FlashDangerpants wrote: ↑Sat Jul 08, 2023 12:20 pmSo tell us which racisms are true please.
This is the sort of question that a person whose mind functions through hot, rhetorical terms will show itself to work.
These terms themselves become blocks to free thinking. Racism, sexism, ageism, homophobia, and some other such words, have been established through negative associations as terms to describe wrongness, badness, retrograde thinking, and also evilness. So, when these terms are used they actually pre-limit any discussion. They are designed to
stop any conversation from occurring. If you say to someone *You are racist!* or *That's racist!* you put them immediately in a position where they are forced to defend themselves. But what actually goes on is that the one who defends themself has agreed to accept the meaning or the implication of the word, and as I say it is so laden with associations, and these are all thoroughly bad associations, that the one who employs this term puts his opponent in a pickle.
This is what Flash has done and this is what Flash regularly does.
Now, I suggest that he does this because -- and here focus on his question which is obviously a trap -- he feels certain that he can *head off at the pass* any conversation that touches on race issues. He knows, and the Woke-Left certainly knows, that if you stop and say "Wait, we have to drill down into this term 'racist' and 'racism' and see how laden it is", that you are placed in a position in which you are made to seem as if you are defending the most negative associations that we all have been exposed to about racism and racists.
To illustrate this point I will refer to
a scene from a popular movie
Mississippi Burning. The man in the barber's chair is a real bona fide racist. The FBI agent who has gone off the rails of *proper procedures* in order to break up the racist order in a small Mississippi township, is in my interpretation you. I mean, the spectator of this cathartic enactment is you, the one watching. That is
you who is going to punish Clinton and, because of your own sense of implication and guilt, it does not matter that you need to violate any *Constitutional* or legal protection because you are history's righteous actor, and you are going to put things to right! The anger you unleash, and which you live out vicariously, is really Divine retribution being enacted against the morally evil. You have seen the light! You place yourself on the righteous side of history. And to do this you can only and must only understand things in strict black & white moral terms.
Naturally, because of the presentation I make here, I have as a result potentially implicated myself and, perhaps, revealed that I am a *racist*. This is how the use of hot terms is designed to function. That is, against any level of closer and more careful analysis. What I have come to understand is that these fallacious modes of framing issues are so rampant that almost everyone as a result does not, and cannot, actually examine the issues that are in play -- as genuine concerns that a thinking person really should think about. It is through these rhetorical tricks that people dupe themselves and dupe others.
Flash is one example, but a good one, of a man who has wedded himself to these sorts of usages. But here is the thing. This is a philosophy forum and here, if anywhere, people should have received training to be able to think properly, to be able to discern rhetorical tricks and fallacious assertions. But that does not seem to be the case. What does this point to then?
A general intellectual degeneration.
So what, if anything, is required here in relation to the question of racism? It is hard indeed, this I admit, but you have to go completely back to the drawing board and recognize that racism, in the European age of exploration, was a form of
applied anthropology. The European, so wedded to his categories, could only see the primitive man as 'inferior' and nearly another species. We know the origins of racism of that sort and we recognize that it is inaccurate and misleading (self-duping) to see humanity in such terms.
But though this is so, and everyone writing on this thread likely sees humanity as being equal at least generally, or broadly, if we examine those who, let's say for example in Denmark or Holland or France who are concerned about what has been (broadly) termed 'replacement' or
the over-infusion of foreign peoples into their generally homogenous societies, when the term *racist* and *racism* is applied it is applied, more often than not, by people who like Flash are weilding hot rhetorical terms in order to stop or inhibit the conversation, any conversation, from occurring.
If this is so, and I assert that it is, one then has to back-track into political and ideological motivations. That is, what impels people like Flash to act as praxis-driven
activists and to use language-tools quite bound up with moral blame to accuse those who may be genuinely and fairly concerned about their societies, as a properly responsible adult should and must be, as being bad, wrong, retrograde and effectively
evil. Because as we all know the ur-racist is the *Nazi*, and when the term Nazi is employed, and for Flash it is one of his go-to terms, all responsible conversation is obliterated right at the start. Lurking behind the usage is the multi-use Hitlerian Figure,
a simile of Satan.
And as I say that is the basic function. That is the
purpose of the use of such terms.
So let us very briefly consider, if we can, the topic of *replacement*. Is replacement a false-idea? That is to say a deliberate policy choice by those and among those ideological inclined to the general idea of, say, cultural blending, general assimilation, *applied diversity* if you will? How can we examine this through a fair and balanced lens? Is what some say is happening really happening? Or is it a Right-Wing lie?
May I thrown into the mix here a segment of a speech
by a notable figure who lays out, rather plainly, that what is going on is intended and certainly happening? Or is what he says a lie?
What are we to think of this when presented in the way I present it? I mention these things because my point is that the real conversation is far more complex than we are allowed to realize when we our thinking and our conversations are deformed by fallacious terms that are based in fallacious reductions.
I am not going to go on here, my posts are usually long, but I hope that I have made my point at least somewhat clear. Should I summarize? Is that really needed?
