End the Scourge of White Supremacy

Er....OK, let's read on.

Alexa has succinctly blown your 'relative poverty' concept sky-high, with her simple and accurate observation:

" Relative poverty is very different from poverty which people experienced together because of low resources. Relative Poverty keeps people from being able to function in society. In a society like the US which has extremely low social mobility this tends to be inherited by the children"

No kidding... yes we are animals.

You already said that (which I underlined above)

Why am I getting sick of your representation of "enlightenment"?

Maybe because it's sounding awfully like the Randian concept of "rationality" supposedly available to all "free" individuals regardless of unconscious instinct and unconscious attachment to culture.

Education can potentially enlighten all of us, provided we eradicate war and poverty (via rule of law in an enlightened system , a process which is "top-down" (from governmen), as well as "bottom up" (from the individual)

Yeh.....well stop waffling and join the movement to enable government to fund the electotate's own desired policies, eg a Job Guarantee, without having to go begging to the current 'Masters of the Universe" ie private financiers.

Government does NOT need to tax or borrow in order to spend, as explained eloquently (in this link):

(Here Pastor Delman Coates surveys the problems and how to fix them).

https://ourmoneyus.org/

Refreshingly, none of the phony "prosperity gospel" of the religious Right.....

 

Does it? Look at all the billions in investment that have been pumped into these area since the 60s and yet the crime rate remains stubbornly high. If the black community could cure crime then prosperity would follow.

 

Can you support that claim?

 

Lets do, but free of false assumptions.

I don't see how that observation, even when true, affects what I have said. Absolute poverty does worse when it comes to being able to function in society, but relative poverty certain has some of the same effects too. It doesn't change anything in what I had said.

Animals either destined to remain as animals. Or animals that are in 'middle part' of a larger project? I don't know but I tend to side with Iran's 13th century theologian, mathematician, astronomer, Tusi:
https://www.thevintagenews.com/2016/08/27/priority-first-theory-evolution-600-years-older-darwin/

"Randian concept"? Lol. I hate dogma of any kind, secular or religious, and/but trust me: Ayn Rand and her progeny aren't my cup of tea at all. If you want western philosophers whose teachings I value (as opposed to hacks like Ayn Rand), you would have to learn from Plato, Descartes, Hume and, of more recent vintage, Hart (Concept of Law) and Rawles (Theory of Justice). (The dialectical approach from both Hegel and its opposite, Marx, are both valuable to me too). But my philosophical approach ultimately is as much influenced by a tradition you are totally unfamiliar with: of ideas developed by ancient Iran and the adherents of Zoroastrian thought, as transmitted in particular through Iran's national epic, the Shahnameh of Iran's 10th century poet, Ferdowsi; of a long line of medieval Iranian philosophers and poets of which Tusi is only one, and a few others since then.

Ayn Rand, and her dogma of "objective rationality" is not really anything but an irritant to me. Even more so, because her followers are among the least redeeming to me.

If you want to talk about my view of 'enlightenment', and what it entails, and my view of a Platonic Republic (Just Kingship in old Iranian traditions), and my view of economics, and the rest, you need to try to stick to what I say and not substitute those whose views I not only reject. But find offensive in many respects.

Nothing that I find either particularly illuminating nor certainly objectionable in what you say here.

As I told alexa, I might share some (not all) the objectives of those who hail from the 'left' in the western political divide, but I don't share their diagnosis of the ailment nor put the same emphasis on their prescriptions either.

 

That's because the neoliberal system itself - with its mandated NAIRU - is sick. Pumping billions into anything without providing a living wage for everyone is a waste of money.

 

Now you are erroneously conflating two entirely DIFFERENT approaches to dealing with poverty.

NOWHERE did I suggest REPEATING what was tried before because we already KNOW that it doesn't work.

Conservatives are right when they point out that jobs lift people out of poverty and yet they have OPPOSED all attempts at job creation in those areas.

This is why a Trust Fund that EDUCATED and provides STARTUP funding for Worker Owned corporations is the FEASIBLE and VIABLE alternative.

When you make someone an OWNER of a business then the success or failure becomes their responsibility. Even when they SHARE the OWNERSHIP the same principle applies.

Here are some background articles that might clarify your understanding of the solution and how it works.

https://www.thenews.coop/130862/sector/worker-coops/caused-number-us-worker-co-ops-nearly-double/

https://hbr.org/2018/08/why-the-u-s-needs-more-worker-owned-companies

 

Sometimes, the best answers come from other people. Like in this piece that was published today in Bloomberg:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-25/pico-iyer-on-being-a-tourist-traveling-in-iran

Even though I have my strong suspicions that North Korea isn't totally different than how it is depicted in the media and popular culture, being from Iran (and knowing Iran) I also share the same reluctance to even comment on North Korea!

In the meantime, I have traveled the world in my own way. I haven't been to Australia, but I lived in the US for most of my adult and much of professional life, traveled throughout western Europe and been to many European countries more than once or twice, have traveled the Far East, been to India, and many other places around my own country in the Caucasus (Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan) and have a vacation home in Turkey where I am staying now. Which makes me totally understand what this guy is talking about since I lived and worked in Iran for many years in between, until quite recently:

 

it is difficult to really know what you are talking about though you do bring religion into it. I did live in a Buddhist community for a couple of years and I can remember hearing the Buddha said, 'Put nothing above the deepest truth you know within yourself!' That being said I do believe he understood things pretty well. Basically you could put his conception of human beings pretty much the same as person centered counselling. We all create an image of ourselves based on our experience and from that we react to the world. However the truth is we do not have a rigid fixed self. When we learn to let go of 'self' and experience things in the moment we are most alive. From the person centered position we have created a false self because of out experiences in life and have cut off from our inner feeling self. I believe truth is inside us for us to find. Now as to ultimate truth. Again I would say I probably agree with Buddhism. by our actions we create the world. I don't see people who go against this as evil or 'the devil'. I see them as people who have in some way been harmed and need healing. I believe each and every one of us has the potential for healing and that put in the wrong situation most if not all of us are capable of acting as bad as the worst.

adding your quote of yourself

I do have concern about your talk of truth. In some things there is truth but a lot of the time truth is personal - it is how a person experiences the situation and to move on, the person's position, how they experience it must be accepted. I do believe we can have truthful facts and also that each person has their own personal truth.

Concerning this

This is very much how political and social scientists etc were working for a long time after WW2. Having looked at societies they noticed that there was no behaviour which could be said to be 'human nature'. That how people acted tended to depend on the circumstances they were in. What they then tried to do was to provide the best circumstances so that each person had the best opportunity to fulfil their potential. This started being eaten into with Thatcherism/Reganism who were moving us back to the kind of economic and social political system that we had prior to WW2. We are getting pretty near that now.

 

Why would or should an American care that white people could become a minority in his country? It's called the United States of America, not Whiteland, or Aryanistan. Your country isn't a land of whites where the blacks and browns are stealing "your" country from you. And no, history hasn't shown us that unless one's idea of "everlasting" has history start in the late 18th, early 19th century. Pretending that the guardian pamphlet you linked to represents a "death blow to western civilization" is entirely a pathetic, unmanly, hysterical and entirely undignifying response to a bit of progressive virtue signalling. It's typical for right-wing Americans though, that "liberty for me, but not for thee" mindset and becoming a blubbering, self-hugging, scaredy-cat weeping his pants whenever someone other than his "side" is protesting in the streets. If an Antifa guy throws a firecracker in the street, blubbering right-wing Aryans go "AAAAAAAaarrrrghhhhh! He just threw a WEAPON OF MASS DESTRUCTION! We're all DOOMED NOW!" *pisses himself* Some of you right-wingers must live really boring, safe lives if this little bit of rioting is enough to make you imagine Communist revolutions that "totally" leads to shoving you into the BLM/Antifa gulags - or whatever pathetic fear-mongering BS you imagine to make your everyday lives seem more dramatic and important. Maybe lay off reading those idiotic far right media sites that sell non-stop fear-mongering hyperbole to you?

As for "The West". We aren't all "white people" in the sense you mean it. I share a skin tone with so-called "white Americans", but that's all I share. They're not my "people", or who I share an identity with. My people, my ethnicity, the values of my culture, aren't a skin color. If you want to become a citizen of my country, I am as likely to want to kick you out if you're fair-skinned and European-looking but don't want to integrate into our culture. Because that's the only thing that matters. Tribe. And we can live just fine with other tribes. Ethnic Nationalism wanted us to believe that there can and must only be one dominant ethnicity or culture in a nation-state. That was a lie. I am Danish and live in Denmark, but I lose nothing by allowing Greenlanders have their own land and language, Faroe islanders have theirs or the German-speaking minority in southern Jutland have their language (they share the land with us). While it's an option, there isn't any "natural" imperative for us to hate each other simply for sharing a country of different ethnicities.

 

I am not religious in any sense you would be familiar with that term. But I understand the difficulty you allude to.

My view, in broad outline, is as follows:

1- the evolution of human beings from its other animal past is still in its infancy. We are still more animal than anything that could be distinguished from it.
2- the path of evolution has both a biological and spiritual component. Neither is about purity but its reverse.
Biological evolution thrives from genetic diversity. Spiritual evolution thrives from the diversity of ideas, both those which are purely materialistic and those which look to find 'truths' hidden behind the forms of things.
3- inequality is the natural condition of the animal kingdom, where different species and different humans have different attributes, different strengths and different weaknesses.
4- the instinct to control and dominate other things is part of the human (animal) primordial instincts. The divisions we create based on myths, legends, or other criteria, are part of a dynamic that is not going to be 'eradicated'. We can only change the dividing lines to be more or less enlightened.
5- enlightenment is not guided only by rationality. The limits of reason were already shown by Ghazali (a Persian philosopher and jurist) many centuries before Descartes developed similar ideas to show those limits by his famous phrase "I think therefore I am". There is more to enlightenment than pure reason. The same way there is more to the universe than even just the material world (which is actually 5% of the universe, 70% of which is composed of what scientists dub "Dark Energy" -- and unknown and unknowable force which we know exists only because it negates everything we understand from the laws and rules of the material world.
6- while the 'ultimate truth' is elusive, the path to truth is paved by us discovering what is clearly false. And avoiding falsehoods.
7- a system of government can be devised to give both the enlightened forces that should guide society their due and protection, while also allowing the material world and its competing interests to move along the evolutionary path. In western philosophy, the hints of its outlines and justifications were given by Plato in his Republic. But the actual project and details are a lot more involved than whatever Plato could conceive in his time.
8- an economic system that is based on falsehood (any form of monetary system where money doesn't represent true production and which is akin to a Ponzi scheme) is a system that is inherently oppressive, even if its oppression will fall on those which it robs the most (and not those who are robbing others through that system). That doesn't mean I advocate return to the 'gold standard' or such other things either.
9- we can devise a just government (guided by a bevy of truly enlightened Platonic guardians but with representative institutions to take care of the affairs of the people), and a just economic system, but that project cannot be explained here in this message board. It contours are very involved and for me to even attempt to explain it would make my message even more unbearably long

 

I can see why my original answer to your post irritated you. Basically what I see is your ideas coming from a very dry thought process. I do not think any kind of higher awareness is possible without interacting with and healing our inner feeling selves and accepting the strength and intelligence in feeling. By feeling here I am not meaning emotional reactivity but what Jung bore to heart after American Indians told him 'the white man' was mad because they think with their head not their heart. It is possible to think with your heart and is something which to a large extent has been lost in Western Civilisations and certainly is lost when people start treating people inhumanely as in slavery. It is about a change in consciousness.

 

although certainly in the UK and I think the West in general, this was the direction we were moving in once we had got Democracy and after WW2. In the UK we had long stopped speaking about evil people and countries and in respect to the countries were much more interested in understanding why they were acting in the way they were and making acceptable necessary compromises while gaining mutual understanding. We were also much more aware of psychological issues. After 9/11 when I heard Tony Blair call people 'evil' I feared as happened that we were moving away from that and back into the thinking of a darker pre democracy age.

 

That would require acceptance they way they are living and the lack of morals they accept needs to change.

 

There is no such thing as a living wage, people earn what they are worth.

 

Because if they become a minority all programs that currently apply to other minorities, that are no longer minorities, should be transferred to whites.

 

So sayeth the 'teacher'.....(what a dummy....)

Here is one alternative:

http://www.politicalforum.com/index.php?threads/mmt-overcoming-the-political-divide.569365/

 

And add to that minority treatment of Christian churches.
My bet is that even as a minority, whites will be held in
contempt by other whites - it's all about self hate.
Bet you no statue of Karl Marx is torn down.

 

You believe that American whites becoming a minority, will mean that they also lose political and cultural power in the US? And that they will thus need those programs?

 

You are joking right? This is common knowledge...

 

OMG Rarely have I become aware of such inhumanity. In the video below the narrator says more than once that Slave owners gave up their morality for money. No slave owners and others involved in this debauchery gave up their humanity.

I heard a black American woman on one of the marches trying to justify why slaves tolerated being slaves. I am guessing some racist was taunting her. She said they tolerated it because the consequences of trying to escape were too awful. She was wrong. Slaves tried to escape all the time. All in the South were involved in catching them and acting inhumanely to them....and it spread to the North. People being offered money to hand in escaped slaves and not minding even if they were not escaped slaves. Eventually some in the North started protesting this constant inhumanity.

The US, the South at least though I suspect a lot of the richest in the North was created by this inhumanity - century after century after century. How can you build something in any way decent when you have no respect for human beings and a love of sadistic cruelty. That anyone now is trying as people appear to be to justify this indecency only speaks to the decadence of their minds.

Being British I have heard a lot about the treatment of the Colonialists to the Indians but we don't hear so much about slavery possibly because of Britain's involvement in it.

No one with any humanity could feel anything but horror at what the people of the United States did to these people all to make lots of money.

I don't believe people are responsible for what those who came before them did - providing they acknowledge it and where possible make amends. I don't think I have ever seen a country born of such inhumanity. With the rise in the US of this kind of thinking it looks like the inhumanity was passed down to many. What a joke the US was trying to get people to believe they were the land of the 'free' and had any moral integrity.

 

You are clueless, define a living wage.

 

I did 3 times in this thread not including that post.

 

A living wage doesnt garuntee equality of opportunity it's working towards equality of outcome which is crap. Get rid of competition laws and people like Bezos wouldnt exist.

 

Theres 23 pages would you be kind enough to restate them?

 

You say "a living wage doesn't guarantee equality of opportunity".

So what does guarantee equality of opportunity?

Certainly abolition of segregation doesn't guarantee equality of opportunity, because ghetto life engenders poor values.

You then say "It's working towards equality of outcome which is crap"; which itself is a meaningless piece of crap; obviously facilitating equality of opportunity is basic for universal rights.

Well-bonded said:

A living wage is one which enables access to the necessities; basic housing, healthy food, public transport, internet access, utilities.

Fact is there is no shortage of resources that would preclude this, only an inadequate greedy ideology. The problem is ideological, not economic.

Go back to sleep.