Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Tue Feb 01, 2022 2:43 am
As it turns out, and in some contradiction to what you say, you
can engineer attitudes. You can make people feel bad and guilty and reprehensible for attitudes that they do have, and you can engineer situations where, to stop feeling bad, that they alter their attitude.
Yes, of course you can, if you're prepared to spend time either rationally convincing them or indoctrinating them against their consciences. You can change their perspectives.
But what I was speaking of was the judicial fact: you can't legislate against a thought. You can't know what the thought-crime even is, since you can't see inside a person's head.
The issue of racism only comes up when different races clash.
I see why you say that, but I think it's no longer true.
It's just in the last two days, but I've figured out what the SJW set means when they use the word, "racism." It's not what you and I, or other normal people think. You and I probably both think "racism" means "the belief that some people are inferior or superior by dint of their 'race.'" But that's not what the Social Justice propaganda set thinks.
Remember that they think racism is
systemic. That means it's not dependent on an attitude one holds in one's head, and that may or may not manifest; it's a thing you can do without even knowing you're doing it. But it's not even personal; it's systemic. That means that according to them, "racism" is "an oppressive structure built into all existing systems, institutions and authorities, that has to be deconstructed and overthrown."
So for them, you can be a "racist" merely by supporting the system of "systemic racism," by which they mean nothing other than "the existing order of things," or "the status quo."
Do you believe there is good in the existing school system, and want to improve it instead of destroy it? You're a racist! Do you support having police arrest people who steal? Racist! Do you believe in borders, in national interests, in private property, or in equal treatment of all before the law? Racist, racist, racist! Every single thing you do to save, support or encourage the existing "system," the structures and stability of existing society makes you a racist.
I other words, for SJW's and their "systemic racism," the term "racism" is just the same as "social conservative" or "social moderate." Being anything other than an extreme, Neo-Marxist radical makes you, in their terminology, a "racist."
Of course there is a basic "performative inconsistency" (to parrot Kant and Habermas) in this allegation. If "racist" means only "social conservative," or "centrist," then it stops being a hot term, a pejorative, something to insult you and put you on the defensive, and make you react by way of your bitten humanitarian conscience. So they want you to hear the old definition when they insult you; but them won't stop insulting you with it until you buy into the entire Neo-Marxist program, perform your acts of contrition to them, and fall supine and worshipping at their feet, beggging for forgiveness for your "unconscious bias" and "complicity in the structures of injustice."
But SJW's don't forgive. They wait until you kneel, then kick you in the face. Because it's not about you getting forgiveness, but about them being able to virtue-signal the depth of their own hatred against "systemic racism," and keep their pals from accusing them of exactly the same thing, just for being "white" themselves.
No, for SJW's, "racist" simply means "conservative."
I have examined the issue of 'systemic racism'. That means that I entered into the thinking-system of those who define what systemic racism is. Systemic racism is an ideological armament against the dominant culture.
Yes, this is right. So the whole culture is, in Neo-Marxist ideology, damnable. And so are all participants in it. They're all "complicit,"whether they know it or not; and the only way they'll realize it is if they get "woke."
Any oppositional stance, in whatever form it takes, is defined as an expression of racism.
Exactly right. The "sin" of Neo-Marxism is always the same: that you're not Neo-Marxist enough yourself.
They don't want racism "solved." They want it perpetual, eternal, and unfindable. They want it "out there" so they can allege they hate it, and virtue signal about it, and hold 'protests' that do nothing good at all, and above all, claim privileges, special status and reparations based on it...and they would sit down on a kerbstone and cry if you ever convinced them you'd "solved" racism.
Racism is 'solved' when the distinct races or ethnicities (I am unsure what the now-correct and acceptable terms are) that make up a multi-ethnic society become sufficiently blended together.
But that never happens, for an obvious reason: that assimilation and multiculturalism are, by definition, opposite goals. So "blended together" means, "no longer really multicultural but monocultural instead," and "distinct races or ethnicities" mean "unblended" or "multicultural." To the extent one remains "distinct," one is not "blended"; to the extent one has been "blended," one is no longer "distinct." And that's just definitional.
If I am not mistaken that must be the *ethic* that must be practiced. If it happened that one ethnicity within the multi-ethnic society did not, for whatever reason, want to go along with that program, it would have to develop a counter-ethical proposition to validate and rationalize staying apart (again I am unsure what terms to use -- separation? exclusivity?) It would have to define a social attitude that opposed what was once called miscegenation. But if I am not mistaken that is not a possible (acceptable) attitude to have. That is to say it is immoral and unethical.
But here's the problem: if you're raised in a Western, post-Humanist context, you believe two contradictory things. First, you believe that having such an attitude as you describe is "unethical"; but second, you believe that cultural distinctiveness is sacred.
So what happens when you have an anti-humanist-ethic-believing culture? Is it still sacred? Should it be protected? Or is it an immoral culture, and its people should be "re-educated"?
Surely many many different things are going on when one critically examines the internal function and logic of Critical Race Theory, but it cannot be denied that all of those 'attitudes' existed. And if they existed once they *must* still have their traces. And according to POC they certainly do.
The difficulty is this: you're using "racism" to describe a personal attitude. They're using it to describe a system. In a person, there may be no "traces" left of racism, because maybe the person has reformed his attitude, or maybe he was never racist in the first place. But in a "system" there is always the chance to "deconstruct" again, to "critque," locate "traces" and scream "racism" again.
But in all of this one must understand, at least this seems plain to me -- that there is a larger social engineering project being undertaken and in the end it is, quite factually, to create a racially-blended society and thus to 'solve racism'.
No, actually; that's not the end goal.
The very last thing the SJW set wants is the end of racism. They do not want a "racially-blended" society. What they want it an angry, alienated society, with factions hating each other and regarding each other with perpetual suspicion.
Now, I know that seems a lunatic goal to you and to me. But Neo-Marxist don't think normally. They think that the way utopia arrives is automatically, by "forces of history" on the back of bloody revolution. So they need as many bloody revolutionaries as they can whip up. And they need to destroy every existing "racist" structure of society, and indeed, the whole existing social order in order for the "triumph of the woketarait" to come.
The chief preservers of racism today, those fighting hardest against the MLK vision of equality and of people being judged solely by the "content of their characters, not the colour of their skin" are the Wokies. They want anger, they want rage, they want destruction -- they want revolution.
But they are utterly incompetent to build anything at all afterward. They have almost no non-negative vision of social good, and no skills to build the new society they imagine will spring like a rose from the dunghill if only they create enough angry, alienated rebels and succeed in destroying all the "systemic" stuff. In short, they want to level society to the ground.
But we pretty much have. The attitude might still be "out there" somewhere unlocatable, but nothing can really be done about that. We have all the laws we need to make racism eliminable in practice: we have "solved" it. It's illegal in employment, in commerce, in education, in housing, and so on in every case except for the special "anti-racist" racist privileges we're still handing out, for some reason.
This is true in many ways but certainly not in all.
What are you thinking of, in specific?
The only total "solution" to racism is the day when people choose not to hold any private racially-discriminatory attitude. But that is just not a thing that legislation, or protest propaganda, or equity initiatives can achieve. At some point, the worst thing you can do is keep talking like "racism" is still a thing, when every possible measure against it has already been taken. Then, you're just giving publicity to the attitude.
That's exactly where the SJW's are. And that's why Morgan Freeman said the best way to fight racism is to "stop talking about it."
I don't think he means there's no racism left: it's just that it's past time that it simply became a relic of the past, something that no longer can be meaningfully talked about today. And the tipping point is when equality
of opportunity is achieved; equality
of outcome is not an indicator of a lack of equality of opporunity, because people "take" their opportunties differently. Thus, the only way to arrive at equality of outcome is to end freedom, achievement and choice once and for all, and to banish quality from all consideration.
By treating it as consummately important, you're giving it a dignity it never deserved. You're presenting it as a dire enemy; but dire enemies are presumably formidable, viable and current. They are still to be reckoned with.
Exactly so. That's what they want.
Having "racism" to hate gives their agenda relevance and imparts to them a sense of their own moral superiority. They won't give that up easily...or at all.
I would actually substantially disagree. If the State is powerful enough, and if it has control of those mechanisms of 'social engineering', it can indeed engineer all sorts of different outcomes.
The word for that is "totalitarianism," though.
