ‘hands up don’t shoot’ as Ferguson protests spread to Europe

Yep, and in addition to the case of T. Rice above, recall the recent shooting, also in Ohio, of another man in the toy gun section of Walmart. Picked up the toy gun, took a call on his cell phone, and then an ex-Marine was so scared that he called the cops, who run in, flank him from between the store shelves, and shoot him dead. And if you’ve been paying attention, you can infer the key third variable here.

[link to video is here, I don’t really recommend watching however: http://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2014/sep/25/ohio-shooting-walmart-video ]

Relevant for many reasons, but the most important one, imho, is that these institutions have no process for internal reform, they are not changing, they continue to kill innocent civilians and LEARN NOTHING FROM IT. Two shootings, in the span of a couple months; same state, both with toy guns. You think that someone would have reacted to the above case in such a way that there would have been greater caution exercised in the T. Rice case? Obscene.

About the video of the 12-year-old in Cleveland: I recommend watching the first minute or so and then skipping to about 6 minute or 6:30.

On racism as hate. It may count as one of Hitler’s posthumous victories that the extreme version of anti-semitic racism practised by the Nazis has com to be seen in some way as typical of human evil. That was certainly hatred. But it didn’t fit even their attitude to other inferiors, Gypsies, Slavs, homosexuals, the mentally handicapped, etc. They were quite willing to commit mass murder against these out of contempt. A slave-owner doesn’t hate his slaves, any more than his cattle. No, Brett, racism is merely the very widespread belief, which you clearly share, in the natural inferiority of other groups. It’s not necessarily harmful, but usually is.

Consider a world in which homo erectus survived and populations coexist with homo sapiens. It would be commonly held, and rightly so , that the Erecti are mentally less capable by nature than the Sapientes. That would not justify mistreatment of the former, but it would justify inequalities of status. That was roughly how 19th-century whites, even abolitionists, thought of blacks. We know better. We Sapientes are all the same.

From Wilson’s testimony, which needs to be read to be believed, and by believed i mean disbelieved -“At this point it looked like he was almost bulking up to run through the shots, like it was making him mad that I’m shooting at him”

Reads like Tarantino. How did this guy ever get to be a police officer ? Don’t they have, IDK, phone screens and several levels of interviews to prevent unqualified/unstable people from entering the force ?

Adding to the theme, here’s a dashcam video of a fairly recent police shooting of an unarmed man (care to guess what race?). It really has to be seen to be believed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBUUO_VFYMs

Luckily the cop was a bad enough shot to not kill the victim. Also lucky is that there is clear video evidence of what happened, since if we only had the eye witness testimony and forensics, we know how that would have played out. Indeed, it’s interesting to hear how the cop recounts the incident right after it happens, which can be heard in the longer version of the video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZuyFqo8sRs#t=794

“I pulled him over for a seat belt violation. Before I could even get out of my car he jumped out, stared at me, and as I jumped out of my car and identified myself, as I approached him, he jumped headfirst back into his car. I started retracting back towards the rear of his vehicle, telling him, ‘Look, get out of the car, let me see your hands.’ He jumped out of the car. I saw something black in his hands. I ran to the other side of the car, yelling at him, and he kept coming towards me. Apparently it was his wallet.”

“Robert P. McCulloch is the Prosecuting Attorney for St. Louis County, Missouri, a post he has held since 1991. A Democrat, he has historically had bipartisan support as a popular prosecutor and has won re-election in 1994, 1998, 2002, 2006, 2010 and 2014, often unopposed but by wide margins when he has had an opponent.”

Missouri Governor – Jay Nixon (Democrat)

Just for the record.

p.s I wish some of the Timberers on the Twitters would give a heads up to hot threads like this (before all the derails). Cough. Robin. Healy. Quiggin. Farrell.

Ps. I don’t think conservatives were wringing their hands about this verdict. Rather, they were planning on ways to invite Darren Wilson to their next campaign stop or conference. He’s their new Joe the Plumber, with better racist cred. He’s become a go to guy for this group.

@243
I expect him to be a better fit that the previous candidate, Zimmerman, who was tried a bit here and there but didn’t quite catch on.

Brett at 202: Here’s what Wilson said, “”I felt that another of those punches in my face could knock me out or worse … I’ve already taken two to the face and I didn’t think I would, the third one could be fatal if he hit me right,”

Look at the pictures–as you say, “the forensics.” Apparently Wilson is so resilient that he could absorb two life threatening blows to the left side of the face, and show no bruising. (Of course they weren’t life threatening. They were minor and trivial. Wilson panicked because he’s filled with racist ideas and ideology and because he’s a terrible police officer. This is why his capacity for professional, rational action deserted him, why he couldn’t deal with the situation productively and why he couldn’t aim his gun.)

What it doesn’t explain is why, as dozens of attorneys have wondered, McCullough didn’t ask Wilson to explain why his account of his injuries is so at odds with the forensics.

And it doesn’t explain why the police investigating didn’t measure the distance between the shell casings and the body, didn’t take a full set of pictures of the scene, and why they allowed Wilson to transport the possible murder weapon to the station house, and wash Brown’s blood off his hands.

What explains the latter is McCullough’s devotion to the police, and St. Louis’s indifference to Michael Brown and people like him. They saw a cop and a dead black man, and they knew what to think, because neither of them were individuals.

Going back to the discussion between Rich Puchalsky and John Holbo…

I think Rich is far more correct. I think the essential element missing is that racist systems are first systems. If it is kept going, then there is something that keeps it going. If you believe that there is no merit to any just interpretation of the system, such as the concept that black people natively produce genuinely inferior goods to whites, jury-rigging and all, then that system, pretty much by definition, run on lies that expropriates something. Looking at who gains and who loses, you can clearly identify black and other nonwhites as losers. What’s debatable is the pool of people who wins, in the sense of just how many nonapex whites has gains from the system. Thus, there is always a (potential)controversy about how the loot is split up. This is resolved by convincing people that they gain from the system as is, and the losses to people as regrettable consequences to an overall beneficial system, but definitely not racist.

People just do not really dance to any ideology, as a mass. Insisting on a theory of racist ideology that people can hold or be self-deluded about is probably missing the point. People respond to incentives, and they believe the reasoning that justify them having more than their peers, whether that reasoning includes explicitly racist reasoning or not. When held to account, they most likely will deny that they had racist motivations, and when they are forced to account for the damage their favored policies does to others, they are just going to go “too bad, so sad”. If they feel especially bad about it, they’ll give you a longer message of sympathy. What they won’t do is allow the challenge the system that they feel benefits them. Ultimatly, this sentiment by Holbo in the post:

But, by the time you’ve got 1 & 2, that ship has sailed. Conservatives who want 1) and are passively ok with 2) – at least in places like Ferguson – but who want order, need a mechanism for restoring and maintaining trust.

–really does have loaded silent assumptions. What sort of “order” do conservatives want, and does it have a thing to do with restoring and maintaining trust? Or is the word used to create a prenumbra that occludes the intent that has nothing to do with any just order in the surrounding patter of words? Holbo talks about dismantling “bad defenses of conservatism” as being worthwhile. However, conservatives do not place much value in any consistent justification–so long as you aren’t threatening the system, talking about the “bad defenses” occupies anti-racist good will to the satisfaction of racists. It’s just a tent being torn down. New tents can be made, and they can be placed on some other pleasant dale, some other day. You gunna want to smack around the tent-builders instead.

As several commenters have noted, racism has a history. Indeed, it does. Turning racism into a political taboo marks one of the great triumphs of political liberalism in its long fight for the dignity and autonomy of the individual and to transform the state into a rationally administered instrument for a shared, public good.

The series of historic triumphs for political liberalism over racial oppression marked out a series of historic defeats for reactionary and authoritarian conservatism if “conservatism” is the label we care to attach to whatever apology in whatever era has been offered for complacency and indifference, regarding conventional acceptance of cruelty and vicious, amoral selfishness.

It doesn’t seem to me that one can really argue effectively with cruelty and vicious, amoral selfishness; in democratic politics, we’re always arguing with complacency and indifference regarding moral conventions.

It’s a measure of that remarkable series of triumphs of liberal politics against racism that “racist” is a such a powerful pejorative in conventional moral terms.

It is a powerful charge, racism, because of that acceptance within the framework of conventional morality that racism be treated as a taboo. It is a politically potent charge. It was the charge of racism that finally drew some Federal court attention to stop-and-frisk, and it is the charge of racism, which draws national attention to Ferguson and the shooting of Michael Brown.

Sadly, feeling outrage within the approved framework of conventional morality is also perfectly consistent with complacency and indifference. A partisan divide can be defined, t-shirts and bumperstickers distributed that reinforce partisan identifications, without anyone questioning too closely the actual exercise of power.

Liberal democracy in the U.S. and in the Western world is at serious hazard, not from Racism per se, but from Money. Whether common people retain a degree of individual, political autonomy and whether governments serve as instruments for the general welfare, is an open question going forward, the answer no longer assured. Some of those issues are on the surface in Ferguson. As the OP eloquently pointed out, trust in the government’s service to the Community is in very serious question.

At this point, the questions of ‘should we engage with conservatives’ or ‘do they admit that they are racists?’ are a distraction.

The last honest, good faith debate that I have had with a conservative was with a teacher of mine, back in high school, and it eventually stalled out – coming down to one’s personal belief in God. The last one prior to that was in the context of a formal, structured debate, hardly analogous to circumstances in the outside world.

Since then, the name of the game in my experience has been misdirection. Everyone has their pet factoid that they think they can deploy as a sort of trump card, and will throw it at you once you really start making headway. I have basically given up debating conservatives. Throw them some snark? sure. But earnest debate or discussion? Not wasting my breath. Call that defeatist or apathetic or whatever; if you have any ‘conversion stories’ or Pauline ‘scales from the eyes’ moments to regale me with I am all ears.

The real question we should be asking ourselves – ‘what is to be done?’

People are marching in the streets, holding up highways, bridges, etc. Does this do anything? Does this sort of direct action have any efficacy? I once heard it said that the challenge of the left today is that there is no longer a Winter Palace to march on, to take over. Power is fluid, dispersed, everywhere and nowhere, in our heads and our language and built into the bricks of our institutions.

I am honestly asking – I have no clue. It feels nice and fuzzy to chant and march and see that the local news is taking pictures. But I can get that nice and fuzzy feeling by ranting about Obama or Racism or whatever on the internet message boards. And at least it is warm inside – the food is better too.

Some people are opting to break things, mostly of the corporate variety, and I can’t blame them for that. But what use is it getting arrested? Pay the court for the great privilege of hearing their perverse opinion on justice? No thanks. Some people tried to disrupt the thanksgiving day parade in NYC today. Carted off to jail – how many even noticed their effort? The Spectacle must not be interfered with. Everything is functioning… everything continues functioning…

#252 Bruce Wilder

It is not either or. Racism was invented to serve Money. The relationship isn’t going away.

It also ties in with things that might not be about money much. In a society where lots of things are connected to the monetary economy you can always make a connection, but — I’ve noticed that in confrontations with “italians” I find myself wary that they might draw knives, more than in confrontations with, say, “irish”. In confrontations with “italians” I consider that they might have Mafia connections. Most “italians” I’ve known have at some point in the first few weeks have mentioned that they do have Mafia connections. It’s a trope or something.

These stereotypes actually affect me in situations that could possibly become life-threatening, and I don’t think it’s particularly about money. It’s just garden-variety racism, people sterotype each other from the media and their own prior experience.

But lots of it is about money. A lot of Americans used to be racist about irish and italians, claiming they were genetically inferior etc. They quit. I don’t think that’s primarily because skin color is a less subtle marker than looking irish. I think it’s more because the economic interest changed.

I’m not quite sure I grasp my own argument, and, at the same time, I fear touching people’s hot buttons will prevent anyone hearing me.

That does happen a lot. People tend to interpret everything in terms of what they’re already thinking, and anything new which kind of reminds them of something old, is likely to get responses as if it’s simply the old ideas. Like in the rape altercation, or the nazis, etc.

For lots of people, the cry of racism, and the emotional response to it, defines partisan identity. Its eminently conventional. And, eminently consistent with complacency and indifference.

Yes! Compare the patter from libertarians about Ruby Ridge or Waco, versus things like Ferguson or Rodney King. On the one hand the police are thugs supporting the authoritarian state, destroying liberty. On the other hand they are the innocents who protect us from criminal thugs, protecting order. They see no inconsistency between those. Racism trumps libertarianism.

It’s like, in the 1960’s we got a consensus that we could not afford to tear the country apart over racism, so we tried to work out a way to avoid that. It’s like, poor white people with guns are no threat, but poor black people are a threat. So they go right ahead and oppress poor white people knowing there will be no consequences, but they have to be careful it doesn’t look like they’re oppressing poor black people more.

But maybe Fallujah showed that the technology has shifted. Armed civilian populations just aren’t that much of a threat, so it doesn’t matter so much what poor people or middle-class people think.

I’ve noticed that in confrontations with “italians” I find myself wary that they might draw knives

Oops, I meant “spanish”. And it struck me that this was irrational, that a gun might be more likely than a knife, that I was letting useless stereotypes affect my thinking when they could get me killed.

“Oops, I meant “spanish””

Italians, Spanish, deep down we’re all spiks in the end, right?

I get that you are trying to confront your own prejudice, and that is admirable. But maybe you could do it a little bit more adeptly?

“Well, he did, briefly and inadequately, when Trayvon Martin was murdered. And the right wing press went ape-shit. This is in no way to defend his failure to say much else, but when you have a racist press, racist police, a racist polity and a racist political system, I can kind of understand trying to rationing the racist response to any commentary on race.”

I think by ‘addressing’, Rich means acting, not just speaking. Obama could have ended the sale of military equipment to police forces. He could have a justice department that treated these events as what they are, violations of civil rights, and federalized the response. Where is the federal prosecutor investigating police abuses in Ferguson? Is there a Federal grand jury? Why is public safety during periods of protest being left to the whims of the local and state forces – who seem to be at best inept, and at worst malign?

“We have a black President, who for a while had a Democratic Congress, and he was perfectly capable of addressing police militarization and police racism if he’d chosen to. He didn’t.”

Sure he did. He shipped places like Ferguson surplus military hardware. That might not be what either of us would have liked, but it certainly IS “addressing” police militarization.

I’d say he’s also effectively addressing the problem of income inequality, in roughly the same way.

See, your problem is that, if he’s not making things better, you assume he’s ignoring a topic. I don’t have that problem, because I don’t start with the premise that he’s a good guy. So I’m free to notice him making things worse.

Latter part of 263 directed to Rich P.

Well, I do assume that President Rand wouldn’t direct federal funds to his crony’s investments, and the order that the losses be forgiven.

I might be wrong about that, he might be playing me, the way Obama played you. It’s a lot easier to spot somebody playing somebody else, harder when it’s aimed your way.

Bruce Wilder: “For lots of people, the cry of racism, and the emotional response to it, defines partisan identity. Its eminently conventional. And, eminently consistent with complacency and indifference.”

For what it’s worth, I fully agree with “Racism was invented to serve Money.” But you, Bruce, do have a tendency to write about this as a kind of New Deal vs New Left opposition. Specifically, you sometimes write about how the left has turned away from the concerns of “authoritarian followers”, how it disrespects ordinary white people, etc., as if the Civil Rights Movement, feminism, gay rights and so on were distractions. And, as I in turn have written plenty of times, there is no way that the left-of-center could have remained the left in any meaningful sense and not have supported these movements. It doesn’t matter whether the root cause is money: the left can’t ignore the particular ways in which this works out.

“Specifically, you sometimes write about how the left has turned away from the concerns of “authoritarian followers”, how it disrespects ordinary white people, etc., as if the Civil Rights Movement, feminism, gay rights and so on were distractions. And, as I in turn have written plenty of times, there is no way that the left-of-center could have remained the left in any meaningful sense and not have supported these movements.”

100% Right and 0% Wrong. I have saying that to Bruce for years now.

In case this is still a thread about Ferguson:

Fifty years before Michael Brown was shot to death on the streets of Ferguson, McCulloch’s father died in the line of duty. The father’s death casts additional doubt on the son’s ability to lead the grand jury investigation into Brown’s killing, while at the same time shedding a garish light on the history of racism, policing, and the law in St. Louis.

RP @269
there are a number of civil liberties areas in which the Obama administration really is worse than Bush’s

The record in this area is very mixed (so to that extent I agree).

“I smell burning straw.”

Nope. BW has at least implied that is his view many times here at Crooked Timber. He never actually responds to any questions about it though.

Can I resist temptation? Should I?

As you know, Alcibiades, an argument derives its validity from its form, but acquires no particular factual relevance from its form alone. The argument,

All men are bald, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is bald

is logically valid. Its statements hang together as an argument because they fit the form. If we substitute the fact, “Some men are bald” for the categorical claim, “All men are bald”, the argument does not merely change, it ceases to exist, because the form is no longer satisfied: its statements are unrelated and produce no “therefore”. (Of course, if you are an econometrician, this obstacle will not deter you. You will go ahead, and end by declaring that correlation is indeed causation and counterfactuals are evidence.)

I agree with Rich that even if ‘racism was invented to serve money’ (whether that’s true I dont know, but taking it as fact) , it can and does still function independently, from the bottom up.
My link at 245 seems to imply that post ww2 northern segregation occured at numerous level, but a lot of the dynamics were driven by ordinary white families not wanting to live near blacks. Afaicr that was also the take away from Sugrue’s ‘Origins of the urban crisis’ , that the demographic most hostile to integration were blue collar workers in skilled or semi skilled work, as they saw black Americans as a threat to their economic position (among other factors)
Im reading ‘Reproducing Racism’ by Daria Rothmayr at the minute, and her chapter 2 opens with the 1919 Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad strike (which Id never heard about) where white workers went on strike against the inclusion of black workers in more skilled positions, and where management supported the black workers (because of labour shortages)
It also alls seems very parochial. These sorts of divisions exist the world over, (and not only racial), in different contexts and different times. Of course elite maipulation explains bits of it, perhaps most, but how far does ‘it’s all about the money/elites’ get us ?

So far, commentary on the Ferguson case has been weirdly skewed on at least two fronts: one front is that the only “experts” that are consulted about the verdict have police roots – see this NYT story where expert is equated with being a police officer. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/27/us/ferguson-experts-weigh-darren-wilsons-decisions-leading-to-fatal-shooting-of-michael-brown.html?action=click&contentCollection=U.S.&module=RelatedCoverage&region=Marginalia&pgtype=article This, weirdly, casts those people who’ve been victims of police abuse, or their lawyers, in the role of “amateur”. Clearly, this is absurd. I have not yet seen, say, Marilynn S. Johnson consulted by any paper, although she wrote one of the most cited books on police violence, Street Justice: A History of Police Violence in New York City. This question of “expertise” is the point at which ideology really emerges on the surface of the discourse, since as long as one only consults the police about the policing, the law and order point of view – inherently conservative – wins. This seems to me to be implicated in the second weird skewing, which is the idea that grand juries never indict policemen and juries never convict them. This I think confuses the work of the grand jury with the work of the prosecutor. The conflict of interest of a prosecutor in these cases is obvious, which is why the simplest reform here would be to require special prosecutors for these cases. Still, when the victim is white and middle class, grand juries do indict and juries can be moved to convict. The Ferguson case, which hinged on Wilson’s claim that he felt his life was endangered, can be paralleled by a case that was tried just last year of a Culpepper Virginia policeman who killed a sunday school teacher, Patricia Cook. The policeman, Daniel Harmon-Wright, claimed that when he reached in her car window to take her license, she rolled up the window and took off. Thus, he shot her – seven times – because otherwise he would have been dragged to death. This seems more life threatening that anything that happened to Wilson. The difference was that eye witnesses, in the Harmon-Wright case, were believed, and they asserted that Harmon-Wright’s hand was not trapped in that window, and that he simply unloaded when she took off in her car. She was “escaping” him, just as Michael Brown was escaping Wilson, and the automatic response was shoot to kill. In fact, with a special prosecutor, I think Wilson’s claim of being threatened would be broken down in court – and what would be left was the overwhelming desire to be obeyed. However, there are limits on how police can achieve that last goal.
The law and order mentality and racism or ethnic prejudice, in American history, have long been twins.

Fresh from holiday with the family (California upper middle class). Coupl’a relevant bullet points re: race relations:

-unbeknownst to me until last night, my paternal grandparents, whilst living in Chicago suburbs, hired a young black women as a live-in. She was referred to in exclusively white company as grandma’s “slavey”.

-Richard Sherman, star (American) football player, was referred to repeatedly by my relations as a THUG, on evidence of his sometimes aggressively rude post -game comments and crowd-taunting. (Why did I go there but …) I mentioned that Sherman grew up in inner city Los Angeles poverty, graduated from Stanford with very high marks, and probably had accomplished “more” (by middle class norms) than musket or any one deriding him. The response was that he obviously had a tutor and, because he was an athlete, was coddled throughout his time at Stanford.

I’m sure any deconstructed mainstream white Ameican grew up in this soup too, and this is apparently some distance still from racial discourse from the middle class whites in the mid-West and South.

I heard a great analogy on the radio this week: white-black race relations in the U.S. Are line an airport people-mover. The overt racists are walking on/with the flow, most people are “standing still” but still, alas, moving along with the racist momentum, and those who are trying to create a post-racist society are walking against the flow.

Right. The strongest hierarchy (and the most obvious) is the hierarchy of wealth. The ‘rights’ movements attempt to enforce and legitimize the hierarchy of wealth: ‘this is a perfectly fine middle-class person, but he/she is not getting all the respect he/she deserves simply because he/she is X – this is unacceptable’. The ‘rights’ movements never object to the hierarchy of wealth, it’s a given. Their goal is a meritocratic capitalist society. Fine, as far as that goes, but why do they have to be categorized as “Left”? It’s confusing. “National Socialism” is not Left; why should “Meritocratic Capitalism” be Left?

Please can we go back to talking about Ferguson?

Shall we try making a list of things that ‘legitimize and straighten [strengthen?] capitalism’. I’ll start us off:

1. welfare state
2. universal sufferage
3. legal process / human rights
4. rising living standards
5. …

Come engels and Ze, let us raise the red flag over city hall!

I quoted Cornel West about Ferguson, and I think I’m just going to stick with that.

I think part of it is just temperament. That his success has been predicated on finding that middle ground. “We’re not black. We’re not white. We’re not rich. We’re not poor. There’s no classes in America. We are all Americans. We’re the American family.” He invoked the American family last week. It’s a lie, brother. You’ve got to be able to tell the truth to the American people. We’re not a family. We’re a people. We’re a nation. And a nation always has divisions. You have to be able to speak to those divisions in such a way that, like FDR, like Lincoln, you’re able to somehow pull out the best of who we are, given the divisions.

I’ll add that in our own responses we have to consider who we are, individually and collectively. Are you a charismatic politician, capable of winning at a national level? Then I encourage you to run for high office and do what you can to make a difference. Are you the next Marx or Keynes? Then go out and write whatever the contemporary equivalent of their works would be.

Are you more or less an ordinary person with no extraordinary talent for politics or theory? Then accept that ordinary people did everything we were supposed to do and that we have been failed by our leaders and organizations. After the catastrophe that was the Bush administration, we chose the primary candidate who promised to end the war, the one that seemed most to the left of those available. When many of his promises turned out to be lies, we protested. (Some of us, anyways.) Protests are either ignored or repressed. Whether you’re simply a voter, an electoral politics activist, or a non-electoral politics activist, people pretty much did all of the classic things they are supposed to do within our system and the system is not responsive to them.

And now your responsibility as an ordinary person is to admit that. Not to keep defending the Democrats because they aren’t as bad as the GOP. Not to go one more round of “but what can we do when something like Ferguson happens?” You can’t do anything, and your defense and your concern are both ineffectual. Police in America kill a black man every 28 hours, and after all the ritual what-can-we-dos over Ferguson, every week in the years to come is going to bring another case just like this one, until some sociological factor beyond our control changes.

And what are you going to do about that? If the answer is “nothing”, then get it out of the way and stop wasting mental energy on pretending otherwise. I decided to become an anarchist, which while it doesn’t involve any superhuman feats of activism over what I’d otherwise do, at least frees me from having to pretend that I’m working for the maintenance of a system that’s failed.

bob mcmanus @287
I think the neoliberal co-optation of identity (as commodity, as mobile fungible maleable social capital) is an inevitable consequence of late global capitalism.

McManus seems completely in thrall to the idea — if it can indeed be dignified with that word — that neoliberal capitalism has co-opted all manifestations of identity-oriented politics and commodified them, so that for example when predominantly, though by no means exclusively, African-American protests occur in response to Ferguson or similar incidents, they are somehow reinforcing capitalism. Even the small minority of violent protesters who vandalized property and smashed cars and businesses are, by implication on this view, expressing a commodified neoliberal consciousness inasmuch as the *real* reason for trashing shop X is that it doesn’t sell the particular kind of clothing, say, that a particular manipulating neoliberal capitalist subculture (for lack of a better word) has convinced them is cool. (Too bad for shop X — it somehow didn’t get with the program.) The foregoing, of course, is nonsense and illustrates, imo, how reading too much postmodernist and postructuralist theory can have a bad effect on one’s powers of elementary observation and analysis.

More seriously, although Wm. Timberman @285 is right about the historical and continuing tension between economic-based and rights-based (or identity-based) politics, there doesn’t *have* to be a chasm between them. That the left has done a less than great job of trying to bridge these divides does not mean they’re unbridgeable. But I think they will be if one starts from McManus’ presumptions.

“Shall we try making a list of things that ‘legitimize and straighten [strengthen?] capitalism’. ”

No, we should go back to talking about Ferguson. I read that somewhere…

Bruce Wilder: “What I do think is that the Republican “Southern Strategy” about which one hears so much corresponded to a Democratic non-strategy strategy of abandoning the alliance of progressive idealists with more populist forces that had represented outsiders in American society generally, and especially small farmers and the working classes.”

I’m generally sympathetic to that, and I especially think that you should be reading John Emerson, who has written a lot about left populism. But when people talk about why this alliance was abandoned (if it ever really existed), they talk as you did about exhaustion or demoralization, or perhaps that people just didn’t find how to do it as William Timberman wrote, or some other varient on inadvertence or ignorance or bad planning. But I really don’t know whether there was any way to do it. To quote another talented politician, LBJ: “We have lost the South for a generation.” I don’t think that there was actually any way of avoiding doing that.

There’s quite a lot to chew on in BW’s recapitulation @ 299, as there is in bob m’s insight into the forces of co-optation @ 287, and LFC’s response to it @ 300. For the record, I don’t think that bob is wrong, but he does appear to be slighting the whole for the understandable purpose of illuminating the part which concerns him most. Modernity as we know it in the U.S. is protean; its true genius is expressed in turning things into their opposites at a truly bewildering pace. This isn’t the whole story of what’s wrong with us, but I do think LFC is too quick to condemn what for me seems a genuine problem to be overcome — if indeed we can overcome it.

It’s never exactly easy to freeze and hold for an instant all of the historical currents which have led to us and now pass through us, not even for a moment. Occasionally — early in the morning, usually — I imagine I can almost manage it. I say almost because I’m old enough to be painfully aware of the constraints of my own ignorance, never more so than when I’ve been reading the comments for a while on a CT thread like this one.

A thought that came to me in the middle of BW’s latest: Detroit is a significant nexus of the history he’s recounting. If you imagine it the symbolic place on the map where the streams of European refugees from 1848 and 1870 coalesced with those fleeing the Jim Crow South following Reconstruction, as recounted in The Warmth of Other Suns, the collision of economic and racial issues, and the aftermath of that collision seem more or less inevitable. When you look at Detroit today, the scale of the resulting tragedy becomes much clearer, and also much harder to pass off as a victimless crime.

Flashes like this, true or false, don’t answer the what is to be done question, of course, but they do make it clear that such questions are never those any single individual can answer, even as an intellectual exercise.

“I do not want to be in the same political Party with Scott Lemieux. I am tired of people, including Paul Krugman, regarding Paul Krugman as a liberal.”

Just going to point out that if Scott Lemieux is not left wing enough for your the audience for your coalition is going to be pretty small. Like 3-5% of the population small.

TTN @295:

This is pretty OT, but Adrian Chen recently had an entertaining takedown of Anonymous in The Nation. Hm, “entertaining” may be the wrong word. Pretty OT, as I said, but at least it does mention Ferguson.

RP @ 305: what Lee Atwater is describing works out to be a trade. The elite gets tax cuts. The working class whites get racism, and its positional benefits to them. Neither one cares about what the other cares about, but they have to work together, because the elite doesn’t directly buy votes, and the working class whites don’t have the economic resources to hold power otherwise. Lee Atwater doesn’t have to care about either one: he just has to be the fixer who comes up with a way in which the racism becomes deniable and the tax cuts get widely supported by people who they economically hurt and as a result his candidates win.

You’re right that I don’t quite see it that way, because I do not think the working class whites have anything like the agency you attribute to them, an agency you put onto a par with the elite. The elite have power, wealth, education, status — the stuff of leadership aplenty and at hand. Political organization for them is easy; they’re practically born organized, as their elite status is, itself, a latency of their place in the hierarchy. The working class whites are followers, subordinate and dependent, untrusting and uncomprehending, their resentments up for grabs. Lee Atwater is less a fixer brokering a coalition, than a technician offering services to some elite coalition, which wants to mobilize working class support and/or deny working class support to some opposing rival elite faction. To me, Lee Atwater is an amoral manipulator for hire, who is delivering working class whites to rich elites by such means as are easy for him.

And, the basis for a split of factions among the elite was diminishing.

Erik Loomis is to SL’s left and is tolerated just fine. It is purity zealots who don’t understand how the American political system works who get under his skin. I doubt he would be very far from most of the posters here on ideal policy. He just is more cynical, rightly or wrongly, on what type of result we can actually get.

Anyway thank you for answering and I am very glad to hear that you do not think the left should abandon our commitment to equal rights. My apologies for misreading you.

An addendum to my own comment @ 312 to better explain why I think it is possible for the Left to bid for the political support of authoritarian followers.

Right-wing authoritarian followers (people exhibiting a cluster of political attitudes) do not have a fixed political desideratum or philosophy. They probably don’t understand politics even slightly or care all that much, most of the time.

Their attitudes and therefore their responses to certain kinds of information or appeals is predictable. Some of those reactions, like aggression against “out-groups” or “deviants” can seem pretty typical of reactionary conservative policy. So, yes, as Rich says, they do derive some satisfaction from the “positional” status satisfactions of a system in which some other caste is available for bottom duty.

On the other hand, they are also instinctive political egalitarians and favor a social welfare state, especially once it is in place. It is arguable that Martin Luther King’s version of peaceful civil disobedience was practically designed to provoke their sympathetic, pro-justice response to seeing one-sided aggression and violence by authorities.

What authorities in Missouri and the usual suspects in the Media expect will be the consequences of the images and narratives they produce can be left as an exercise.

“Scott Lemieux” is a scholastic.

Whatever the Democratic Party does is Jesus, and it is Lemieux’s job to explain to the unhealed lepers why their fate is as necessary as the right angles of the True Cross.

“The effect of Media conglomerates” is almost always exaggerated. Virtually all media theory boils down to an attempt to explain why conservatives exist, and the explanations never work, largely because the actual research ends up being nothing more than an exploration of the differences between graduate students and everyone else.

Look, the breakdown in membership organizations you describe is real–and I would note the decline of the Klan as a particular instance of it, but community does still exist, I’m telling you, and it is community, real face-to-face community that provides the handle elites use to manipulate the white conservative masses.

Families, neighborhoods, schools, churches, circles of friends, local government, sports, fairs, bars, what-have-you. Get a shave and a haircut and go to some conservative ones. they don’t just talk about TV and radio. They talk about people of color whom they have seen in the flesh and whom they resent and fear and despise. Everyday real life is the problem, not the media.

Man, you must run in different conservative social circles than I do.

“you must run in different conservative social circles than I do”

You don’t run in any conservative social circles. You are–and it is obvious that you are–entirely a phenomenon of the internet.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-EhsaiwVYnLw/VHYEv9kZqhI/AAAAAAAAV2U/zfzxSpFiIOk/s1600/Screenshot%2B2014-11-26%2Bat%2B5.41.00%2BAM.png

“The fact is that when the president came to the podium on Monday night there actually was very little he could say. His mildest admonitions of racism had only earned him trouble. If the American public cannot stomach the idea that arresting a Harvard professor for breaking into his own home is “stupid,” then there is virtually nothing worthwhile that Barack Obama can say about Michael Brown.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/11/barack-obama-ferguson-and-the-evidence-of-things-unsaid/383212/

JH is right to assert that the presumption of innocence is greater for police. It is also true that city police, especially, serve to protect tax-payers and business owners. City police learn early not to arrest city officials and their family members. Minorities are victims in every sense of the term. We should not, therefore, be surprised by the verdict, or by the response of minorities to the verdict.

Liberals and conservatives share a common sense of their own intelligence, the superior morality of their tribal beliefs and values, and a general indifference to fact. Cue the team-blue cheerleaders. This week, I’ll be directing my own students to reality-based studies of Ben Franklin’s slave purchases, such as
http://www.amphilsoc.org/sites/default/files/proceedings/150408.pdf
We will use Nash’s useful work to critique PBS pro-Franklin hyperbole, and other spin-sites. Our work will examine the “abolitionist” beliefs of Franklin and Jefferson, and the words and actions of much-ridiculed, born-again Christian cranks, such as W. Wilberforce, and his bible-thumping ilk.

The day-to-day heavy lifting in America’s inner-cities continues to be done by churches, often working in the teeth of daily real-life violence and/or intimidation. So, yes. Light a candle for Michael Brown and his family, but consider, too, dropping a dollar or two in the pot for the tambourine-bangers this holiday season. It’s going to be long, cold winter for America’s poor.

William Timberman @306:

A thought that came to me in the middle of BW’s latest: Detroit is a significant nexus of the history he’s recounting. If you imagine it [as] the symbolic place on the map where the streams of European refugees from 1848 and 1870 coalesced with those fleeing the Jim Crow South following Reconstruction, as recounted in The Warmth of Other Suns, the collision of economic and racial issues, and the aftermath of that collision seem more or less inevitable.

Perhaps.
I do wonder, however, how certain aspects of the modern history of Detroit and some other northern cities would have been different had the Supreme Court’s 1974 5-4 decision in Milliken v. Bradley come out the other way. The decision held that, absent intentional de jure segregation, cross-district (metro/suburban) school busing was impermissible, thereby locking in the situation of (mostly) white suburban schools and black inner-city ones — at least in the North, where segregation mostly resulted from residential patterns and white flight to the suburbs (and redlining), rather than official dual school systems as in the South.

Outsiders can root for unions or management, knowing that whoever wins it won’t help anybody but union or management.

LFC is so kind.

J Thomas: one three hundred millionth of the power

Probably isn’t sensible to think of political power as something that could be represented as a divisible sum.

Hannah Arendt said that strength may be a property of the individual person, but power is the product and property of social organization. We share in the power of the political organization, and are powerful as a component of the organization, because the organization amplifies our capacity to control and command. Within the organization, some are in positions of greater power than others, but that sharing of power within the organization is not a zero-sum game among the members, because all are deriving power from the whole: a more powerful organization makes all of its members more powerful, because their individual power is derived from the power of the whole. A powerful army makes its private soldiers powerful by organizing: providing training, weapons, coordinating activities and concentrating the soldiers in tactically advantageous position; an army that makes its private soldiers more powerful makes its generals more powerful.

An army differs from the more general organization of political economy in that an army shares a common purpose, while the individuals composing society and the body politic of the state have diverse private purposes, in potential conflict with one another. Their cooperation with one another in society and in the organization of the political economy has the potential to be conducted as a positive-sum game, in which the whole becomes healthier and more powerful, endowing all the participants with greater gains from cooperation in a more powerful whole. Potential. But, not necessary.

If the organization of cooperation in society were wholly conducted “horizontally” among equals, without fraud or force, we might imagine a positive-sum equilibrium emerging out of the negotiation of every conflict arising out of a complex network of specialization and trade. This is how Dr. Pangloss imagines the market economy operating, in the best of all possible worlds.

In actual, complex societies, at least since the emergence of “hydraulic” civilizations around 3000 BCE, social and political organization has a significant “vertical” element, in which domination and solidarity play critical, problematic parts.

Organization by hierarchy and authority can create enormously powerful political entities: grand cities and great empires, enterprises of vast scale and scope. The vertical relationship, by distributing authority and channeling and abstracting information, can solve technical problems and resolve conflict in ways that greatly amplify the collective potential to concentrate effort strategically and produce.

The vertical bargain between the elite few and the common many is politically problematic, as the operation of the organization requires an imbalance of authority and power between the elite few and the many. Efficiency of operation in command-and-control requires obedience. Yet, if the gains from hierarchical organization are to be both maximized in sum and distributed fairly, if the common purposes of organization are not to be sacrificed in corruption of purpose to the private, exclusively selfish interests of the elite, some means must be found to constrain and check the elite in their exercise of authority, lest the elite trade away the power of the whole at the expense of the many, in corruptly conserving their own perquisites while shirking their duty. And, that means of constraint and check by the many against the few must not, itself, unduly cripple the legitimate and necessary exercise of hierarchical authority in directing cooperation.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who will guard the guardians? We have a complex society, which benefits greatly from the use of complex hierarchies to order political and economic cooperation, but we have not definitively solved this fundamental problem.

Various approaches to solving the problem of checking elites have been proposed.

The OP eloquently outlined an aspect of the problem highlighted by the inconsistencies of conservative authoritarians in their response to the breakdown of trust in police authority in Ferguson.

Socrates, in the Republic seems to suggest that ideology (a noble lie), reason and conscience may play useful roles in enabling the elite guardians to constrain themselves. The authors of the American Constitution seemed to think that representative democracy, acting through a separation of constitutional authority might create the conditions for political competition that would both frustrate efforts to assemble a permanent coalition capable of persistent domination in its own exclusive interest, and promote the use of deliberative reasoning in policymaking by making it a necessary means of cooperating in expedient decision making in a system of distributed powers.

My fear is that the mechanisms of the American Constitution (and small-c constitution, too) that have hitherto enabled politics to remain fluid enough, even in dark periods, to enable long-terms campaigns for reform and renewal to move forward with effect may be breaking down. The reduction of economic competition among businesses, the concentration of wealth, the breakdown of political partisanship into symbolic politics, the decline of social affiliation and mass-membership organizations . . . and so on . . .

When I wrote that I felt powerless, and was powerless, in the present system, I was referring to the paralysis or erosion of those various means of checking elite power, including mass-membership political organization, various opportunities that arise from intra-elite competition and the various senses of ethical obligation and common solidarity that sometimes emerge to constrain elite excess and abuse.

That Theory and Event issue to which Ronan links @335 (Vol 17 Issue 3 Supplement or whatever it’s called) is not behind a subscription wall. Just looked quickly at some of the contributions. Some look interesting.

BW: “Within the organization, some are in positions of greater power than others, but that sharing of power within the organization is not a zero-sum game among the members, because all are deriving power from the whole […]”

Yeah, I didn’t think that J. Thomas’ 1/300 millionth thing was worth responding to, but now that you have…

How do political elites share power with masses, ideally, in the American system? It’s simple: ordinary people vote for the party or politician that promises to do certain things, or at least has a certain stance. If those things aren’t done, the party loses votes next time, or the politician gets a primary challenge. In this way a plain liberal or conservative gets to have elites carry out a liberal or conservative policy even though they are 1/300 millionth whatever. The way that American elections are set up mathematically, there can really be only two parties. So there are two groups of people who more or less can have something near their views, and everyone else loses out. Naturally the two parties normally try to make these two groups of people as large as possible because they each want votes.

The “lesser evil” bit that is so loved by _LGM_ breaks this system. Currently, big-money donors have captured the Democratic Party so that, essentially, most progressives or liberals or whatever you want to call them really don’t have a party that will represent their views. Instead, they are forced to keep voting Democratic because the other party continues to the right and would be even worse. So the GOP represents its base, the Democratic Party represents its big-money donors and perhaps a few centrists, and maybe a third of the country is represented by no one.

Really what needs to happen is that Democratic Party needs to fail, break up, and reform as another party with greater party loyalty and with cultural resistance to control by industry. The GOP isn’t going to break up in this way, even if it keeps getting a smaller share of the electorate, because it really is representing its base.

So it’s not some kind of thing like “Each voter is only 1/300 millionth of the electorate, so each voter always feels powerless.” There are specific, historically contingent reasons for why the left in America is systematically unrepresented.

“So the GOP represents its base, the Democratic Party represents its big-money donors and perhaps a few centrists, and maybe a third of the country is represented by no one.”

Funny thing is, any conservative would tell the same story, with the names of the parties inverted.

Much like the Democratic party, the GOP makes a show of representing it’s base, while giving it as little real representation as possible. That’s why the GOP has to deal with the TEA party insurgency, because a fair portion of their base are sick of putting up with it.

How do political elites share power with masses, ideally, in the American system? It’s simple: ordinary people vote for the party or politician that promises to do certain things, or at least has a certain stance.

I thought BW’s point about organizations—which I thought was a very good one—was supposed to complicate this tho. The idea being, roughly and with apologies to BW if I’m misrepresenting, that if individuals are organized via institutions in civil society, then they can apply pressure more effectively and in more ways than by simply voting for their preferred candidate. (On second thought, this may actually misrepresent BW’s point…)

#338 Rich Puchalsky

How do political elites share power with masses, ideally, in the American system? It’s simple: ordinary people vote for the party or politician that promises to do certain things, or at least has a certain stance. If those things aren’t done, the party loses votes next time, or the politician gets a primary challenge. In this way a plain liberal or conservative gets to have elites carry out a liberal or conservative policy even though they are 1/300 millionth whatever.

If there are N issues, and people’s responses on them are uncorrelated, then for any candidate the average voter will be on the other side on about half the issues. A random minority of voters will line up significantly more with one than the other, and given lots of information those would determine the election.

But in reality candidates try as much as possible to hide their stands on issues. They run on character and identity. They try to persuade voters that the various issues really are correlated in an important way. They try to persuade people that it’s two different teams, and they should vote for their team. (In ancient Rome the supporters of two competing chariot stables actually did turn into two important political parties.) When there are just a few important issues that do correlate, it works and lots of people take sides. Other times it’s not so unlikely that the plurality or even the majority is undecided. Because neither alternative does much for them.

Imagine a candidate had the following strategy: “On each issue I will use random polling to try to find out what my constituents want. I will vote the way my constituents want me to, unless a majority say they don’t care. In that case I will do what I think is best for my district.” He would represent his district better than any predefined policy could. But he would not demonstrate character.

Two party representative democracy cannot possibly work well. Its best use is for situations where government is not very important, but we want a government in place that’s strong enough to keep a more intrusive government from developing.

When the goal is mostly to keep things from happening, and it doesn’t really matter which candidates you elect to keep things from happening, then this approach is probably adequate.

My last is a response to RP @343.

IN regard to point two of the OP
afaik, racial composition of ferguson has changed rapidly in the last 15 years; thus the white cop/black populace possibly reflects rapid demographic change, with some lag period before the NooBs latch onto power

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2014/08/14/visualizing-the-rapid-racial-change-in-ferguson-over-the-past-decade/

e abrams: “Why is the news media empty of stories about the campaign to increase voter enrollment, which is now underway in Ferguson ?”

Because it doesn’t fit the framing of black rioters and criminals.

tl;dr version: The GOP gave up on their vision in Reagan’s day. Reagan took over the Democrat approach, and ran it into the ground. He was tremendously popular. Now the FDR approach is failing because in extremely uncertain times we don’t know what a big government should do, given both a world economy that the US government cannot regulate and the beginning of climate change.

The GOP has the Tea Party movement which wants to retreat to the GOP policies that failed before Reagan. The Democrats are clueless and have no idea. Democrats would benefit from a clear, simple idea that many people can stand behind on principle. They lack that now.

#340 BB

“So the GOP represents its base, the Democratic Party represents its big-money donors and perhaps a few centrists, and maybe a third of the country is represented by no one.”

Funny thing is, any conservative would tell the same story, with the names of the parties inverted.

I would put a different interpretation on this. I say that voters, even in a party’s “base”, do not have the sort of united focus that people try to give them.

Consider for example the way that in disputes between white criminals who are killed by the government — Waco, Ruby Ridge, etc — versus black criminals killed — Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, etc — in the one case you take a libertarian stand arguing the government is wrong, while in the other you take a statist stand arguing the government is right. I’m not saying “Brett Bellmore is inconsistent so that proves he’s wrong about everything”. You can surely find a rationale that reconciles things that might look from the outside like contradictions. What I claim is that any simple, clear philosophy will not in fact fit what voters want on the issues.

So for example most “conservatives” agree they want less government transfer payments, but on average Red states get more government dollars than they put in. Of course they want less government spending, and of course they want more pork for *their* districts. Most liberals want for there to be less murder, and yet they tend to support abortion. (But not entirely, there’s a solid minority of liberals who disapprove of abortion, but who keep with the program because they think the other side is worse on average.)

The reason presidential elections often tend to be close, is that we have a solid base of apathy — neither side appeals all that much to voters.

Much like the Democratic party, the GOP makes a show of representing it’s base, while giving it as little real representation as possible. That’s why the GOP has to deal with the TEA party insurgency, because a fair portion of their base are sick of putting up with it.

The Tea Party provides a focus for opposition. It has a simple, clear message that most Tea Party members would not want to be applied with any consistency. But it’s simple and clear and people can stand behind it in principle.

Democrats don’t have that, or if they do it hasn’t gotten much publicity. There was once a time when their forefathers had “Common Sense” and the voluminous writings of Jefferson as a philosophical crutch. We would be a nation of farmers, with equality before the law and no national bank or other federal-financial scams. They didn’t exactly win against the Federalists, but they tried to hold the line.

A later time we had FDR. The GOP couldn’t disagree with winning the war, so they had to put up with a command economy that could win the war. The government did whatever it took, and if the money inflated that was just too damn bad. The nation came out of the war with a whole lot of capital equipment, a whole lot of used-up consumer goods, and a bunch of people ready to spend their war bonds. Plus we were making lots more capital equipment for europe so it was cheap to make more for ourselves.

And we had to win the Cold War, so we built the Interstate highways etc. The things we did to win the Cold War transformed the economy. We got more and more wealthy with government looking for new ways to improve the economy, to the point that Johnson wanted to do things to eliminate the remaining pockets of poverty.

After awhile the GOP got tired of pushing for budget restraint and they jumped on the Democratic bandwagon. Win the Cold War! Spend whatever it takes! Deficits don’t matter! Reagan broke the GOP. He contradicted most of what they stood for, and his deficits were the biggest the USA had ever seen. He talked about reduced government but his government grew fast. He was tremendously popular. Bush senior tried to be more responsible, he was not popular at all. During his term the USSR collapsed and we didn’t have to beat the communists any more. People started to think that it had been a scam all along, that the communists were never strong enough to be the threat that required us to develop a giant successful economy.

Bush junior was pretty popular with the world’s biggest deficits until he told retirees he wanted to spend their Social Security and let them gamble on the stock market to make up for it. He said “I have a lot of political capital now so I’m going to spend it.” Bush had always believed in spending his capital.

So OK, the FDR plan has stopped working. We mostly don’t know what the government can do to improve the economy a lot, nothing like the Interstates. (Bridges to nowhere?) Pretty soon the Interstates will stop working. It takes a lot of resources to maintain them, and we’re going to have to replace our trucks with something that uses some other fuel, do we still need Interstates? If climate change gets severe we may need to relocate some cities, how much maintenance should we put into them? The centrist approach that worked so well during and after WWII is breaking down and it isn’t at all clear what to do instead.

Republicans are starting to go back from the Reagan approach to something more like what didn’t work before. Democrats are clueless, they have no idea.

Democrats would benefit from a simple, clear, idea that a lot of people can stand behind in principle.

Regardless of what the people attacked at Ruby Ridge and Waco did, the government used excessive force. Arrests of the two specific people they were after could have done with minimal force. But of course anyone who talks about Ruby Ridge or Waco doesn’t talk about other events like the MOVE raid, and uses a completely hypocritical standard when they talk about how much evidence of criminality or provocation there was for Ruby Ridge or Waco vs incidents involving black people.

Lest people here get too comfortable with BB’s obvious hypocrisy, I would guess that most people here are equally big hypocrites about governmental force directed at right-wing victims. There’s only a tiny number of people who really care about civil rights as such, and in the age of Obama, that number of people has turned out to be a lot smaller than I’d previously thought. Left-wing hypocrisy is at least somewhat preferable to right-wing because it’s partisan, rather than racist.

He means politically.

“As an immediate result of this, political parties are not very good at representing their constituents.”

Another way to look at it is to accept that so called ‘political parties’ are actors in a meaningless political theater. As they often say here: if voting could change anything, it would have been illegal.

Today, people vote in Moldova, in a very important parliamentary elections. The neoliberal pro-EU coalition had been behind the pro-Eurasian coalition – until, 2 days before the elections, one of the anti-EU parties (with 9% support) was disqualified and banned. Now the pro-EU coalition is on its way to victory. Simple as that.

Hey, let’s argue about that for a while!

By the way, just to be clear, when the right was whining about Ruby Ridge and Waco, I was saying, “Oh, now you get it.” Interesting that it took white people dying for them to get to the point I was at with Mark Clark and Fred Hampton.

It’s not that they’re hypocrites. It’s that they’re stupid and racist.

J Thomas: “OK, try it this way. When we try to look at power from the outside, we can trace it to a point and then we reach somebody who appears to have free will. He can make whatever choice he wants, he has the power. But likely there are constraints on him that are not particularly visible to outsiders. Likely he doesn’t really have the power, he’s just the link where the control turns secret.
[…]
A slight digression — when US interrogators asked Saddam’s generals about Iraqi nukes, many of them were sure that Saddam did have nukes. Each of them thought some *other* general was responsible for them. They each knew that they themselves knew nothing about the nukes, but they were ready to believe that Iraq had them and somebody else was in charge of them.

It’s possible that power is like that. Possibly every player is enmeshed in such a tight web of constraints that he himself feels like he has very little power, but they each think somebody *else* has the power….

But if what you want does happen, you can believe you have power. It might be true. Maybe the things you did — things as superficially trivial as saying what you want on blogs — had hidden effects. Maybe by some magic your force of will made things happen without anybody’s conscious knowledge. Nobody really knows the causes, perhaps you are the cause.

An interesting theory well worth a front page post of its own.

But in the specific case at hand, Ferguson, perhaps not quite applicable. Because there are in St. Louis County and the City of St. Louis a fairly limited set of people who set the direction for the region and make the key decisions. Between 1830-1890 an enormous amount of money was made by people who set up shop at the gateway to the West and sold stuff to the Pa Ingalls types who were eager to die, I mean try their luck on the Great Plains, Oregon Trail, etc. For part of that time St. Louis was the wealthiest city on the planet on a per capita basis [1].

Some of that wealth stayed in the region, and today there are 2-3 dozen families or family trusts that control a large percentage – perhaps 50% – of the real estate, jobs, and financing in the area. They also intermarry with one another at a fairly high rate. Maybe a half-dozen of those are publicly known; the rest appear only as shadows. But no major action gets taken in that region without involvement by some of them. That includes, for example, the decision to heavily tax St. Louis County and City and use the proceeds to build out St. Charles county – where people of dusky hue with less than $1 million in liquid assets are definitely not welcome.

This is a quite different situation from other areas which are too large (Chicago) or too new/large (LA) for the founding families to have retained so much influence (one wonders about NYC). And you could certainly argue that at their deep decision-making level those families are subject to the same forces and uncertainties as other power centers. But in the STL region there are at least clear loci of power.

[1] General Sherman’s autobiography has a couple of interesting chapters about his experience working for St. Louis bankers during their battle with New York financiers for control of San Francisco and central California.

#364 Cranky Observer

… today there are 2-3 dozen families or family trusts that control a large percentage – perhaps 50% – of the real estate, jobs, and financing in the area. They also intermarry with one another at a fairly high rate. Maybe a half-dozen of those are publicly known; the rest appear only as shadows. But no major action gets taken in that region without involvement by some of them.

That makes sense. I read a speculation that back during integration days, Atlanta had essentially no trouble while Birmingham had violent confrontations, was that the people who controlled both Atlanta and Birmingham lived in Atlanta. They didn’t want it in their own backyards but they were just fine with it that far away.

Still, it’s possible in both cases that the people who make the decisions we consider decisive have such constraints on them that they don’t feel like they have free choices.

But in the STL region there are at least clear loci of power.

There are at least big areas where power clearly does not reside, and other places where it may be.

I don’t want to claim that lots of things are inevitable because the people who appear to have choices instead feel they have no choice. I want to argue that this is *possible*, but I don’t know how to find out whether it’s actually true apart from a few cases.

RP @ 338: I didn’t think that J. Thomas’ 1/300 millionth thing was worth responding to

And, you were right.

Patrick 361

Right on.

Not only should Brett do something hard, he should from time to time do something gracious. Like thanking the lefties here for tolerating, engaging and otherwise entertaining his empathy-challenged ogre so his wife doesn’t have to…

Watson he shot him 6 times and tried to shoot him 12. Plus he is a trained officer of the law who was also a very big man. He was in no way justified in shooting an unarmed man.

If you honestly believe that someone is going to kill you, you are going to try as hard as you can to kill them. You aren’t going to fire one shot, wait to see what effect it has, then shoot again. You are going to empty the entire gun into them, in a desperate attempt to stop them from killing you. Most of those shots are going to miss: adrenaline is not compatible with keeping a steady arm.

What exactly should someone in the situation I described do? Police training isn’t going to give them superpowers. Taser won’t work in time. Hand-to-hand might work: might also end up getting your brains rattled up, or going down and taking beating that lands you in the ICU. Retreating can work: if you think you can run faster then them. If not, well, it was nice to know you.

Watson you are a blood thirsty maniac.

#367 Watson Ladd

The facts of Ruby Ridge and Waco are very different. It shouldn’t be surprising that people view them differently.

I think the most important difference between the narratives is the human face.

On the one hand, you have highly trained killers, who follow illegal orders. All pretty much faceless.

On the other hand, you have a poorly-trained white man who is put into a situation where he is scared *all the time*. Maybe he made a mistake. Maybe he did the right thing and now his career is on the line because the people he was supposed to be governing who never gave their consent, are upset at him.

It’s easy to see it from the point of view of the surviving policeman. It isn’t easy to see the point of view of an anonymous FBI agent.

I think the military uses this strategy to good effect. Lieutenant Calley obeyed illegal orders and got punished for it. He should have known not to follow illegal orders. His superior officers should have known not to give illegal orders too, but they didn’t get any public punishment. Calley was the human face who got people not to ask why we were committing war crimes in the first place. Instead they argued about whether Calley deserved his punishment.

Similarly with Iran/Contra, Colonel North was the Marine with the can doo attitude who got in way over his head. He was supposed to negotiate with Israelis and Iranians etc, and he was completely clueless. He was just a Marine, he probably didn’t even know what he was doing was illegal. By focusing on his personal story we somehow managed to mostly ignore the facts of Iran/Contra.

Abu Graib. Lynndie England and Charles Graner took illegal orders from anonymous CIA agents. They were told that their commanding officer did not have authority to give orders in that part of the prison. They were just a couple of perverts happily following orders to do what came naturally, and they got punished. The CIA agents and contractors (some of them Israeli) were not named and not tried. Somehow it became a question of what punishment Graner and England (and the other less-known enlisted soldiers) deserved, while the bigger picture was mostly ignored except for the general feeling that it was a bad thing the story got out because it made the USA look bad.

Clearly, for Waco etc the federal government did it wrong. In each case they should have found one low-level person to blame it on, and talked loudly in public about a trial for that one person, and published lots of sympathetic information about that person, to shift the story away from what they were actually doing and onto whether or not that person deserved the punishment he was likely to get.

Cranky Observer: actually, Mike Brown’s family did conduct an autopsy, which closely followed the official one in conclusions. I’ve got no idea what “bulking up to run through the bullets” is supposed to mean: commentators around the world seem to be intent on finding the original sin of racism in Darren Williams testimony, and thus conclude that he deserves punishment for it.

Of course, the prosecutor is unlikely to throw the book at any cop, even for perjury. The prosecutor clearly didn’t want to prosecute, and decided to pin the blame on the grand jury. The police are a section of the working class that opposes the interests of the working class, and one should never assume that cops tell the truth.

These riots aren’t about a single police killing. They’re about decades of closing schools, no jobs, an uncaring political class, and a deeply divided society in which Obama and Al Sharpton are on one side and Mike Brown and Darren Wilson on the other. Racial bigotry didn’t make the schools on one side of Chicago worse than the others: the mayor did, and the victims of this policy voted for him. No matter how many more black lawyers, black doctors, and black police there are, conditions for the black working class will not improve until we have a politics that understands the nature of class society.

America is a very unusual place. There have been several comparisons in this thread between the behaviour of armed US police and (usually) unarmed British police. It may be forgotten that there is one part of the UK where most police in the streets are usually armed: Northern Ireland, population around 1.8 million, rather more than five times the size of St Louis. (There was, briefly, a policy of having unarmed police, but that was exploited by advocates of a thirty-two county socialist republic.) This has not, in recent years, led to shootings and killings on the US scale. The figures for number of occasions on which PSNI firearms were discharged are:
2008-09: 0
2009-10: 5
2919-11: 3
2011-12: 0
2012-13: 1
2013-14: 0
Nobody was killed, though two police officers were killed by the remnants of the IRA.
Comparative figures for St Louis would be interesting.

> He was supposed to negotiate with Israelis and Iranians etc, and he was completely clueless.

If we regard people as being under an affirmative duty to know the limits of their own competence — seems pretty reasonable to me — “but he didn’t know what he was doing” just collapses back into the general negligence category [they didn’t familiarise themselves with something they really ought to have: viz, themselves. No different to operating dangerous machinery without reading the manual, really.]

re Stephen @ 382, a quick check shows that on a conservative estimate you are ten times more likely to be shot by police in the US than in the Australian state with the highest recent number of police deaths. A peculiar place indeed.

And I don’t know if BB was being ironic or uncharacteristically self-aware at 385.

But people have limits to their competence at determining the limits to their competence, and it would be somewhat self-referential to expect people to know them.

“We are limited, but the limits aren’t where we think they are. We find them only by exceeding them.”

Tom Tomorrow – sees both sides as usual: some might not even think it ironic?

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/12/01/1348341/-Cartoon-Black-and-white

Collin Street @381
From your previous comments on other threads, I’ve gleaned that you think that all right-wingers are “autistic,” and now you assert that DW is “mentally disabled.” Though the DW statement you cite (albeit out of context) is indeed weird and I certainly don’t defend his actions, there’s no evidence I’m aware of that he’s mentally disabled as that phrase is ordinarily used. Your contention that “the problem with politics is medical” — i.e., that everyone who disagrees with you about anything is mentally or psychologically out-of-the-ordinary — is bizarre and offensive.

The “mentally disabled” remark is especially offensive considering that this group of people is perhaps even more at risk of police violence than young blacks. The reports of police killing a mentally disturbed person (which I realize isn’t necessarily the same as “mentally disabled”) are legion as any google search will show.

“A California family called 911 for medical help for their mentally ill relative. Instead of a paramedic responding, police arrived and fatally shot the 18-year-old woman after they say she lunged at them with a knife.”

It’s always the same – deadly force is justified by the slightest wrong movement. In a case in Rogers, Ark., a woman weighing 90 pounds with a small knife told the police officers that she was mentally ill. She actually was the one who called 911. The officers then moved closer, making her feel threatened, and then “had no choice” but to kill her. Much has been made of Michael Brown’s body stature but this is just BS. It could have been a 90 pound woman and it would have played out the same way.

Of course the huge number of police shootings points to systemic racism but it also points to another issue which doesn’t even get talked about – systemic incompetence. If the job of the police is to protect the community, then police officers who needlessly kill members of the community are at least grossly incompetent yet there never are consequences (apart from the occasional weregild payment). This absence of consequences can only be blamed on racism and other prejudice.

@ 395 “If we assume Wilson’s testimony is true”. Huge “if”.

@392 “Your contention that “the problem with politics is medical” — i.e., that everyone who disagrees with you about anything is mentally or psychologically out-of-the-ordinary — is bizarre and offensive.”

Ah, interesting. I’d say this is related (if indirectly) to the problem of racism, a phenomenon typical of, and, I’d say, to a significant extent specific to the western civilization. The intoxicating feeling of superiority.

#399 Origami Isopod

“As an example, “geeks”, “nerds”, “people with high-functioning autism” etc tend to behave as if they have no social skills because that is part of the role that society assigns them. People expect it of them, and their social skills are developed enough that they learn to fit the role.”

What the… do you know anything about high-functioning autism, which is a medical condition? Which has nothing to do with the social role of “geek” or “nerd”?

Well yes, when I was diagnosed with it I gave it a reasonably thorough study. It is a medical condition but there are no medical tests involved in diagnosis. It is entirely behavioral. If you do various things that are considered characteristic of autism, even if you do most of them in ways that are eminently functional, you may receive that diagnosis. If you can focus intently on a topic without being distracted by irrelevant distractions (even if sometimes you do chase down distractions), if you come up with idiosyncratic solutions to problems — particularly if you invent your own terminology to describe them , if you do not suffer fools gladly, if you are not intimidated by social bullies until they threaten physical violence, then you could be high-functioning autistic.

Given how blithely you spout all sorts of bigoted comments….

Typical bullying. High-functioning autistic people often run into this sort of thing. You look down on me for my medical condition, as if there was something wrong with it, as if it was my fault. Never mind. I’m used to it. Some people refute me by saying that by their own cultural standards I am a rude and uncouth neurotypical and therefore not worth consideration. Others say that I’m autistic and therefore not worth consideration. It goes both ways, sometimes both ways from the same critic. No big deal. People who consider ideas on their merits aren’t swayed by that garbage.

“Bigot” isn’t on the spectrum, J Thomas. I know plenty of people with HFA who don’t use their condition as an excuse in that regard. I’m related to some, in fact.

Huh. I find it surprising that your style may be considered indicative of some ‘medical condition’. Where I’m from, many people talk like this (and I hope I do too), and that’s perfectly normal. In fact, this is the only way to have a normal discussion – as opposed to a stream of silly ritual denunciations, which is what passes for a ‘discussion’ in the dying western culture these days.

The Garner decision in New York thankfully makes the whole discussion redundant. An unarmed black man who wasn’t remotely threatening anybody – who unquestionably had his hands up! – was killed by a police officer using an outlawed and entirely unnecessary technique of physical violence and he was caught on video doing it. Yet no indictment, no trial, no justice. There are apparently no circumstances in the universe that would convince an American prosecutor to prosecute a police homicide. The debate about whether or not Brown had his hands in the air was nothing but smoke and mirror. It doesn’t matter to law enforcement. Video capture doesn’t matter, body cams don’t matter (and why would anybody think otherwise, after the savage Rodney King beating)?

American “law enforcement” is intrinsically savage and lawless. It is so by design. We now have all the clarity we ever needed on this issue. No fine points need to be debated any more. The only question is, how will the people victimized by this system respond. I’m pretty sure they will.

TM @401: I think Wilson’s testimony is implausible for many reasons and moreover even if every word were true, there was no need for Wilson to expose himself to what he now says was a situation in which his life was in danger. All he needed to do, after Brown fled (and posed no danger to anybody), was to stay in his car and wait for backup.

Wilson’s testimony fits better with the forensics and more reliable eyewitness accounts than do alternative accounts with the features necessary to justify a criminal charge.

As to Wilson’s actions, with 20/20 hindsight we can say, in this particular case, it would have been better to follow and wait for back-up, as additional officers could have restrained Brown without using lethal force. However given the information I will assume available to Wilson at the time – that an individual who had just violently assaulted a police officer and fought for control of that officer’s firearm was fleeing the scene – his decision to engage was sound. Brown’s actions would have led anyone to conclude that he posed a threat to the safety of others, and Wilson could not have known that Brown would ignore the commands of an armed officer with clearly sufficient time and space to fire his weapon effectively.

TM @406: The Garner decision in New York thankfully makes the whole discussion redundant.

Only if one’s vision is completely captivated by the race of each individual involved. Garner and Brown are, in many significant ways, very different cases.

An unarmed black man who wasn’t remotely threatening anybody – who unquestionably had his hands up! – was killed by a police officer using an outlawed and entirely unnecessary technique of physical violence and he was caught on video doing it. Yet no indictment, no trial, no justice. There are apparently no circumstances in the universe that would convince an American prosecutor to prosecute a police homicide.

The medical examiner concluded that the chokehold, in conjunction with placing Garner (6’5, about 400 pounds) in a prone position, on his chest, aggravated pre-existing health conditions, leading to cardiac arrest and death. Specifically acute and chronic bronchial asthma, obesity, and hypertensive cardiovascular disease were listed as contributing factors. The autopsy also found no damage to Garner’s neck or trachea.

There’s no question that the officer violated NYPD’s prohibition of the use of chokeholds – one was clearly applied here for several seconds as five police officers struggled to restrain Garner.

However, the officer also clearly did not intend to cause serious physical harm, much less death. This is a case that is probably better handled by a civil lawsuit and internal disciplinary action than by criminal prosecution.

I think that some people will, reasonably, disagree with that assessment, although others will less reasonably seek to distort these cases in a self-serving and ultimately harmful manner.

It’s that pretense of a measured tone that’s really amazing.

#405 MPAV

J Thomas your disability entitles you to understanding and accommodation.

And people who are not disabled are not entitled to understanding and accommodation? What a peculiar standard.

But then, none of us tend to get what we are entitled to.

I was not going to bring this up, but since you did — I am not disabled. I am functional. People who have fully adapted to neurotypical culture are disabled by it. It is a firmly dysfunctional culture, as you will agree if you think about it a little. Neurotypical culture is “rape culture”, it is patriarchy, it is a culture of double-think where people must be careful to review their thinking to make sure it is acceptable to the culture before they admit they are thinking it.

Increasingly many people reject it. I can’t be sure how things will go, but there is a fair likelihood that Aspergers, HFA etc are the new normal.

That said you have posted many things here that other commenters have found offensive. Why do you think that is?

Consider the extreme case. There are people who have suffered emotional shocks so severe that anything which reminds them of those things can cause them considerable emotional pain. So people feel an obligation to avoid saying anything which might set them off, or mark any text that might possibly do that with “trigger” warnings. Of course their disability deserves considerable accommodation, but it very much gets in the way of open discussion. I think the victims have considerable responsibility too. Like, if the topic is about how we can get fewer rapes, and rape is in the title, it makes some sense for people with rape triggers not to read it at all.

It looks to me like you are borderline like that. When you see a combination of words that reminds you of some previous evil commenter, your emotions take over and you respond as if it was the previous evil commenter making his evil comments. It looks to me like it happens when some combination of words triggers a flashback.

The obvious way for me to avoid that is to avoid saying anything unusual for fear it will be a trigger for you. For me this makes responding pointless. I have found if I reply with sufficient abstraction, no one gets upset and no one responds at all; apparently nobody bothers to figure out the meaning. So I am trying out different ways to say things, that actually get the idea across with different words and different metaphors, looking for approaches that trigger less.

Is it because you didn’t know they would be offensive? Is it because you didn’t care how other people might interpret your words?

There are a lot of dysfunctional people who respond badly to things, apparently more-or-less at random. I am looking for patterns in that. It would help if they could describe the process from their points of view, but usually they are pretty much incoherent.

Oh, come on Rich, I call that little trick the diagnostic two-step.

Step 1: Let’s assume you’re wrong.
Step 2: Now let’s explore what’s causing you to have these incorrect beliefs…

The views I put forth above do not depend, so far as I am aware, on the race of any of the actors involved. If you see a specific point in those views that you think is evidence that racism is skewing my view of things, then I’d like to have it pointed out to me. If you think my views are motivated by racism, and you’re correct, then hopefully I’ll gain some insight and be able to reduce any such bias in my thinking.

However, having some familiarity with myself, my history, and my reactions to these events, I have to say that it is extremely unlikely that racism is a driver in my views. But, I’m willing to listen (or read I suppose) with an open mind.

Rich,

I had drafted the following comment several days ago, but had problems with the internet and couldn’t post. It was originally a response to Ronan I think, and only the last bit is really relevant to @411, but posting the whole thing, realizing that this position is probably less congenial to you than John Holbo’s:

I think it’s important not to trivialize the position that right wingers are typically not self-conscious or avowed racists. For example, if I define racism as “irrational hatred of black people (or some other group)”, it might turn out that even an avowed neo-Nazi is not an avowed racist because e.g. he doesn’t think there’s anything irrational about his hatred. Or you might get: “I don’t hate them, I just think they are inferior”. If that’s the only sense you can give to the view that someone isn’t an avowed racist, I think you might as well concede Rich’s point—or at least concede that you haven’t really answered it.

I originally had something subtler in mind, but at this point I’ll let that go, and instead note that my position is actually quite close to Rich’s. For example, I think racism is a form of social oppression and not just some brute psychological trait that can be indifferently exhibited by anyone in society. I just think it’s about institutions that more or less stably reproduce certain broad social patters, behaviors, etc. And as effective institutions, they don’t require explicit buy-in to the ideology they represent. I’m not totally sure what Rich thinks, but he seems committed to the claim that it’s something more like a planned conspiracy (in the proper sense of the word), with extremely widespread explicit buy-in. It’s this bit that I find to be extremely implausible.

(Meanwhile, we taking this to 500, or what!? Si, si puede!)

“I’m not totally sure what Rich thinks, but he seems committed to the claim that it’s something more like a planned conspiracy (in the proper sense of the word), with extremely widespread explicit buy-in. It’s this bit that I find to be extremely implausible.”

At this point in the thread, describing what I think again isn’t worth it. But conspiracies are typically concealed, and there is nothing really concealed about the extremely widespread, explicit buy-in to racism in America. I think that John Holbo’s position comes down to “If they object to the use of the word ‘racist’, then they aren’t conscious racists”.

#415 MPAV

Thank you for replying J. Even if your reply amounted to “everyone else has a problem but me.”

You’re welcome. It isn’t everybody else, what I’ve seen has been a large minority. Sometimes their objections are clear, and sometimes less so. I can easily understand “Any man who on short acquaintance invites a woman to have sex with him is a disgusting cad.”. Less clear the intense emotional defense of “No attempt to negotiate an end to WWII (or the Civil War) could possibly have ended the war any at all sooner without unacceptable appeasement and was not worth any attempt.”.

“As a general rule they agree that other cultures are not better or worse, just different, provided the other cultures share their own values.”

But ‘values’ is exactly what I meant by ‘culture’, obviously, not the amount of chili pepper in their favorite dish.

J. Thomas I encourage you to actually go back to the thread on consent and read what you actually wrote.
/Of course you probably still won’t get it and think that I am the problem.

#425 Ze Kraggash

“I’m glad that nonconservatives tend to approve of it”

I haven’t noticed that western ‘nonconservatives’ tend to approve of it. As far as I can see, they, actually, demand that other cultures (not to mention sub-cultures of their own culture) adhere to their ideas of progress, morality, and so on.

My experience has been that they tend to say they approve of it, but in practice they assume that all good people everywhere have basicly the same values, and the details don’t matter much. Then when it looks like the values actually are different they strongly disapprove.

In my limited experience, conservatives tend to mock the idea, and then disapprove of cultural values that don’t fit their own. Liberal ideas of multiculturalism and moral relativity and the idea that other cultures could be as good as their own are among the alien values they disapprove of.

Both of them want to send the army out to influence other cultures, except for the small minority of both who don’t actually want the government to have a strong military to do that with.

I don’t have any big disagreement with you here, just my experience with conservatives has been a little different from yours. Not to invalidate your experience.