[Kobi]

Dread,

You and I have had this discussion before. Critical thinking, good and bad ideas by whose standards?

You can quote Brown vs the Board of Education, the Black codes, Pluessy vs Ferguson, the entire litany of racism in America. But, judge it by whose standards, under what conditions, and by whom?

Your own leaders have said stop relying on the white race to solve racism for you. Booker Washington. W.E. B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey, Malcom X. Louis Farrakhan all espoused a different philosophy of empowering yourself by taking the control of your own lives. Here is the reference for those who need it for words to have any relevance http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/...man-8217/6774/ .

So what was a good idea and a bad idea? And by whose standard? Cuz some people would be saying the leaders of the Black movement were betraying their own people by thinking this way.

Did Obama become President because he espoused racism? He got an education, he has ideas people were ready for, he was willing to listen, he knew he had to compromise. You dont succeed by beating people over the head because they disagree with you.

And one can not take anything as a given. The constitution gives us the right to bear arms. Chicagos no gun rule was just decided in the Supreme Court. 9 justices...5 saying you have the unqualified right to have guns, 4 saying you dont. Which is a good idea and which is a bad one? And by whose standards?

Now back to immigration and the Arizona law.....everyone wants to brand me a a racist because I dont "critically think as they do". So be it. I look at the larger picture of immigration and how policy affects the quality of life in America. A solid immigration policy based on economics served us well when we were a growing industrialized nation. And immigrants made tremendous contributions to what this country has become. Immigrants who circumvent the system cause problems for all of us. I wont even bother to go into the ways this a problematical cuz none of you even bother to listen.

Do I like the idea of American citizens being subjected to having to prove they are citizens? About as much as I like being humiliated at an airport as a potential terror threat because I use liquid soap. Is it a good idea or a bad idea and by whose standards?

When we were rounding up all the Japanese in this country and putting them in camps when Pearl Harbor was attacked...no one thought twice about it. Was it a good idea? Maybe at the time, who knows.

And immigration issues do NOT just affect persons of color or ethnicity. Here in Mass. if you want the state mandatory health insurance or a driver license, you had damn well have proof of citizenship. It affects all groups, all colors, all nationalities, all socio-economic groups. Arizona is just more blatant about it. Amazes me that the feds or the aclu havent sought an injunction pending review and makes me wonder why.

What annoys me most on these forums is when one has a different point of view, others feel it is their right to belittle them, to call them names, and be generally rude. They would not like it if I went around doing the same to them but it is ok for them to do it to me and others under the guise of racism. Pull out the race card and civility goes in the hopper. But, they are the first to say....read the TOS?????? Hello??????

Originally Posted by dreadgeek

Let me be clear, I'm not saying we should have homogenous ideas. I AM saying that there is a difference--a qualitative difference--between good ideas and bad ideas. Not every diverse idea was or is a good one. For example, please explain to me every single benefit that was gained by America--as a whole--by the ideology behind segregation. How was America made stronger by the idea--just to take one example--that black men were inherently dangerous and that for the protection of white women there needed to be social rules *seriously* proscribing the interactions between black men and white women. Not how we were made stronger by getting over that idea or proscribing its inaction. How did the mere *presence* of this idea make America stronger? The argument that Kobi and, it would appear you, are making is that merely having diverse ideas--regardless of what those ideas might be--is the strength of America. It doesn't matter if those ideas promote beneficial social attitudes or baleful ones, just the diversity of those ideas is strong enough. By that light, according to this argument, an America without active racist ideology is LESS strong, vibrant, healthy than an America *with* active racist ideology. I strenuously disagree unless and until someone can explain to me what, to take another example, the mere presence of anti-miscegenation laws, codes and social sanction did to make America stronger. (Again, please don't say that we became stronger because we had to overcome those things because that would be saying that the suffering of the people who actually had to live under the system of Jim Crow was justified so that we could say we got rid of Jim Crow. I would argue, in case anyone is tempted to make that argument, that we would have been better off without a system of segregation to get over.)




One can have the idea that there are bad ideas without having to have an arbiter of what is good or bad. If, for instance, you hold to the belief that, to stay in the ballpark of what we're discussing here, black people are simultaneously unqualified affirmative action hires, drug dealers and welfare cheats and there is no *actual* empirical evidence to sustain that belief I'm going to call that a bad idea. Beliefs about how the world works--the world all of us live in--that are not empirically supported are probably not good ideas. Let me also be clear, I'm not saying we should make these ideas illegal--I think that good information can drive out bad information if allowed to do so. However, good information cannot do so if we decide that 'all human beings are and should be equal before the law' and 'all white people should be equal before the law but no black people should be equal before the law in the same way that whites are' are both good ideas, both of which are worthy of consideration and neither of which there is any metric by which we can distinguish what is preferable. The argument you appear to be making here, is that there is no way to distinguish those two beliefs and no basis upon which a society could choose which is preferable. I disagree.



Why on Earth is it that people consider arguing a point vigorously is considered squashing of other viewpoints? I can't, for the life of me, see why that should be the case. What I am saying is this:

For most all of my adult life and probably going back a little further than that, Americans--my parochial interest here--have behaved as if the only way to have social harmony is to treat every idea as being equally valid, all opinions as being equally correct, and all ideologies as being equally fair. We have behaved as if there is no *actual* reason to choose an ideology that promotes tolerance and equal justice over one that promotes intolerance and favoring the majority at the expense of the minority. Now, I want to be clear I am NOT saying that either you or Kobi or anyone else in this discussion or reading these words is a racist. I AM saying that the ideology you are espousing, that all ideas--regardless of what they are, how sound they are, how well they map to the real world or what their effects are--add to the diversity and strength of America. So in that construction, the ideas of the Klan or the neo-Nazis add to the strength of America and there is, in fact, no way to decide whether or not we should prefer the views of George Wallace or Martin Luther King, Jr. circa 1965. What's more we have taken the absolutely insane (to me) position that any views that anyone holds are valid for no better reason than that someone holds them. I hate to break this to you but George Wallace and Martin Luther King, Jr. held fundamentally different views in 1965--diametrically opposed views, in fact. One of them was wrong. I would argue that it was George Wallace who was wrong and that America would have been better off if his ideas about segregation and the necessity of it had never taken root in this country.

What I am saying is that I have grown weary of pretending that opinions that are born out of incorrect information are as good (read useful/valid/comporting well with reality) as opinions born out of correct information. I'm not going to play that game anymore. I'm not going to pretend that there aren't ideas that are wrong--like segregation.

One practical consequence of this cognitive corner we've painted ourselves into is that we now have a generation of people who *reflexively* say that they are not racist because they know being a racist is something they shouldn't want to be but they cannot articulate WHY racism is wrong. They just know that the socially acceptable attitude is that racism is wrong. Thus, you can have laws or statements that are blatantly racist and the people pushing the laws or propounding these statements genuinely believe that they aren't racists because they aren't using, for instance, the 'n-word' or the 's-word'.