@anon71262119, see this piece if you haven’t already:
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Thanks. No, I hadn’t seen it, Bolt. I often like reason.
I just finished reading Common Sense, so this quote was fresh in my mind. “Immediate necessity makes many things convenient, which if continued would grow into oppressions. Expedience and right are different things.”
We see this so often, where government power grows in response to something like 9/11, and then we never seem to reel it back in. Ever. Any new department once it’s original purpose has been accomplished, will reinvent itself. Any tax for some specific need will need to be extended for a new reason. If something is ineffective, it will be argued that we need to pour more money on it. Anyway, it seems we all accept that this is just the way it is. The President is currently making sure that the positions of many of his political appointees are made permanent.
Bolt, can I ask you what your background is? Are you an attorney? What are your main areas of interest with regard to politics/ current events?
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What valid concerns? The only thing PC-ism has done is squash any possibility of honest dialog about important issues. If you look at what has happened since PC has emerge en masse, the country is more divided than ever, nobody trusts each other, that are lines of deep hatred and tribalism the likes of which hasn’t been seen since Jim Crow. But it’s not just across racial lines, the line can be drawn anywhere. So what’s the important message being missed? What are the valid concerns?
He didn’t conduct a war in Libya, he assassinated its leader, who was a U.S. ally, and left.
I would say ‘micro aggressions,’ ‘white privilege,’ ‘racism’ and ‘xenophobia’ are all valid concerns.
I disagree; rather, it has brought many important issues to the fore.
I’m not sure by what metric you can claim that ‘PC has emerged en masse.’ But at any rate, it is not surprising that wrestling with these difficult, emotionally-charged issues has produced strong reactions on multiple fronts.
Funny you mention that, as some people (eg, Phil Robertson of Duck Dynasty fame) look back fondly upon the Jim Crow era as a time when people got along. Certainly, there was less public turmoil over issues such as racism back then. Do you see that lack of turmoil as a good thing?
No, they are not. They are weapons of castigation and hate. Most of the situations in which they have been applied have simply been made up. They are labels that people are desperate to shrug off of them while, these ‘others’ try to pile it on them all the more. And there is hardly a more racist term then ‘white privilege’ if you want to be glandular about any of those terms. Or are you just ‘man-splaining’?
See I can just label you as a Eyedentist who has no possible understand of what it is to be a technician and hence cannot speak intelligently about any aspect of my life. Conversation over.
It made up issues that didn’t exist to any large extent and brought them to the fore.
When you constantly label and sling mud at people, you can expect a reaction and often not the one you want.
I see lack of turmoil as a good thing. I don’t watch Duck Dynasty and certainly don’t take any philosophical lessons from any reality show, or comedy, or drama for application in my life. So I don’t really give a right damn what the Phil Robertson character said. Clearly I am not for racism in any form. Nor am I for race baiting which is the more prominent problem today.
You tell people they are being oppressed long enough they begin to believe it, whether or not its true. Even the very rich, never oppressed in anyway Colin Kaepernick felt this oppression so well that he went on to praise one of the most oppressive, murderous and maniacal dictators of all time in Fidel Castro.
If you want to be a victim you will be a victim. But most people in the U.S. are where they are not because some mean oppressor did something to them, but a combination of where and by whom they were raised and then the decisions they themselves made when given the choice. The majority of people, in the U.S. are no oppressed by anybody but their own minds.
The few who are illegally forced in to lives they never chose are in the hands of criminals who are laws unto themselves, forcing girls into sex slavery, or people into servitude is tragic, but by in large, rare.
All these -isms and and -ists from the PC movement is largely a lie. Making victims out of people, who by spending their time more wisely instead of whining about who is doing what wrong, can do something productive for themselves.
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It is beyond my ken how you feel capable of making a blanket statement such as this.
Not sure how you can construe this term as racist. I suspect one of those terms (ie, either white privilege or racism) does not mean what you think it does.
Racism didn’t exist to any large extent–it’s a “made up issue”? Interesting.
Even if it’s a function of people feeling too intimidated to speak their mind?
So, in your opinion racism, sexism, homophobia, etc, are all things of the past?
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I’ve worked in the public sector, but I am currently in the private sector. 
(No disrespect to you intended, I like you very much, but I’ve never been one to share much personal information on discussion boards.)
Hmmm, great question, hard to say what my main areas are - I think there is so much to fix. One thing, though - an overarching thing, so it transcends all policy areas - is the overwhelming need for balance, especially between federal and state authority. Our federal government is entirely too involved in issues that simply aren’t national issues and shouldn’t be “solved” by federal legislation.
Gotta head out for supper, I’ll add more later. Great question.
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Racism isn’t new and there will always be racism/prejudice… College campuses didn’t bring this to light. What they have done however, is use it as a tool (along with xenophobia, micro aggressions, white privilege and all the other bullshit terms) to shut down speech they don’t agree with. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen on social media platforms(coming from liberals) these very words being used without merit, against people they disagreed with. It’s straight out of the liberal playbook and it accomplishes nothing.
Such as? I’d like to discuss case by case.
In my opinion, these people need to deadlift more.
Is there anyone (this side of Dan Greene) who doesn’t need to DL more?
Maybe we should equip their ‘safe space’ with a bar and bumper plates. Or alternatively, change the name-plate on the gym door to Safe Space. That would work too.
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Begin long threadjack. Please skip if you want to get back to the ACA.
I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.
I just read Friedman talking about the history of the Interstate Commerce Commission, and the move from more specific smaller regulatory agencies, to the proliferation of these large over-arching agencies we now have. It’s hard to think of government as this benevolent force, making all of our lives better after reading that! I need to clean and jerk something really hard. Ha!
Regarding my earlier comments about federal lands appropriated at the point of a pen, I know I probably sound like a radical. Who wouldn’t want to protect federal lands? Hey, I have a little part-time gig with an environmental group here that does some good things, but yeah, so many people are completely unaware of how BLM, or other public lands are managed and of the push to restrict them to any public use. People can’t care about things that they are unaware of. And why should anybody in suburban or urban America know about or care about farms and ranches they have never seen?
Constitutional legalities aside, it’s hard for me to feel that Obama’s rule by fiat is benevolent when I see ranchers who can no longer move their cattle from private summer pastures, to winter pastures they’ve been using for a hundred years. So many people are unaware of the families who own private land that borders these federal lands, and how they are now sometimes unable to even build a road into a pasture, or build a garage for a tractor on their own lands. Environmental groups have been very effective in restricting private land use. Imagine buying land for a retirement home, because you’d like to return to where your family lives when you’re older, and then being unable to build on that property or even drill a well, making that land virtually worthless.
It’s not enough to make all federal lands national parks (honestly, I think some of my neighbors imagine that all federal land is a national park), or to make all federal lands single-use, but we also need to restrict use of every piece of private property. There isn’t an acre on the planet that doesn’t need federal oversight, from agencies like the EPA. Someone from the federal government telling you that you can’t fill in a low spot in your field because that puddle is really important. Every puddle is.
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I don’t want to sidetrack this sidetrack, but I remember someone on this board once asking me how a libertarian/private property society would deal with someone buying all of the land around one man’s property in order to prevent that man from leaving his property. It’s strange how similar government actually acts to far-out scenarios like that one proposed as a “Ha! Gotcha!” comeback to libertarianism/private property.
At least the trapped private property owner would have full access to his own property, I guess.
As to the original(?) sidetrack: I completely agree with Thunderbolt re: federal government involvement in issues that aren’t national issues and shouldn’t be handled with federal legislation.
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No. racism, sexism, xenophobia and all the like do exist and always will exist in some small circles, that is not disputable. To apply them to the masses as has been done is a mislabeling and even worse obscurantist. To accuse a white student having dreadlocks as offensive to blacks is not only mislabeled but profoundly stupid. To deny Bill Maher, a liberal’s liberal, a speaking engagement at Berkeley because he dared to question the links between Islam and islamism is just absurd. To worry so much about feelings as to obscure the truth and to do it by hostile methods of labeling and ad hominem attacks is pathetic. That’s what PC is. It’s not an honest look into the world, its a way for one to feel good about themselves, indeed elevated above others because they claim to be aware of so many wrongs. It’s about feelings not facts.
If you are afraid of facts, then you have no place calling anybody anything. Nobody deserves shelter from truth.
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It didn’t bring important issues to the fore. It moved truth to the background. That’s all it did.
The good news is that the movement appears to be dying a quicker death then even I can hope for. So really, it’s a fledgling movement dying on the vine. Even liberals are at war with each other over the topic and the PC left is not winning the fight.
That is because the classic liberals believe they have important points to make and cannot be dragged down by bullshit jargon that gets in the way of their message. I may disagree with both, by I support the former because they are willing to at least have honest conversations.
I can do the best I can, but I am really busy and cannot afford to do research and paste a wall of words with 8 X 10 glossy photos with 'X’s and arrows pointing to the scene of the crime. The days of writing scripts and watch them run for the next 2 hours appears to be on hold for the time being. And these damn new SANS have much faster I/O so the scripts run much faster…
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So, it could be likened to, say, a pendulum that had swung too far in one direction, and is now in the process of swinging back to a more centrist position?
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Pendulums do not tend to rest in the middle, though that would be best.
That was a very well written, articulate article…
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