Oh dear, no Jedb, that is the opposite of what i have said. I think there is a failure of comprehension at play here. Let me try one last time, just for you.
My claim is that biology can directly impact lived experience here in 21st century Australia. Therefore, in order to identify and dismantle structures of racism and patriarchal domination, lived experience, of racism and sexism, is a valid and important resource that can be harnessed for the purposes of deconstructing inequity which may not be otherwise discernible by those with no direct experience of either, for example, white males.
If that makes me in your eyes a racist, and presumably sexist too, then in the words of my teenage daughter…whatever.
Yes, lets return to the original motion. Andrew, i do not think you get to extract these words from context. Out of context, ‘it’s ok to be white,’ is a mundane and trivially superficial statement akin to saying ‘its ok to like the taste of apples,’ or ‘its ok to be 167cm tall.’ You cannot grasp the meaning of the words when they are decontextualised.
Pauline Hansen’s entire political career is built from racism. From ‘being swamped by Asians’ to wearing a burka to parliament. Barely a month ago, Fraser Anning called for a return to white Australia immigration. Add these recent utterances to our two hundred years of attempted genocide of first Australians - this is the context of ‘its ok to be white.’
That would indeed have been a preferable response to the coalition voting in favour of the motion but it woefully misses the point, again! It would have neutralised the statement to a degree but done nothing to address the underlying fact of white privilege. To say it’s ok to perpetuate white privilege, oh and it’s also ok to perpetuate black, brown and yellow privilege, when they don’t exist, is laughable.
Hansen is a racist and bigot and she represents a small portion of Australian society, i expect her to produce stuff like this. The best case scenario would have been for the government to laugh it off and vote against the motion, which they did not!
I’m returning to this point.
For starters, the government did not reject the motion but what I find horrifying here is your implication that identifying and calling out racism only works to recruit racists. What the fuck! Let’s not say anything about white racists because it will upset people and they might join the Nazis? Name one time in the last 120 years when this type of thinking worked out well.
Looking at it again I can see how that interpretation is valid, although I would still argue that talking about “memories” and then immediately saying “I remember” implies otherwise. But consider that comment withdrawn.
Maybe I’m just annoyed that I started out considering that he could actually have grievance from the 1950s, then looked him up and discovered that he grew up in the 1980s, had successful family, and was apparently raised as an activist.
Australia is supposedly a democracy, so in practice the citizens are sovereign regardless of a vestigial royalty that doesn’t actually do anything. The aborigines have just as much say in their own affairs as anyone else here. (Which isn’t anywhere near as much as I would like, of course.) It has nothing to do with identity and everything to do with the structure of how best the Australian people can fairly manage their affairs.
Everything about the aboriginal sovereignty movement that I’ve read or heard about involves trying to create an aboriginal nation or claim that there still exists an aboriginal nation separate from the rest of Australia, complete with territory disputes and the need for treaties. Foley’s statement is no exception.
Never mind that sovereignty is something that can be taken and defended by force, and does not have to be voluntarily given up to be extinguished. Never mind the large overlap of the distribution of people of aboriginal and non-aboriginal ethnicity. Never mind that, as you said, aborigines weren’t even considered human in the first half of last century.
This instance of the Australian government is arguably illegitimate because it isn’t doing what the people want. But as far as I can tell Foley isn’t talking about that. He’s arguing against the entire structure, corporation, organisation of government that exists at present. To throw it all out, pretend that non-aboriginals just got here and start over from there.
On the subject of whether Australia should keep or dissolve the monarchy, I agree with him. Although I don’t think it’s really worth caring about since they don’t really do anything these days.
On the subject of the current government acting against the people, I agree with him.
On the subject of stealing children and deaths in custody, the conversation would quickly get complicated.
It’s the idea of holding aborigines as separate from the rest of Australians for whatever political purpose that I find so objectionable. We are all here, most of us were born and grew up here. What ethnicity and identity we have should not matter in democratically determining how to run Australia and the various parts thereof.
Would you like me to go back and quote you? Because I can do that.
I do agree that there is a failure of comprehension here, however. Probably a very deep failure. Some questions to begin with that may illuminate some things:
What is racism, to you?
What is patriarchy, to you?
What is privilege, to you?
OooK. So, how would you describe your preferred system of government? From that remark, I’m guessing straight up Marxist? Define everything in terms of oppression and power struggle, then proceed from there. Is that about right? (FYI, you wouldn’t be the only one)
So, I didn’t understand many of the big words … or larger concepts, and I love that smarter Pirates are discussing this, respectfully and logically (I guess).
Have at it.
I’ll go back to cleaning septic tanks and cleaning up rotten old shearing sheds …
The government did rejected the bill. It failed by 3 votes. Not a resounding rejection, but it was rejected.
Name one time? How about just all the time?
Calling people out, calling them names, labelling them, telling them that their success is due to corrupt white privilege rather than the life of hard work they put in … this does not get people on side. It places them directly off side.
When we just declare that everyone should have the same opportunities and consistently act on that, then everyone wants to align with that, because it invokes the inate sense of fairness built into all social species.
This has been the basis of most social progress, until recently, when the “social justice” movement has driven an enormous wedge between everyone in the form of identity politics and language policing in the form of political correctness. So now everyone is walking around on egg shells avoiding connection with anybody not like them.
How about we build everyone up, rather than trying to tear down anybody successful. At least that way we have someone to pay all the taxes.
You know the Nazi party was the “National Socialist German Workers’ Party” right?
They were quite into identity. Jews, Aryans etc. They seemed to particularly hate the Jews for being so successful, like some kind of Jewish privilege maybe.
They were also quite totalitarian, demanding rigid compliance to language and thought policing, and just quietly failed to police violent ideological gangs of youths (Antifa much?)
Do you see a common pattern here?
Same shit in the communists countries. Divide everyone. Police attitudes. Turn everyone against each other. Tear everything down, destroy individual initiative or success, killing 10’s of millions in the process, then eventually turn back to capitalism when it all grinds down into squalour.
I’m not a Marxist. I do not know how i’d describe my preferred system of government beyond democratic, controlled capitalism, environmentally active etc… I like the PPAU policy document, that’s why i’m here.
I’m already relaxed. Encountering actual Marxists in politics is quite common, and I’m still happy to have a conversation with them.
More common is people just operating from the same divisive playbook but calling it social justice, even if they don’t recognize it as that.
Thanks, I had quite a bit to do with that.
You may notice that nowhere in there do we declare identity groups or treat arbitrary groups of people like they are victims of oppression. We focus on problems, and evidence backed solutions, typically while considering the whole structure they operate in. It’s not always easy, because these things are complicated.
Oh, ok, sorry. I was referring to ‘government’ as the incumbent party, not the senate as a whole. Ok, yes, in that sense it was rejected.
But what if it is a product of white privilege? What then? Also, you’ve just set up a false binary. You can recognise how you have benefited from certain advantages and privileges, i do, but it doesnt mean i can’t derive satisfaction from hard work. Recognition followed by change, it’s not that traumatic.
This innate sense of fairness you speak of is a curious thing set against 3000 years of recorded history. I don’t really see fairness driving the politics of our species. Fairness, i would suggest, is the exception not the norm. Of course, this type of conjecture is entirely relative and you could definitely mount a case that says liberal democracies over the last few decades are less unfair than every other model we’ve ever tried but obviously, and i assume this is why you are here, there are still major problems with our system…and they seem to be growing.
We can declare that everyone has the same opportunities until the cows hopscotch across the meadow. We can even make laws to that affect. We can write it into constitutions. Hang on…that’s what we’ve done! And yet…we do not have the same opportunities, do we. So…what now?
You have a problem with ‘social justice’? Or a movement’s that demand it?
Andrew, understanding how power diffuses through the social strata and pointing out where it accumulates unfairly does not divide us, it unites us. When a particular identity based group comes together to express and expose an injustice they experience, all those not of that identity can join the cause, and they do. This is why we have marriage equality now. This is why we talk of glass ceilings and how to break them. This is also why we, or some of us, are listening to the experience of first Australians.
You may hate this bogey man called ‘political correctness,’ - it must be terrible having to walk on egg shells but there really is no need, it’s just about growth and understanding, it’s about widening your circle of empathy.
I do not get how listening to the particular experience of a group divides us and makes us, ‘avoid connection with anybody not like us.’ That to me is a very weird thing to say when it seems perfectly apparent that the more we know about a group’s experience the more likely we are to form connections. That’s my experience anyway, i guess it’s not yours, which i find curious.
Well, i agree, but you seem to be suggesting that this is conditional on everyone acting as a disconnected and disembodied individual and when people join together to express their particular experiences based on a biological fact you dismiss it as divisive. There is an irony at work here, there is no thing more divisive than atomising communities.
I was quoting Niemoller’s poem, that begins with, ‘first they came for the socialists…’ I assumed you were aware of the piece. Apologies for the assumption.
You think social justice is a pseudo-Marxian movement? That’s quaint. You haven’t been reading Jordan Peterson by any chance?
On this, what basically @AndrewDowning is trying to say is that societies don’t put minorities randomly in positions of power anymore. They did that before and the results were not at all disastrous, just psychologically mindf***d people seeing minorities taking position and jobs in power without passing the competitions, just by appointment. We’ve seen that in history a lot, a lot of times, and it didn’t create further division, just that 2nd generations were less hateful towards minorities.
But the thing is, those positions in power were held previously by real institutionalized hateful people, conscious discrimination. Nowadays we don’t have too much conscious discrimination anymore in institutions with positions of power, only unconscious discrimination.
The difference between the two is that one of the stances ( the unconscious discrimination ) can be helped to change, and the 2nd generation is automatically changed.
But the whole problem with unconscious discriminating people in position of power is once you force them out, without them even implying anything about differences between majority and minority, a new problem will arise, and it’s a 99% chance it’s going to be conscious.
Forcing something bureaucratically unfair on unconscious discriminating people and promoting someone’s else historic eligibility to be in position of power creates more unfairness. That’s why @AndrewDowning insists that this kind of forced thing to do is both USA-style and Marxist-style.
Other kind of solutions of some of the radicals is calling-out people that are supposed to be the main conscious discriminators, and forcing them out. But that’s kind of a chance-based. In most cases you will find out that the person is not really conscious discriminating, and you end-up in a false-flag situation, while making other pretty conscious about the radicals’ actions, and stirring up some not-really-nice-feeling about them.
A lot of radicals / extremists rely on trying to force out people’s private opinions about minorities. And once the hateful opinions are out, there’s a legitimate position of power to be replaced and refilled with minority members. The funfact to all of this it is a durable effect with legitimate good benefits, especially at the 2nd generation.
This has always been, with my honest words, staggering to see that it actually defies social logic itself. It’s some sort of social hack. Same social hack has been applied in history even after the U.S. Civil War by replacing conscious discriminators in positions of power with black people. It turn out that we have nowadays hopefully more tolerant americans that actually lived in harmony with one another.
But we must be extremely careful at something, though. In the old days discrimination was a thing in western societies. It was extremely conscious. Nowadays people became hugely less conscious discriminating about different color, race, sex and gender of the majoritan ones. They don’t even realize.
If you start forcing your way through in the positions of power with pure radical propaganda and not education or democratic participation, we’re doomed to create monsters like Europe’s new right-wingers / fascists
Personally, I don’t have a solution (yet) other than educating the ones in positions of power into accepting new members from minorities, or sometimes replace one active&conscious discriminator with one minority member, like in Physics with replacing Ice with Heat, they negate each other and create harmony.
Else, try convincing and educating unconscious discriminators ( generally the grand majority of normal people ) in institutions and positions of power to help out, contribute, initiate and knowledge-share to the affected minorities. I think this kind of participation should change discrimination in institutions.
I actually really hope…
Thanks Stefan, yes, i largely agree and i’m not advocating for some kind of forced minority representation as much as simply calling out bigotry when i see it, especially when it is flaunted in parliament or by powerful people. This is the most effective long term strategy in my view and it has been pretty successful over the last few decades.
I work with in a well paid professional role in Sydney. I work together with Chinese, Koreans, Taiwanese, Nigerians, Russians, Indians, Pakistani, Dutch, Scottish, British, Irish, Ukrainian, and even a token American.
Some mixture like this has existed in every company I’ve worked for since the 1980’s, and all the companies I’ve interviewed at or partnered with. One in Perth had almost as many nationalities as people.
The Chinese are demographically well over represented. The Russians wildly so, and that’s fine. They’re smart, diligent, hard working and creative.
Where I live, in an afluent suburb, my immediate neighbours are Romanian, Yugoslavian, Chinese and Korean. We get on just fine. Our kids played together, we collect each other’s mail when we’re away. It’s all fine, and normal.
I don’t recognize this world of “white privilege” that you describe. It looks a lot more like a system built on recognition of hard work and competence, and let’s not forget that ultimately the value created like this is what’s paying for all the nice social programmes that we like.
Good for you Andrew. And yes, rest assured, your multiple references to the fact that you pay taxes for all the nice social programs we have has been noted, multiple times.
I am well aware of this. Perhaps you might check out our current federal cabinet. The ceo’s of the ASX100, their boards. Media owners and so on…people with power.
I am not denying the grassroots change in the direction of equality and the street level successes of multi-multiculturalism. It’s a bottom up movement, it’s just people, and it’s fucking awesome. We have come so far over the last three or four decades it sometimes demands a moment of pause and reflection on social attitudinal progress. And it seems that it’s the social sentiment of people that drives political change, not the other way round, so i’ll keep calling out expressions of racism and bigotry where ever i see them, because, ultimately and in the long run, it works.
I’m talking about an economic system level function. When we build our economy on the basis of promoting hard work, competence and success, our collective value creation is high, and the resulting taxation can be used to lift up the less fortunate. I’m saying, don’t screw with that. It’s the goose that lays the golden eggs.
Well, it’s the same philosophical language of class struggle. Define everything is in terms of power, ignore individual responsibility then pitching identity groups against each other.
“Tear down the patriarchy” is Marxist to the core.
Edit: the number of hammer and sickle symbols at social justice marches is probably a clue also.
Jordan Peterson is great. I love his stuff. He’s not perfect, but he’s connected a lot of philosophical and even theological (wasn’t expecting that) loose ends for me.
I expect you see all manner of biased reporting on him, depending which kind of echo chamber you’re living in.
I’ll just go by what he actually says and does, and acknowledge that the things he is discussing are complex and multidisciplinary.
If you really want to have a Jordan Peterson discussion, I suggest a new thread.
To be entirely honest with you, and as a legitimate troll, I would have shit tons of fun on replacing a right-winger in position of power with a oppressed-minority person. I would have fun almost alldaylong, to the limits of law, on that particular topic
I’m not kidding, but trolls are trolls, and when a right-wing / far-right fanatic is beaten up by the exact ones that he/she considered weak … that’s the perfect troll topic that I would love to continue upon against the oppressor. Let’s say that when the moment comes, I’ll take my popcorn and talk him/her out of the discussion with ‘no borders, no nations’ topic
Of course, that’s totally unconventional; but we’re a bunch of Pirates here that are part of some unconventional troll guard empowering the minorities to resist the oppressors. We truly believe in free speech, and that empowers us to help out the ones that were always oppressed.
This idea came from the very roots of Nassau liberation times when pirates were the bad guys stealing from everyone.
They created something that we (ideological/political) Pirates hold extremely dear: the freedom to empower the (considered) weak, which were the actual minorities, from the fold. And so the black and women were invited, and some individually encouraged, to take part of the leadership of the pirates and raid together. Few notable pirates in this area were The Black Caesar, Mary Read, Anne Bonny
Nowadays ideologically, we separated the romantic part, took the good parts of the story and implemented on our side, like the Icelandic and Czech Pirates. Hope the Piratenpartei Deutschland will get it by the time they vote the europarliament members
I believe that between Pirates we have the same feeling, as always, to empower the one that feels and shows as weak / minority to become much more, while keeping the balance with professionalism and purpose.
Practically, we’re the living proof that we succeeded in this particular ideology, to combine the civic rights with free speech and digital freedom. Heck, that’s why we have Julia out there!
Well, technically, it’s crystal clear that nobody follows ideologies anymore except for a few of us. Corporations and private businesses from the U.S. are now switching to full radical social progressiveness, while clearly maintaining their neoliberal economical agenda. I mean, if you were in their skin and have a extremely bad education of exploiting people, wouldn’t you use the new social progressive revolution in your favor without touching the economical side? Of course you would, because that’s what that sort of education does to you.
They put a lot of money in pushing a very radical agenda of social progressiveness, while in the same time help their business out of tax excerpts due to worker social enhancements, and the usual Copyright/Patent enforcement that of course comes along with Internet censorship and surveillance.
The funny thing in all of this is it’s some kind of social blindspot for all those that push for this radical social progressive agenda: they don’t realize for whom they’re actually fighting, but they truly believe they’re fighting for their rights. It’s very naive to think that the world changes that easy and the world adapts to the progressive equalitarian laws that easy, with the help of corporations.
Other clear fact is that they’re really not economically marxist, as you suggested with hammer & sickle. Even if Karl Marx and Engels pushed for revolution instead of reform, you must understand ( if you read Dialectical Materialism ) that the core of the revolution was both the pushback to the elimination of the free market, and transition to collectivism/communism and the empowering of the social contract.
The extreme and/or radical progressives are clearly pushing for the enforcement of social equality using the capitalistic-generated economical system.
You cannot connect the social aspect and economic aspect when it’s about getting your rights to do business in the free market. Perhaps in the old ages when the clergy held all the economic power, most of the people revolted to have part of that economic power.
These people are not marxist, @AndrewDowning, they’re what I would like to call as Reichists combined with the anarchic urge of forcefully removing the ones in position of power, with clear support from private businesses / companies / corporations.
Even if the ideals are correct ( in promoting equality and no institutionalized discrimination ), their direction and conclusion have been largely, most probably, confiscated; and they can’t object.
Yes, normal christians in the old times didn’t recognize the Church institution as being corrupt. It’s a normal feeling, and also normal feeling for a christian is to not recognize some other sex than male or female, without ever seeing people with both types of genitals. A lot of christians don’t want that kind of diversity in their neighborhood, but neither they want bad things to happen to them, some of them even supporting the surgery to get normal due to the lack of biological knowledge of the situation.
This exists as I previously described as unconscious discrimination. It’s hard for a lot of people to describe ‘white privilege’, but a hell lot of people put conscious discrimination and unconscious discrimination in the same category, and try to force only one agenda on it: force removal
When you usually hear of “white privilege”, you should start asking questions about what kind of white privilege, the conscious discrimination or the unconscious one?
Even if they’re both available as “white privilege”, they should not be dealt with in the same manner. “White privilege” as conscious discrimination can be easily dealt with, as: removing the discriminator / oppressor, and replacement with a oppressed minority ( let’s say, as a effective solution )
But what happens when that “white privilege” manifests as unconscious privilege? Would you call the army to remove the -insert unknown discriminator here- ?
That’s why radicals usually try to root-out the purposely-focused oppressors and/or discriminators while relying on chance and random public attacks, even at persona; in hoping that someone, some day, will prove as a real discriminator.
This is the radicals’ blindspot: There are white communities that do not discriminate and on the contrary, welcome everyone
The radicals will try their best to root-out the evil, but maybe there is no evil there, and the communities were built exactly like that, totally random and out of nowhere, as any other humankind people appeared out of nowhere, just that everyone is white. And they staid like that. Their first contact with a black skin human would be like the first contact with a elf ( I gave this example much earlier in the discussion ).
Now imagine that a total alien comes to your neighborhood, and some radicals will put him in charge of the neighborhood alongside the mayor, in the ideals of removing the possible discrimination. @PLB I really hope it will not come to this, it would be damn freaking awkward, lol.
Jordon Peterson is to philosophy what Donald Trump is to statesmanship. He’s a misogynistic Christian apologist. I’ve read maps of meaning, or as much of it as I can, and i’ve endured many of his lectures. He is a con man.
But at least I now understand the pushback on this thread.
Well at least you’re consistent. When faced with views that doesn’t fit your ideology, just call them names so you don’t have to deal with them. Good job.
I don’t think you do, though probably for similar reasons to you not understanding Prof. Peterson. You just don’t want to. Too many inconvenient facts.
Would you like me to go back and quote you? Because I can do that.
