Sunday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
·
Sunday, March 26, 2023
·
27 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
Follow Steven on
Twitter
Hello? Is there anyone out there??
@Sleeping Dog:
“We Have Never Been Here.”
Seen at the Vorlon Tourist Office on Babylon 5.
Hard day cooking yesterday.
There was the potato and onion soup. Then a mix of vegetables with shredded chicken and corkscrew pasta with tomato sauce and cheese.
For desert I shredded three apples, then cooked them on a pan with a little bit of water, adding some nutmeg and cinnamon. Next I made a mess of rolling the puff pastry dough (I have a terrible relationship with dough), then filled it with a mix of apple and powdered pecans. Outside I applied egg wash, more powdered nuts, and some cinnamon.
I was too tired to even taste one. We’ll see about that today.
Last orders? Belgium’s Trappist beers under threat as vocations run dry
If God cared, would he allow this travesty to occur?
@OzarkHillbilly:
There was a small monastery in Spencer, MA, St Joseph’s Abbey, that brewed a great line of Trappist style beers that shut down last fall. They couldn’t afford to upgrade the brewery to keep up with the hundreds of micro breweries that have cropped up.
Niche brewers are an industry that is rife for consolidation and many bankruptcies.
Yesterday, JB32 brought up “All Lives Matter”, and it occurred to me that it is an almost perfect distillation of the type of bad faith argument that permeates our culture.
First, let’s take a look at the best of the good faith arguments on both sides. For “Black Lives Matters”: On the one hand, racists have co-opted the phrase as a way of minimizing or erasing the disproportionate sanctions society imposes on people of color. For “All Lives Matter”: it is a simple statement of shared values that serves as a starting point before we go on to more nuanced discussions. This dichotomy serves as the perfect societal trap, where the small percentage of highly invested people people on either side perform a sort of kabuki dance with each other for the audience of 90+ percent of the population who are only peripherally aware of the issues. At the drop of a hat, each side can elicit a reaction from the other that perfectly proves their point: “Look, my opponent will go to any length to avoid saying that black lives have value, including mouthing a meaningless phrase that was coined by actual Nazis and klan members! Watch, see what they say when I ask them if black lives matter!”; versus “Look, these people only care about black people, and won’t even concede that other people suffer injustices! They won’t even say that out loud! Watch what happens when I ask them if all lives matter!”
Like kabuki, this dance is immensely satisfying to the performers but completely opaque to the majority of the populace. It lets the dancers feel elevated and righteous but advances us as a society not one whit.
My reply is always, “Well of course, but you’d have to be blinder than a bat to not see that in our society some lives matter more than others.”
A part of me wishes they had called it Black Lives Matter Too. It was pretty predictable that opponents would use the name to claim that it meant other lives didnt matter.
Steve
@Sleeping Dog: Agreed. Gonna lose a lot of good brews. Which tbh is not much of problem for me. I rarely drink beer these days.
@MarkedMan:
You know what perfectly illustrates this? On the right, I just as often hear the slogan “Blue Lives Matter.” This means they understand perfectly well that singling out a specific group of people and saying their “lives matter” isn’t equivalent to saying other people’s lives don’t matter, it’s just a way of expressing that you believe the group has been devalued by society. They only pretend not to understand this when it’s a group they don’t care about.
@OzarkHillbilly: A sensible response. Of course, the racists are saying “Yes, and it is the white christians who are being discriminated against!” What you said doesn’t contradict that. FWIW, I think the whole “my suffering (or some other person’s suffering) is more serious than yours” thing is a dead end, regardless of the subject. Even on trivial things, it just generates annoyance. When we say, “Man, I drowning in this cold, I feel like crap”, we all know how we react to the social misfit who immediately jumps in with, “That’s nothing! Last week I had a cold that was much worse than yours!”
According to Axios, Trump told a group of reporters on the way back from Waco last night that he thinks Bragg will drop the charges against him because the D.A. has no case. “It’s a fake case.”
@Kylopod:
Obviously. Nobody responds to Save The Whales with “But what about dogs? All animals matter.” Or to Breast Cancer Awareness Week with “What about the flu? All illness matters.”
The rightwing MAGA conservatives using All Lives Matter as a rejoinder to BLM know exactly what they’re up to. They hate black people. It’s not complicated.
To which I politely remind them they are a blithering fragile idiot snowflake with a near fatel case of fragile white syndrome. Seriously. I’m not trying to change any minds. I can’t, but I will settle for them having no doubt whatsoever of what I think of them and that their shit won’t be tolerated by me.
@MarkedMan: You are describing poison pill arguments that unwitting participants fall into with good intentions but nefarious actors exploit to further their goal.
Whether Black Lives are important or not is irrelevant as an argument with respect to building a mandate for reform. It’s a prime illustration of why I said in the media leak post that even worthy issues are framed in terms that make political movement impossible.
Had the activist “intelligencia” that came up BLM understood the art of politics they would understand that you have to frame things from the point of view of the people that need convincing. In this case, the target audience can’t and will never have a real appreciation for the Black Community. Most white people don’t know or meaningfully socialize with black people. BLM means to them what Asian Lives Matter means to me…something the intellect acknowledges as true but nothing that sparks emotion.
In the case of BLM, what does resonate with the white voter is government accountability and efficient use of tax dollars. Everything about the issue should have been messaged in those terms…including the killings of 100s of unarmed white people by the police with no accountability. Police and Polie Union largesse should have been regular stories to generate the emotional crescendo for change.
But those stories aren’t entertaining and the preacher doesn’t get the hi-five the choir. It’s activists recruiting and battling other activists. Our system requires a threshold of mass emotional investment to even have the possibility of change. Activist wars aren’t even a space heaters worth of energy to moving to a new status quo.
@Jim Brown 32:
100% agree. To me it’s a waste of time arguing about whether poor inner city black kids or Appalachian holler poor white kids have less access to opportunity. They both don’t have enough. Setting them against each other is a suckers game. It’s how Jim Crow governance works and it astounds me that educated people of all colors, persuasions and walks of life fall into it so easily.
@Jim Brown 32:
Very well-put. It’s crazy arguing with more crazy.
I go back to effect. The purpose of the Democratic Party is to house the homeless, feed the hungry, treat the sick, and defend the rights of those who cannot defend themselves. When we do those things we win, and even when we don’t win at least we’re still trying to help, we’re still trying to do good.
Fight the battles we need to fight in order to house the homeless, etc… Don’t fight every battle that presents itself, that’s leaving the initiative to the enemy. Focus on our core goals, focus on winning for the sake of the people we help, and the chickenshit will take care of itself.
Things just get more and more bizarre. Speaking on WABC radio Friday night, Andrew Cuomo attacked Alvin Bragg, Letitia James, and Fani Willis for going after Trump. “It’s all politics,” he fumed.
Next thing he’ll be yelling “witch hunt! witch hunt”.
@CSK:
It’s not bizarre if you’ve followed his tailspin. He’s referred to his own scandals as “cancel culture.” It almost sounds like his endgame is a job in right-wing media, though I doubt it’ll work. The other possibility is that he’s genuinely bought into the victim complex of Trump and thinks the woke mob is out to destroy powerful men in general, regardless of party.
@Kylopod:
Well, I did follow the Cuomo saga when it happened, so he may regard Trump as a fellow sufferer of unfair persecution for committing very trivial sexual indiscretions, if that.
But yes, birds of a feather do indeed flock together.
What’s happening in Israel is worth attention. Netanyahu is driving the country to the brink of civil strife.
Also the Saudi/Iran rapprochement.
Tectonics are shifting in a very sensitive region.
Also of interest: Europe promises a million 155mm artillery shells to be sent to Ukraine.
Also, Putin announces Russia my put nuclear weapons in Belarus.
Rest of Europe: “Russia may also put nuclear weapons up its arse.”
Finland is on track for NATO accession this summer.
@JohnSF:
Apparently Turkey is okay–or they indicate they are–with Sweden joining NATO as well.
@CSK:
Evidence indicates FSB was orchestrating a lot of the anti-Turkish and anti-Islamic protests in Sweden.
I suspect Erdogan does not appreciate Putin trying to play him.
@JohnSF:
I’m sure he doesn’t, either.
Really?
Because once again you accept that black lives don’t really matter to white people and the only way to get white people’s attention is to make them face the fact that their lives are at risk too? However minimally?
I’m sorry, I can’t go there. My only response is that white people really suck. Donkey dick.
@Jim Brown 32:
Exactly. The phrase miscast the issue as a racial matter, which it only tangentially is.
It’s mostly a training issue. The warrior cop mentality is an infusion of military force-protection-first within the LE training community, prompted in no small part by the numbers of returning vets from our wars. The by-words were “It’s better to be a live cop on trial.” We essentially trained a generation of cops that when frightened, shoot.
Fear-biting cops doesn’t work in a non-police state. The people will not tolerate it and as the Oakland PD learned the hard way in the early 70s, public trust is essential to effective LE.
@OzarkHillbilly:
I don’t necessarily disagree. I do think that we are only talking about white people because in this country, they white people are the powerful ones. You can find similar dynamics play out in other countries but with very different racial identities cast in the various roles.
Human beings suck. Donkey dick.