What is "Woke"?

[nanana]

19 minutes ago, PozBearWI said:

The democrats lied and thus, implicitly you believe the Republicans didn't?  Listen again then...

You  clearly don’t get me. I think that people of all partisanships (including mine) have foibles. Love I say but don’t be gullible. Like my favorite church lady (I was Episcopalian) said, “God told us not to judge but he didn’t tell us we had to be stupid…”

[BlackDude]

22 hours ago, nanana said:

 

Sorry, didn't pick up on what you meant by #1 until right now when I was supposed to be working on some deadline, oops.

The "Slave Reparations" movement is a great example, but people could argue that it is a straw man for the point, since I  am not aware that any jurisdiction has passed "Slave Reparations," so I pick it more because it is a clear illustration of what I  was talking about rather than because it is more than a wish of a few percentage of our fellow citizens.  There are many muddier examples, but let's get the water out of the mud until it is crisp pottery that makes a good illustration.  

There have been periodic attempts to get various states and/or the federal government to pass a law to remunerate descendants of slaves for the agreeably unjust conditions and economic deprivations they experienced.  Since slavery was outlawed in 1865, a day-old slave-owner when the amendment passed would be 158 years, 11 months, and 8 days old.  It is unlikely that a 1-day-old would have achieved a high level of agency, so let's pretend that 18-year-olds whose families owned slaves (a tiny minority even in the South) who had reached their majority and who were in a position to actively REJECT the lives they had been born into were able to make full use of their "agency".  They would be 176 years, 11 months, and 8 days old).  It is unlikely that even very good gene therapy or vampirism would have enabled any slaveowner to live that long.  So, there's no way to apply reparations to anyone who had any agency at that time.  

Lest people wonder whether I deny the potential legacy to the progeny of slaves, I do not.  I am sure it has a multi-generational effect.  But when I  try to translate that into a percentage effect, and when I try to get the state to levy reparations against all citizens, many of which were not progeny of slaveholders, many of which were post-1865 immigrants with no direct or indirect role in slavery, I  find the traceability, onus, and practicality problematic.  

Let me also say that there have been many subsequent injustices, racial and otherwise, since 1865 (limiting myself so I don't overtax the patience of you gorgeous bareback sluts, inseminators, and receptacles) to African Americans (but I could pontificate on the Irish, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Italian, the Mexican Bracero dues-paying that happened).  

After 1865 at the hands of state and Federal government, trotted Jim Crow laws, FDRs creation of Social Security for whites and Welfare for blacks, the redlining of black neighborhoods by FDR's administration, Brown versus the Board of Education, the Civil Rights era, the "Great Sociaty" reforms of LBJ that may have had the unintended consequences of making black families jump through government hoops to qualify for subsidies, Dixiecrats, etc.  

Each of these injustices should be subjected to the same analysis of whether it is possible to trace the injustice to an ACTUAL PERSON OR GROUP OF PEOPLE and levy their profits from the bad behavior.  If it can be done, then okay for all of us.  If there were a way to have a more traceable payback to the source of injustice, I  would not at all be opposed.   The more diffuse and collective and involuntary the payback becomes, the more I  oppose it.  Let me be accountable for things I DID, but let me question the collective punishment I suffer when the real criminals or sources of injustice were just people who LOOKED like me.  (I'm mostly Caucasian by the way.)

I am VERY EXCITED, however, to be part of VOLUNTARY solutions that help all of God's children see and achieve their full potential.  

I  would also say, however unfortunate it may be from an individual perspective, that bloodlines have an effect on the POSSIBILITY to access past generational investment and the mindset of investment in FUTURE generations.  For example, if I  were born a princess as high-born as many of you are, you beautiful pixels, my parents might have indoctrinated me into a view that I was a 32nd-generation-prince(ss), which may have affected my allegiance to my class, my burden to carry the bloodline forward, and my desire to conform to (or potentially rebel against) my predecessors' expectations, including (happy or unhappy) impregnation of a (willing or unwilling) female spouse, and multi-generational accumulation wealth and capital.  If I  were an orphan (or academic middle-class trash like I actually am), I may have less consciousness that my decisions were a multi-generational investment in my 7th generation (to cite the time-horizon of native American tribal decision-making).  There may have been a contribution to my mentality of discrimination in the past that deprived me of my multi-generational consciousness that gained me access to past wealth (perhaps finagled from others) and gave me a consciousness to pay it forward so future members of my family could benefit.  There may be much injustice in this, but I  am not at all convinced that I  could quantify the portion gained from finagling (BAD & WRONG, BUT MAYBE SO FAR IN THE PAST IT BECOMES TOO WOVEN IN WITH OTHER VARIABLES) versus multi-generational investment consciousness (NOT BAD, PERHAPS UNDESERVING OF PUNISHMENT). (THIS MORALITY IS MUCH MORE RELEVANT TO BREEDERS than to most gay culture, which has mostly opted out of the gene pool, though please accuse me of simplifying if you think this diatribe is too short...). As much as DISCRIMINATION plays out in inter-generational wealth, so does a MULTI-GENERATIONAL investment consciousness play out.  

Without suggesting that people are immutable, and also without suggesting that thieving bigots of the past may have discouraged people from maintaining a multi-generational investor consciousness, it is hardly fair to expect the most far-sighted investors to adopt the habits of the most happy-go-lucky, here-and-now investors.  

Lady Fortune is a multi-generational bitch, and if we stay at her roulette table, Washington of the 22nd century may finally rival Baghdad of the 11th century or Giza of the 10th century BC.  

So basically, black people just need to the their “L” and move on?

[nanana]

That seems like too broad a takeaway. I’m not advocating that you listen to me unless I make sense to you. 
 

If I do make sense and you want to support a general claim for “black” people, I think I’ve pointed to MANY more recent injustices where you may be able to mount a specific claim on behalf of specific people against specific people that can prove a traceable specific harm that doesn’t have a lot of variables mixed up in them. Everyone has to decide for themselves how much energy they want to spend righting past wrongs versus building new positives. I’m not advising anyone on how to  spend their time and effort or how to deal with forces that are bigger than I am. 

[BootmanLA]

On 11/13/2024 at 5:31 AM, nanana said:

This is disingenuous. Again, a face-value-quality interpretation. Democrats are so desperate to pretend that all dissent from their policies originates from bad foreigners. Tim Poole didn’t get his ideas from Russia. And so what if he did? Any NPC who gets his ideas from NPR is falling for British bullshit propaganda. It may be hard to see this since Britain has such pervasive mind control over its ex-colony. Democrats have their cold-war Russian boogeyman; Republicans have their Chinese boogeyman. Two mirror parties channeling mirror fears and aggressions. 

I didn't say he got his ideas from Russia. Please re-read what I wrote and actually reply to it, instead of twisting my words so that you can attack something I did not say.

I said he got PAID by Russia - the government thereof, specifically - to do what he does. Those payments are facts. Not "bogeymen". 

[BootmanLA]

2 hours ago, nanana said:

That seems like too broad a takeaway. I’m not advocating that you listen to me unless I make sense to you. 
 

If I do make sense and you want to support a general claim for “black” people, I think I’ve pointed to MANY more recent injustices where you may be able to mount a specific claim on behalf of specific people against specific people that can prove a traceable specific harm that doesn’t have a lot of variables mixed up in them. Everyone has to decide for themselves how much energy they want to spend righting past wrongs versus building new positives. I’m not advising anyone on how to  spend their time and effort or how to deal with forces that are bigger than I am. 

Perhaps it's because you don't live in the US, and have not (I assume) experienced what those of us who pay attention recognize as ongoing effects of past actions.

Chattel slavery existed for 250 years, more or less. Not only was the labor of those individuals stolen, they were deprived of any ability to acquire wealth (minor or not) to pass down to their descendants. They weren't even allowed an education, for the most part, so that their descendants could do better than they (the way most white people could). Their children, their descendants, were literally *property* that could be, and were, bought and sold between and among other slave owners.

Emancipation was followed by roughly 100 years of de jure discrimination - not just bad treatment by individuals, but unequal treatment UNDER the law and BY the law. That was in forms as blatant as woefully underfunded black-only school systems and barring them from better, white-only ones (and that's not ancient history; there are still school systems TODAY struggling to integrate the remnants of their separate and decidedly not equal school systems), and as subtle as undisclosed redlining that meant banks would refuse to lend money to people looking to buy houses in black-majority neighborhoods (which kept those houses owned by white absentee landlords). THAT practice went on until the 1980's and is still subtly practiced today.

My white great-grandfather was able to send his six daughters (including my grandmother) to higher education, with the result that all six had careers (although one who married quit once she started having children). And he wasn't rich; but he had opportunities open to him (and his daughters did, too) that no black person of his era did, here in Louisiana. Each subsequent generation has benefited from the fact that prior generations were able to give them a boost.

That's something my great-grandfather got simply because he was white and the black men who worked under him where they all worked did not, because the system was set up to prevent that. The fact that I own a house today is largely due to my mom's inheritance from HER mother, which allowed her to gift me the down payment, and I'm about to start major renovations on the house that I can afford only because of my share of her inheritance, now that she's gone. These are all things that white privilege provided my family over the last 160 years or so.

And even for people who arrived here from Europe in, say, 1910 or 1930, they STILL benefited from a system that privileged whites over blacks for decades after their arrival. About the ONLY people who haven't benefited dramatically from our long history of racism are immigrants who got here, say, after 1970 or so, when we'd finally STARTED (but by no means finished) dismantling the racist systems that benefited people like me.

So this idea that we have to trace things to specific individuals' actions and tax THEM with the reparations is bogus. We all benefited from the unjust system. That alone is reason we should all share in the cost of rectifying it.