buzz62 wrote:Well then...Your parents should not have done that IMO. The police are there to protect you. And the police are not an entire race of people. As for the lesson "If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is." that was a good lesson.
You seem to have a real identity crisis goin' on there. My condolences. Is there a pill for that?
There is no "identity crisis"
The police are not there to protect you. Surely, some join with that in mind. But they're there to close cases and get a paycheck. They're not doing it for free. It never ceases to amaze me how right-wingers will hysterically yell about wages and the free market, and then pretend as if civil servants of any kind are doing charity.
The police are people. They will lie for each other, like you do in any job, and they will attempt to make their bosses happy, like in any job. If they can clear a case by getting you to say the wrong thing at the wrong time, they'll do it and let the lawyers worry about it later.
That is their job.
SolarCross wrote:The spacial metaphor of right vs left changes a lot over time but these days in the US it is generally understood that the right wingiest of right wing institutions are the military and the police. While the leftiest of left wing institutions are the academias. Right wing people like sports and left wing people like movies.
Left/right has not changed in 300 years. The only thing that's changed is right-wing libertarians attempting to distance their uncomfortable promotion of fascism in the past by making up a new definition.
Academics are not a "left wing institution." They are run on a corporate model where the
CEO can clear almost a million in public institutions, and
twice that at private institutions. They almost always have
business degrees and the universities are run upon profit-making business models. As a result,
tuition has never been higher, faculty
has never been paid less, and most (70-80%)
are reduced to squalor.
This is hardly a "leftwing" model for an institution. It's exactly the kind of structure that Wal-Mart, or any other rightwing institution, uses and advocates.
"Ah!" You may say, "But the faculty is overwhelmingly Democrat!" This is true, read the above. Faculty sleeping in their cars and giving blow-jobs on the side are getting crushed by Republican-promoted business practices. Would it honestly make any sense for them to keep voting for Republicans, or to vote for the party that says the institutions need more money to give to the employees? Surely even a right-winger whining about the free market can see that there is a reason for this to be.
Many members of the faculty I know are not political in the sense that you're thinking about it. Sure, there are departments and activists like there are everywhere (and this is something the students direct more than anything); but mostly we have trained for decades not to listen to what NPR says uncritically and we laugh at the bias of the BBC. This is not conventional American liberalism as you are trying to depict it. These are scholars that spend every day pouring over sourcing and then can't help but to do the same. Does this make one veer to the left? More than likely as the institutional reasons something is said tends to make one cynical of power in general.
But this is not the binary that you are pretending that it is.
The US military without going along with quotas shows a decent representation of blacks in the officer corp. Even up the rank of general you see roughly proportionate black faces. Same goes for the police, though they tend to represent local demographics because they are not national institutions and so officers tend to be recruited locally.
False. Affirmative Action is not only used by the military, but when it comes to the Supreme Court the military goes to bat for quotas in Affirmative Action. The last time this came up, it's the reason the Supreme Court found in favour of Affirmative Action:
Grutter v. Bollinger wrote:Brief for General Motors Corp. as Amicus Curiae 3-4. What is more, high-ranking retired officers and civilian leaders of the United States military assert that, "[b]ased on [their] decades of experience," a "highly qualified, racially diverse officer corps . . . is essential to the military's ability to fulfill its principle mission to provide national security." Brief for Julius W. Becton, Jr., et al. as Amici Curiae 5. The primary sources for the Nation's officer corps are the service academies and the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC), the latter comprising students already admitted to participating colleges and universities. Ibid. At present, "the military cannot achieve an officer corps that is both highly qualified and racially diverse unless the service academies and the ROTC used limited race-conscious recruiting and admissions policies." Ibid. (emphasis in original). To fulfill its mission, the military "must be selective in admissions for training and education for the officer corps, and it must train and educate a highly qualified, racially diverse officer corps in a racially diverse educational setting." Id., at 29 (emphasis in original). We agree that "t requires only a small step from this analysis to conclude that our country's other most selective institutions must remain both diverse and selective." Ibid.
We have repeatedly acknowledged the overriding importance of preparing students for work and citizenship, describing education as pivotal to "sustaining our political and cultural heritage" with a fundamental role in maintaining the fabric of society. Plyler v. Doe, 457 U. S. 202, 221 (1982). This Court has long recognized that "education . . . is the very foundation of good citizenship." Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U. S. 483, 493 (1954). For this reason, the diffusion of knowledge and opportunity through public institutions of higher education must be accessible to all individuals regardless of race or ethnicity. The United States, as amicus curiae, affirms that "[e]nsuring that public institutions are open and available to all segments of American society, including people of all races and ethnicities, represents a paramount government objective." Brief for United States as Amicus Curiae 13.
Incidentally, as implied, big businesses are always in there saying they need affirmative action when it looks in danger too. For the same obvious reason: if you want to penetrate into a market, militarily or commercially, you want to have someone there that knows how to think like that market. You don't want to have to skip over a black guy that may grant you access to that market because another white dude from Harvard is technically more qualified.
This is, ultimately, why academics what AA too. The British are, generally, far more qualified on paper to talk about the Indian Raj. But we want the right to be able to take the fact that someone was educated in India into consideration when looking at material.
Needless to say American sports are if anything over-represented by black people and they are enormously well paid too.
In contrast Academia blocks blacks from progressing up the academic career path. Those few blacks that do progress up the academic career path mostly do so in all black institutions they had to create to insulate themselves from the racism of leftist academics. Hollywood is also deeply weird about blacks being actors, having funny rules where there can be a black side kick but he has to die first. Will Smith getting a starring role in I Robot was kind of a breakthrough for Hollyweird though black heroes had starring roles in the military and sports for many decades before. Interestingly Hollyweird tends to reflect the racism of the left vs the non-racism of the right by making the token black characters cops or soldiers but never academics.
Indeed. This is something that universities attempt to address, but it either gets stopped by right-wingers like Hannity on TV whining about Affirmative Action, or
Republicans in office doing everything they can to stop it.
As for Hollywood, burn down their mansions and fuck their corpses. But, again,
it is always the rightwing that starts whining when a black person is hired for a role they think should be white.
The basic difficulty the right is having with the left on the subject of racism is that the racist left is accusing the non-racist right of being racist.
I don't know what you mean by "left" in this context as you don't seem to have a good grasp on it in general, but I do know that racism is [i]institutional while prejudice is individual. Everything you brought up regarding Hollywood and universities are institutional racist policies, but ones that society itself has (as shown by rightwing objection to trying to fix any of the issues). Where people on the left tend to go wrong with this is hurting rightwing feelings. Granted, right-wingers will have hurt fee-fees at almost anything, but one can do it by example a little bit easier.
For example, I made a crack about gentrification at a bar once. A black guy called me out on it, and he was right—I probably wouldn't have said that had I known a black guy was there. It was something that I hadn't thought about, but the fact that I hadn't thought about it but it was in me, and the fact that I knew I wouldn't have said that in that context does mean that I'm reflecting a racist paradigm. It's something that needs to be addressed. It's not a good feeling, and I talked it out and shook hands at the end, but I still feel a bit of shame about it. The thing to address is how you internalize and interpret the culture and how fairly you're doing it.
Racism, being institutionalized as it is, sneaks up on you on ways you don't think about. It's true for everyone in a racist culture such as our own. And it's just something we all need to work at getting over, even if it takes work for an institution that is so old and refined. Where good-meaning mealy-liberal types fuck up is their false premise that they were somehow born immune to society as a whole and everyone else needs to be condemned. That is typical of
bourgeois individualism, which is the same reason that advertising or anything else works. We believe we are free from it (like racism) but are not fully free from it unless it is actually, constantly, and consistently addressed in opposition to culture itself.
The other issue is political correctness. The right wing people are straight talking and straight thinking, they dislike having to second guess what they say and double-think their thoughts, because for all their flaws they are basically honest people, consequently they recognise political correctness culture as odious and repellent. Moreover they aren't very good at it.
In contrast the left love double-thinking, double-talking, virtue signalling, being two-faced, sly and manipulative and so consequently love political correctness, as it is a linguistic culture that favours those who are dishonest and have skill at being dishonest, like the left. If political correctness becomes a cultural standard then this advantages (privileges) the left against the right.
This is a product of what I was writing about previously. On the left, we tend to look to who is saying what and why. We, at least the "left" I'm speaking about, don't trust anything that can't be further researched and explained to root. That's why academics don't trust any news source—and it's probably the same reason that a Marxist would not trust a source, to find Marxist materials and explanations takes a lot more work and mental prep than another ideology in the Western World as it's not commonly available (this would be reversed in, say, the Soviet Union or China).
Counter this with a conservative that's going to find someone he trusts on Fox News and rightwing radio and sit there and get spoon-fed some ego-stroking garbage. This is not to say it's the conservative's fault, necessarily. Specialization has long moved to a point where we can collectively trust an expert in any given field, and this is something that a lot of these institutions have exploited for money without shame.
However, it does not make their information correct.
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