Leroy XIV

Leroy XIV

48p

88 comments posted · 0 followers · following 0

5 years ago @ The Reality-Based Comm... - U.S. Immigration Polic... · 0 replies · +1 points

Yeah. I am about as loud and committed an advocate of the police as you can find in our times, but there were times in our history in which I would have, with no moral reservation, waited for federal marshals in the tall grass and shot them in the back. It is always fun to remind constitution worshippers of such things, as so often they seem to have forgotten. The slave power erred when it chose to avail itself of its rats to use the legal system in the north to work its evil. As a merchant in Boston famously wrote after the marshals came for a runaway who had become a well-liked member of the local community (I am paraphrasing) "we went to bed compromise whigs and woke up as stark-raving mad abolitionists." The Lord works in mysterious ways.

5 years ago @ The Reality-Based Comm... - U.S. Immigration Polic... · 0 replies · +5 points

One anecdote and "detailed write-up" mean the same thing dude, the only difference is there is a quality descriptor and format specification for the second one. When you say "in fact" you seem to be implying they aren't synonyms, when they are.

I agree that it is a description of a policy that led to the death of a child. Ambulances driven on freeways by good, sober liberals in service to a noble cause can also directly lead to the death of a child, and in fact do. This poor little girl was seen by a bona fide US licensed pediatrician before her condition appeared to warrant hospitalization. This is an awful, sad story, but were are talking about transmission of viruses that children are rife with. You have probably had an adenovirus infection yourself recently... when was the last time you had pinkeye? When you had it, did you call the local elementary school and demand that it be shut down? It was concentrating children while adenovirus was in town, where were you then? This isn't like the bubonic plague making its way through an internment camp while the management debates whether or not Mexican lives are worth buying some streptomycin.

Of all of the arguments against detention facilities for migrants, "kids can get croup there" is just about the weakest sauce imaginable. Kids can get croup anywhere there are other kids. Period. You don't win baseball by swinging at every. single. pitch. You also don't convince any observers that you are playing a solid game of baseball, or have any particular idea of what you are doing.

5 years ago @ The Reality-Based Comm... - U.S. Immigration Polic... · 8 replies · +6 points

To be clear, I have essentially zero respect for Trump and (to drop all pretenses and just be blatantly racial) I really like brown people. If it were up to me, I would throw the doors wide open. Our cocaine spending is part of the reason their countries are such fucking disasters, so I think we have something of a moral obligation to welcome brown people even apart from my basic positive opinion of them.

With that disclaimer lodged, and with the further disclaimer that I am not yet a doctor... I'm not totally sure I follow the causation chain here. Croup due to adenovirus and parainfluenza virus is typically a self-limited viral illness AFAIK. We send our children to day care centers knowing full well that they have a higher chance of getting croup due to the exposure to other children. Some day care centers make some basic attempt to keep sick kids away from other kids, but really, who are we kidding here. If I send my child to a crowded day care center and they become one of the very unlucky few to die of the croup, did my parenting policy kill them? I mean I guess it did, but what is the real moral force of that statement?

Maybe I am being small-minded, and as I said I am definitely not a doctor yet. Convince me.

5 years ago @ The Reality-Based Comm... - How big a problem is h... · 0 replies · +1 points

What I need is to get out of California. If you want to believe that I am misrepresenting California campus political culture that is your right, but you don't get to exercise that right while being right.

5 years ago @ The Reality-Based Comm... - How big a problem is h... · 3 replies · +2 points

The modern left is leaving us behind Prof. Or maybe I am wrong and it was always like this, but I really doubt it. The average person on my campus thinks that the white supremacists are more numerous and powerful now than they were 40 years ago, that all of the black men in prison are there for smoking weed, and that the feds killed MLK in service of the private prison industry. People are wearing shirts that say "Palestine is a queer / feminism issue" which is a perfectly defensible position, except that they mean it in reverse. Compared to the stuff I am seeing now, "Nixon criminalized weed" doesn't even move the dial. Meanwhile, the "party of sober christian realists" is closing ranks behind the orange troll. It can't always have been like this, something is happening. There is some sort of cultural black hole sucking all of the gravitas and political virtue out of the republic.

5 years ago @ The Reality-Based Comm... - Immigration · 0 replies · +1 points

I have read all of his columns and blog posts. Sometimes I am impressed, many times I am not. Like I had said, I am not trying to engage in a competition; my point about the AA kids battering me and calling me honkey / cracker wasn't that I was devastated by the words. In fact, I had no emotional reaction to the words at all, majority privilege is sweet that way. If you tell me that the words thrown at you did wound because you weren't shielded by majority privilege, I immediately believe you. Being surrounded and battered, on the other hand, mattered to me. My point, if you remember, is that adolescent minorities can behave like racist criminals too, because racist / aggressive behavior is a normal behavior pattern for adolescent males to engage in. It is not some sort of majority-only white devil phenomenon. It is a natural product of testosterone and strong group identification. No one was dividing and conquering anything or acting out a playbook their parents knowingly wrote for them; they were being little shits. Sometimes a cigar is a cigar. I likewise cannot convince you that it is worth dropping the everything-is-racism lens from time to time if you don't want to hear it, but c'est la vie. If you want to believe that Obama vs. McCain and Romney prove nothing about anti-black racism in the United States while Trump vs. Hillary proves all sorts of things about anti-black racism in the United States, that is your right. I just can't believe there isn't a part of your brain screaming "what the fuck am I saying" as you do it.

5 years ago @ The Reality-Based Comm... - Immigration · 2 replies · +1 points

"The packs of black kids who used to surround me and shove me around while calling me honkey and cracker" being surrounded and shoved is not "being taunted on the street," it is battery. Shove doesn't mean spoken to from a distance, it involves physical contact and can lead to injury. Being surrounded is not similar to receiving soundwaves from across the street. Not sure how this wasn't clear, or why that is totally different in kind to Kenny Horde's behavior except that there were many of them. Also not clear on why Kenny's behavior meets a criminal threshold that wasn't met in what I wrote. I am not trying to win a competition with you or even to participate in one, but really, you aren't going to just assert that you have one-upped me without reading what I wrote.

Racism is quite obviously abating. 40 years ago a black president would have been unimaginable. 20 years ago, probably the same. The membership rolls of white supremacist groups have been collapsing precipitously for the last century, breathless media coverage of very small assemblies of inbred morons notwithstanding. There are basically none of them left. I think it is worth noting that Trump stopped the birtherism before the 2016 campaign. Sure, I suppose he had already gotten his name into the minds of those clowns with his earlier bullshit, but I am not just going to forget about the fact that he specifically dropped that line when it was time for the campaign. Trump did NOT run an anti-African American campaign. He barely mentioned African Americans at all. He ran a nativist (anti-hispanic) / islamophobe / populist-protectionist / reality TV campaign.

This reminds me of seeing a CNN commentator claim with 100% confidence that the election of Trump represented a "whitelash" against African Americans. What a joke. The last two elections before it involved a black guy against white guys, and he won in both of those. Then in the next election we have a white guy versus a white woman, and the fact that he won shows... anti-black racism? A lot of the people who voted for Obama voted Trump, and Obama still had really high approval ratings as Trump was winning the campaign. I don't particularly understand how people could be so stupid, but I'm not buying this facially absurd framing of HRC vs. Trump as a white versus African American issue, because that just doesn't make a god damn bit of sense. If anti black racism were going to be a huge factor in a presidential election, IT WOULD BE ONE OF THE ONES WITH THE BLACK GUY IN IT. I really, really am surprised at how people seem to blow right past this. Some have gotten so used to screaming "racism!" that they see it everywhere and in everything, even when it makes no sense at all.

I am sure the wealthy try to build voting blocks out of racists. I admit, that (or something like it, just basically raising his profile, I think Trump had almost no expectation of winning) is what Trump was doing with the birtherism crap, but really... this can easily be taken too far. I never claimed the rich don't try to build voting blocks, I claimed that the average wealthy rightist is not a racist. And as for the absurd things that were said about Obama, ok, sure, but do you not remember liberals walking around openly saying to each other they hoped Bush Jr. would be assassinated? Do you remember some of the things that were said about him and, even if you are down with all that, do you remember what lefties were saying about people like general Petraeus? Remember how before there was birtherism there was truferism? You can sit here and tell me that conspiracy-minded bullshit hyperbolic attacks on the government started when Obama was elected, but I ain't buyin it.

5 years ago @ The Reality-Based Comm... - Immigration · 4 replies · +1 points

I am very sorry to read about what you went through as a kid. I am white and so don't have directly parallel experience, but I was mistreated / bullied more than almost anyone in my entire school so, to some extent, I understand. I don't think, however, that kids throwing around racial epithets has anything to do with a divide-and-conquer strategy, for several reasons. First and most importantly, kids have a natural tendency towards bullying and racist speech without it being part of any kind of social strategy. The packs of black kids who used to surround me and shove me around while calling me honkey and cracker (hoping to provoke me into saying the N-word in return so as to create a justification to beat me in a more serious way, which I of course wisely did not do) were certainly not doing it as part of some sort of complex social race strategy. On the contrary, what they were doing was exceedingly simple: They were accessing the ecstasy of violence and domination in a way that they had seen modeled in their homes and neighborhood. Simple as that. I am sure they learned to say honkey and cracker from their parents, but that is the extent of it; they were not soldiers engaged in some kind of strategy. Their parents were not generals acting on a plan.

It is true that America has an overtly racist history and, as overt racism has receded, a history of uncorrected economic inequality perpetuated through mechanisms such as redlining... but I think you are making a conceptual error in trying to apply these facts to the behavior of adolescents. I also think you are making a conceptual error in your view of the behavior of the rich in modern times. In my opinion, the modern rich are better understood as being highly rational amoral actors engaged in the naked pursuit of self-interest, rather than somewhat rational immoral (racist) actors. Put another way, I think highly affluent right-winger Caucasians feel as though they have more in common with other self-interested rich people of any color than they do with dirt-poor Caucasians.

5 years ago @ The Reality-Based Comm... - Immigration · 6 replies · +1 points

Thanks for the link. Yes I see that he does reference the need to have very low-paid labor and that immigrants fill that role, all I meant in my objection is that I just can't imagine the rich being xenophobic in the way he suggests before the bullet points. Can you imagine a rich person thinking "this sure ain't the murica I grew up in, with all these damn mig-rints!" Rich people just don't think that way or in those terms... at least not in our culture. Rich right wingers don't have to balance their xenophobia against their need for migrant labor, they simply are not xenophobic at all.

5 years ago @ The Reality-Based Comm... - Immigration · 8 replies · +1 points

A minor quibble: Are the right-wing rich actually passionate on the immigration issue? That just strikes me as wrong (I have no evidence, this is a sense-of-the-world sort of thing). When I think of nativism my first thought is of a working-class person, although I know that at various times middle-class people have done the nativism thing (IIRC the know-nothings were educated protestants). I can see people like the Kochs being anti-immigration because they know how the migrants will vote if they gain a path to citizenship... but really, I just can't imagine wealthy rightists being true xenophobes. I am sure they are fond of their gardeners and servants right?