MacJournal 6.0!!!

Since I bought my Mac in 2008, MacJournal from Mariner Software has been one of my staple apps. I just noticed in my RSS feed of MacUpdate that MacJournal 6.0 has finally been released. This is my first entry with the new version and even though it’s been a long wait for it to come out (I paid my $15 for my upgrade back in late September) it has been well worth the wait! The timeline function alone is fantastic as it allows me to see how active (or not) I’ve been with my journaling and blogging. I can now set word count goals for my writing week. I’m only just beginning to scratch the surface of all of the new features in this release.

If I Were A Middle Class White Guy

Now, I'm not a middle class white guy, I'm a middle class black woman who grew up upper-middle class (and needless to say black) but sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. So since Gene Marks, the Forbes columnist, feels qualified to tell poor black kids what they should do I think it only fair to tell middle class white guys what they should do.  

So if I were a middle class white guy, I would start early, certainly no later than my junior year of high school, reading deeply in American history.  I would go much deeper than the history that I was taught in high school paying particular attention to how American history looks from the point of view of blacks and Native Americans.  I would read some slave narratives and then work my way up through DuBois and Washington.  I would spend a great deal of time reading the speeches of Martin Luther King Jr.  I would watch Glory until I had it memorized and The Color Purple and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman until I had no more tears to shed.   I would ask more questions than I made statements when talking about race so I didn't come off as an entitled jerk who was blind to the realities that others face.

I would take some time studying, in depth, the exploits of the black men who fought in WW II.  I would seek out Invisible Man and Native Son.  I would buy a seat for an entire run of "A Raisin in the Sun".  I would try to familiarize myself with what blacks have said about life in America so that I might have some idea what I was on about.  When I heard a black person talking about racism, I wouldn't dismiss them out of hand or assume that the black person in question was making it up or 'whining'.  I would have a sense of historical perspective, recognizing that 1967 isn't a time what no living human can remember but recent history as these things are measured in most countries. I would recognize that I have a perspective and that while it is the dominant perspective in America, it isn't necessarily the most accurate perspective.  

I would avoid assuming that poor people are poor because of some fault of their own.  If I were a middle class white guy, I would recognize the role that luck and random circumstance played in my own life.  I'm not saying that white people who 'make it' or (if they were born with it) 'keep it' don't deserve what level of comfort they have.  But luck plays a role and I would never forget it.  I would train my brain to think outside of my own context. I would avoid using phrases like 'my black friend' or 'why don't blacks just...'

No sane person thinks that being white is a trip down the primrose path in America.  White people have to get up and go to work just like everyone else.  Whties get laid off, have car accidents, get divorced, have dogs that chew up their remote controls and teenage kids who listen to music their parents don't like or get.  Life happens to white people too, just like it happens to everyone.   But if I were a middle class white guy, I would try to remember the things that don't happen to me because I'm a middle class white guy.  I would, for instance, remember that because I'm white and male, my intellect or competence will be decided after I open my mouth or act instead of having it dismissed before I do either as happens to, for instance, black women.  If I were a straight, middle class white guy, I would recognize that I can marry the person I love and that it was injust that my gay neighbor or lesbian sister can't and that this was an injustice crying out for rectification.  

If I were a middle class white guy, i would stand up and shout everytime I heard another white guy say that blacks just need to 'develop a habit of work'.  I would put as much daylight between myself and the likes of Newt Gingrich as I possible could.  

If i were a middle class white guy the very last thing I would think of myself was that I was in any kind of position to tell poor black kids what it was they should be doing in order for me to think that they 'deserve' success. If I were a middle class white guy, I would do everything in my power from being the kind of middle class white guy who writes articles in Forbes telling blacks what's wrong with them.

 

If I Were A Poor Black Kid - Forbes

I am not a poor black kid.  I am a middle aged white guy who comes from a middle class white background.  So life was easier for me.  But that doesn’t mean that the prospects are impossible for those kids from the inner city.  It doesn’t mean that there are no opportunities for them.   Or that the 1% control the world and the rest of us have to fight over the scraps left behind.  I don’t believe that.  I believe that everyone in this country has a chance to succeed.  Still.  In 2011.  Even a poor black kid in West Philadelphia.

Destroy a company, lose a nomination?

This could be interesting and, quite honestly, I would love to see Mittens have to pay a price for destroying jobs--because despite the rather typical Republican denials that we have to destroy jobs in order to keep them--when you destroy a company in Anywhere, USA and move the jobs to Someplace Else, Indonesia you haven't really created jobs in America!  

Republicans Warn Bain Capital Could Cripple Romney’s Campaign | TPM2012

Mitt Romney’s career at Bain Capital buying up and restructuring companies — sometimes with major job cuts along the way — has been a glaring vulnerability since his earliest political runs. But it’s rarely come up in his two presidential campaigns, where the GOP’s investor-friendly ethos has made rivals hesitant to use it against him. Until now, that is. Newt Gingrich got the toughest shot in on Monday, suggesting that Romney’s time at Bain showed he was heartless and out of touch with the average American. “I would just say that if Gov. Romney would like to give back all of the money he’s earned from bankrupting companies and laying off employees over his years at Bain, that I would be glad to listen to him,” Gingrich told reporters. Jon Huntsman’s been hinting at Romney’s investment capital years as well, albeit more subtly, making extensive use of a now infamous photo of Bain-era Romney awash in dollar bills in his new website 10kbet.com and an accompanying web video (This is the same Huntsman whose father is a billionaire). Why is the issue coming up all of a sudden? Despite the Tea Party’s anti-bailout streak, it isn’t because Republicans have suddenly decided they hate investors — Gingrich, for example, got pilloried in the conservative press as anti-capitalist over his “layoffs” line and conspicuously rededicated himself to a “positive” campaign the very next day. The real subtext is electability. President Obama has made it absolutely clear that this race is going to about the 99% vs. the 1% on taxes, entitlements, and regulation. Sure we think Bain Capital is a paragon of free market values, Romney’s Republican critics argue, but what about those swing voters who are all too easily swayed the first time they see an ad featuring workers Romney laid off?

Whites and Blacks have a different view of race in America? Say it ain't so!

This article definitely falls into the ‘this should come as no big surprise’ category. Saw this over at ‘The Nation’ and, of course, my first thought was ‘and in other news ice has been determined to be cold’. No one should be the least bit surprised that whites think that more racial progress has been made than blacks, on average. As the author, Jamelle Bouie rightly notes, given that a white person could go through their entire life and have no real substantial contact with blacks depending upon their location, it would be rather astonishing if whites and blacks did not, on average, hold wildly different views.
One of my favorite demographic tidbits is the fact that there are roughly six white Americans for every person labeled as “black” in the census. Which means, given the extent to which African-Americans are concentrated in a few geographic regions, that there are large numbers of white people who have minimal to nonexistent contact with black people.
With that in mind, it’s not too surprising to discover the extent to which white Americans have a far more optimistic view of race relations than their black (and even Latino) fellow citizens. According to the latest survey by the Greenlining Institute—“a national…institute working for racial and economic justice”—just 16 percent of whites believe that there is a lot of discrimination in America today, compared to 59 percent of African-Americans and 22 percent of Latinos.
Overall, the institute found, whites have an incredibly skewed view of racial progress in this country. Despite the fact that African-Americans and Latinos earn significantly less money and have less wealth than their white counterparts, only 37 percent of whites believe that blacks make less money than whites, and a small majority believe that blacks’ and whites’ incomes are about the same. Likewise, a majority of white Americans believe that blacks’ health is “about the same” as their own, despite all evidence to the contrary.
The one problem I have with Mr. Bouie’s post, and it is a very small quibble, is this:
In addition to the relative lack of contact between whites and blacks, it’s simply true that elite blacks have achieved an unprecedented level of influence in American life (see: President Obama). Absent contact with everyday black communities, it’s easy to think that African-Americans are doing as well as everyone else.
As a middle-class black person, I do have some problem with the construction of blacks in America either being ‘everyday’ (read poor) or elite (read rich). Are not blacks who have middle class careers and lifestyles also ‘everyday blacks’? Aren’t all of those black college professors, ministers, lawyers, doctors and various cubicle drones also ‘everyday’ and are we not part of ‘everyday black communities’? I understand why black identity has been equated, for the last four decades at least, with poor, urban blacks but I remain unconvinced that this should be the touchstone of black identity. All of that said, Bouie does go on to say that our perception of race in America is not necessarily correct but perhaps more accurate.
It would be interesting to know why so few Latinos (only 22%, less than 10% more than whites) think that there is a lot of active discrimination in modern America. It makes me ponder whether somewhere between the overly optimistic view of whites and the potentially overly pessimistic view of blacks there is an accurate picture of race relations held by Latinos. That view would be ‘yes, there is still racial discrimination but, on the whole, it is not your grandparent’s discrimination

Narrowing down the Higgs boson

Well done Mittens!  Realistically, though, it's just a coincidence.  That doesn't mean he shouldnt' get a ribbing for it though!  :)

Mitt Romney's Slogan Used By Ku Klux Klan, Anti-Immigrant 'Know Nothing' Party

It's the type of coincidence every politician dreads. On Tuesday, political commenters reported that one of Romney's go-to campaign catch-phrases, "Keep America American," was a central theme of Ku Klux Klan publications in the 1920s, and served as a rallying cry for the white supremacist group's campaign of violence and intimidation against black Americans, as well as Catholics, gay people and Jews. The progressive Americablog first posted examples of the overlap, and a spokeswoman for Mitt Romney declined to comment on the matter when reached by HuffPost. The Republican primary debates have ignited issues of immigration and poverty in this country, both of which disproportionally affect minorities. But Romney, a multi-millionaire, has steered away from some of the more drastic positions his rival candidates have taken on these issues.

Trying a more disciplined approach to blogging

So for the half-dozen of you who follow my blog, you might have noticed that I've been a very busy girl today.  That's because I'm trying to take the blog in a slightly different direction although I'm not certain what that direction is quite yet.  One thing I'm trying to do, however, is blog more often. I've got great tools but get lazy about doing the writing. I'm hoping that this will actually keep me writing which I hope will make me more productive as a writer.

Narrowing down the Higgs boson

CERN has announced that they have 'intriguing hints' that the Higgs boson exists.  

Higgs Boson Search: CERN Releases New Data Said To Narrow Hunt For 'God Particle'

Scientists hunting for an elusive subatomic particle say they've found "intriguing hints" – but not definitive proof – that it exists, narrowing down the search for what is believed to be a basic component of the universe. The researchers added that they hope to reach a conclusion on whether the particle exists by next year. The latest data show that the mass of the Higgs boson – popularly referred to as the "God particle" – probably falls in the lower end of the spectrum of mass that can be produced by smashing protons together in the huge Large Hadron Collider, researchers from two independent teams said Tuesday. The two teams said their data indicates the particle itself may have a mass of between roughly 114 and 130 billion electron volts. One billion electron volts is roughly the mass of a proton. The most likely mass of the Higgs boson is around 124 to 126 billion electron volts, the teams said. Until Tuesday, the most likely mass was seen as between 114 and 141 billion electron volts. There is still a small possibility that the Higgs could be much more massive and found above 476 billion electron volts, physicists said. The revelations Tuesday were heavily anticipated by thousands of researchers who hope that the particle, if it exists, can help explain why there is mass in the universe. British physicist Peter Higgs and others theorized the particle's existence more than 40 years ago to explain why fundamental particles – building blocks of the universe – have mass.

Things getting worse before they get better

Andrew Sullivan over at Daily Dish has this to say about the problems of the GOP.  Like him, my fondest hope for 2012 is that the Republicans lose so badly that they have no choice but to reform themselves.  I think that it would be the best thing for both the Republican party and the United States.  

But in many ways, this is all a simple result of the intellectual and ideological collapse of the Republican party. All they have, it seems, are some visceral reactions to social change - Latino immigrants, gay spouses, tolerant Millennials - and an argument that remains unchanged for thirty years, regardless of a hugely changed world. So we have a Cold War mentality without the Soviet Union - and a crazy endorsement of pre-emptive war and torture as core elements of American exceptionalism! We have a myth of massive new regulations by the Obama administration. We have more tax cuts, as if Reagan's supply side policies have been vindicated in the long term. And we have more tax cuts, while revenue is at 50 year lows. Or we have truly utopian ideas like abolishing the Fed, bringing back child labor, and fracking our way out of climate change. The whole caboose is a sign of a party that has long since unmoored itself from the country it exists in. If one of the GOP's problems is that it has lost the last two generations, nominating a 68 year-old curmudgeon who told OWS to get a job and take a bath is not likely to help. Newt's still a boomer, with all that boomer baggage. But here's what he'd do. He'd clarify dramatically the options in front of us. In refusing any tax hikes on the wealthy, and pledging to end Medicare as we have known it, and proposing a pre-emptive war on Iran as Israel's proxy, he'd help put the real GOP agenda on the table. To have that destroyed by Obama, and to have him handily re-elected would reform that party in a way nothing else would. I always said it would get worse before it gets better. The hope now is that it will get much, much worse, and thereafter much, much better. But it's just a hope, not a prediction. Only a fool would predict anything at this point.

How long will we continue in the same pit?

Ian Flether has a fairly devastating critique of the American Left and our utter fecklessness on economic issues. Full article here but the part I wanted to highlight is below in yellow.
This points to the second problem with the contemporary American left: it has exchanged equality as its primary goal for diversity. Now one can argue this either way, and I don't do culture-war issues, but the hard fact is that one can't prefer diversity to equality and expect equality to be the outcome. They are simply not the same thing. One can claim to be in favor of both, but strategic choices have to be made, and either one or the other must come out on top.
The real problem with diversity, from a leftist point of view, is not that it's a bad thing per se. The real problem is that diversity intrinsically tends to reduce human solidarity. Solidarity is the emotion people feel towards others that makes them care about the fate of people who would otherwise be strangers. It is thus an essential basis of any political tendency that would impose policies designed to reduce economic inequality. (It's no accident this is a word unions talk about all the time.)
Without solidarity, people don't hate each other. They just don't care. Not really, whatever they may say. Solidarity comes from having something in common with other people, and the less people have in common with each other, the more American society devolves to a model of pure individual self-interest. Which may be a leftist model in cultural or social questions, but it's a rightist model in economics.
I live in San Francisco, where there are an extraordinary number of people about who consider themselves liberal on economic issues. And so they are, when they write checks to liberal causes or participate in local political clubs and other organizations. But the other 29 days of the month or 5 days of the week, they go back to work downtown for the same corporate economy they claim to oppose on their days off. And they work hard to become rich, i.e. to acquire a nice juicy piece of inequality for themselves.
One can't blame a person for having a day job or for working for a living, but one also can't help wondering why they expect a certain economic outcome when they spend five days pushing one direction and only one pushing the other.
How long will the American Left continue to engage in identity politics at the cost of being effective? It seems at least a few more years.

NYPD on Facebook: West Indian Day Parade Flap Is Overblown

John McWhorter has some interesting observations about race here
This week the big news on the Racism Watch is the New York City cops who have been discussing on Facebook black attendees of Brooklyn's West Indian American Day Parade in classically unsavory terms: "Animals." "Savages." "Drop a bomb and wipe them all out." And it would hardly be hasty to assume that terms even meaner than those were bandied about; we are only being told about snippets of a thread since erased from the site.
Typically, news like this is classified as evidence that racism in America is still "out there," and in ways more significant than what is acknowledged by those who claim it is on the wane. People like, yes, me.

What Republicans used to be

We grudge no man a fortune in civil life if it is honorably obtained and well used. It is not even enough that it should have been gained without doing damage to the community. We should permit it to be gained only so long as the gaining represents benefit to the community. This, I know, implies a policy of a far more active governmental interference with social and economic conditions in this country than we have yet had, but I think we have got to face the fact that such an increase in governmental control is now necessary.
No man should receive a dollar unless that dollar has been fairly earned. Every dollar received should represent a dollar’s worth of service rendered — not gambling in stocks, but service rendered. The really big fortune, the swollen fortune, by the mere fact of its size, acquires qualities which differentiate it in kind as well as in degree from what is possessed by men of relatively small means. Therefore, I believe in a graduated income tax on big fortunes, and in another tax which is far more easily collected and far more effective — a graduated inheritance tax on big fortunes, properly safeguarded against evasion, and increasing rapidly in amount with the size of the estate. (Teddy Roosevelt)

Please get off my side!

Yet more hysterical nonsense from people who think that holding blacks accountable for our actions is racist.

All these comments about the ethnicity makes me sick to my stomach... Stealing candy REALLY?? We persecute! What about stealing Countries and... people from their countries, what about stealing cultures and lives of innocent people, what about stealing freedom from those who fight so hard to keep it... Who are the masters of this theft craft?? Lets not point fingers -look at the cause of Africans in America and how they got here! Before we blame Ethnicity. Give them education don't outlaw it from them I blame signs like (White's Only!) Take a look at what Africans have contributed and judge them as American children- this is the repercussion of a failing system! If we do not fix this... This 7 eleven will be your home in a short time and that gun in your house will need more bullets... Lets give them something to live for because right now they will Die for your Iphone!

Police in Maryland investigating a mass shoplifting have released stunning footage of an estimated 50 teenagers ransacking a Silver Spring 7-Eleven location.

Officers who responded to the call around 11:20 p.m on Saturday said that young people congregated in surrounding parking lots quickly scattered upon seeing the police vehicles, NBC Washington reports.

The alleged shoplifters took items such as beverages and snacks, according to WXYZ.

Police said that they stopped six people -- each between the ages of 16 and 18 -- and found that all had food or drinks, but no receipts.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/22/silver-spring-flash-mob-video_n_1107452.html

Social responsibility and personal responsibility

Andrew Sullivan over at Daily Dish posted a three-way discussion on personal responsibility and social responsibility and the degree to which liberals put emphasis on either. This is a discussion that the Left desperately needs to pay attention to and do some serious soul searching.
Will Wilkinson recently pointed out that liberals tend to emphasize luck's role in success while conservatives focus on the role of hard work. Kevin Drum and Matt Yglesias countered that liberals do support an ethos of hard work and personal responsibility. Tyler Cowen moderates the debate:
I would not quite say that progressives are "against such an ethos," but where does it stand in their pecking order?  Look at fiction, such as famous left-wing or progressive novels, or for that matter famous left-wing and progressive movies.  How many of them celebrate "an ethos of initiative, hard work, and individual responsibility"?  Is there one?  Maybe as part of a broader struggle against a corrupt system or against "The Man," but that tripartite of values is not celebrated in its own right. 

Can this be done?

Niall Ferguson has a very thought provoking article at Daily Beast, calling for a ‘reboot’ of America.

He makes this argument:

The West first surged ahead of the Rest after about 1500 thanks to a series of institutional innovations that I call the “killer applications”:
1. Competition. Europe was politically fragmented into multiple monarchies and republics, which were in turn internally divided into competing corporate entities, among them the ancestors of modern business corporations.
2. The Scientific Revolution. All the major 17th-century breakthroughs in mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, and biology happened in Western Europe.
3. The Rule of Law and Representative Government. An optimal system of social and political order emerged in the English-speaking world, based on private-property rights and the representation of property owners in elected legislatures.
4. Modern Medicine. Nearly all the major 19th- and 20th-century breakthroughs in health care were made by Western Europeans and North Americans.
5. The Consumer Society. The Industrial Revolution took place where there was both a supply of productivity-enhancing technologies and a demand for more, better, and cheaper goods, beginning with cotton garments.

        6.        The Work Ethic. Westerners were the first people in the world to combine more extensive and intensive labor with higher savings rates, permitting sustained capital accumulation.

There really is no way of arguing with very large parts of it. We might argue that it isn’t necessarily causative or we might argue that it puts insufficient emphasis on softer, more communitarian values, but we cannot argue that Europe in the 8th century was an insignificant backwater and by 1800 was fairly established as the most powerful civilization the world had yet seen. Two hundred years later, one of Europe’s progeny became the most powerful nation-state the world has yet seen. We might wish it were otherwise. We might be wholly unimpressed but we cannot deny that these are the facts. Nor can we deny that, as Ferguson lays out above, the major breakthroughs in all of the sciences in the 17th century that really started to accelerate the modern world into existence happened in the West. We might wish that history had played out otherwise but we cannot deny that history played out as it did.

I bring this up because I find it rather sad that on the Left no one is talking about this. In fact, on the Left no one even wants to look at this stuff. The comfortable tale that the West is in its current position because of a unique rapaciousness and evil on its part is much more to the liking of altogether too many people whom I have walked with proud solidarity all these years. Mr. Ferguson does miss some things. When even someone as conservative as David Frum or a good old fashioned Tory like Andrew Sullivan see the massive income disparity as something the United States might want to address you know things have gotten serious.

There’s something I think a lot of my American friends on the Left fail to grasp--this kinder, gentler, let’s slow down, let’s not compete, make everyone feel good by being not by doing isn’t actually what’s being taught in other parts of the world. It’s not. Kids in Japan, China and South Korea are learning something quite the opposite. They are being infected by the very same memes that made the West so powerful in such a short time.

The irony of this is that the nation that the Left says it wants, by its rhetoric, requires the six items above. I would add one more, reason. If anything should keep people up at night, worrying about the United States it is this fact: both the Right and the Left in this country are driven by ideological assumptions that are fundamentally at odds with the way the world works or is most consonant with social harmony and human happiness and both sides denigrate reason. Reason is that faculty that leads people to understandings such as: if I want you to not push me in the mud, I cannot reserve for myself the right to push you in the mud. Can religious teachings get you there? Yes, of course, the Golden Rule however, religious teachings can just as easily put you on the other side while there is no conclusion reason could lead you to that would prompt you to say, “Please refrain from pushing me in the mud, in the meantime I reserve the right to push you in the mud with impunity. I expect you to abide by this agreement.” Doesn’t that just sound absolutely ludicrous? Yet it is reason and only reason that boxes you in so you have nowhere else to go? Had a bad day? So what, maybe the other person did too. Beaten as a child? So what, this isn’t then and at any rate, shouldn’t you who knew violence when you were at the mercy of others now want to minimize the violence in the world? See how that works?

Yet, this tool which was hard won and is just lying around for anyone to pick up and use is reviled on the Left. Reviled. People will, when challenged, typically launch off into some obligatory and half-hearted hand-waving in the general direction of ‘well, of course, I think reason is important but I don’t want to be a robot’. Then they will start talking about their crystals and their Reiki master or Planet X. When confronted with the idea that the only fair position to take with all non-evidentiary claims is “equally false” and that there is no privileged place for any parochial religious beliefs they seem to not understand what the issue is or what is at stake. It is as if they think that their belief that there are these things called ‘vibrations of energy’ which effect them in various, non-specific ways sometimes bringing them boons and sometimes bringing them woe in accordance with the Law of Attraction. This ‘Law’ is that whatever you mentally give energy to, even in the sense of ‘I don’t want this to happen’ is what will happen to you. It is claimed that this law is backed up by a very idiosyncratic reading of quantum mechanics and string theory. But that is just to give it a scientific patina. It is pure magical thinking, all the way down.

If it were the case that these same people who hold to beliefs that are patently ridiculous could be consistent then that would at least be something. Instead, when confronted with beliefs that they dislike--say certain strains of evangelical Christianity--they are quick to say that those beliefs are ‘stupid’ or nonsensical and then will turn around and justify that position with a statement is just as over-the-top as the Rapture.

This is what I was afraid would happen to OWS

A common class background made it a little easier for working class youth – employed and unemployed, housed and homeless – to come together across the color line. This unity is complicated by the dominance of petty bourgeois folks in these occupations. The petty bourgeoisie are small shop owners, as well as professionals who serve in a managerial capacity, such as cops, judges, bosses, transit security, etc. Many of them are losing their jobs, houses, and businesses, and are being thrown into the ranks of the working class, so they are joining this movement. They are part of the 99%, but they have had very different experiences than the groups we have discussed so far, and this shapes their political outlook. Many higher paid workers are not petty bourgeois, but they still share petty bourgeois outlooks and ideas, especially the illusion that they are part of the “middle class”.

I had hoped this time it would be different. This time we’d keep our focus, be smart and not alienate people who it would be profitable to have on the side of the angels. Then I saw this and I knew, just knew, that OWS is doomed. I hope that before it tears itself a part in an orgy of “more-left-than-thou” accusation and counter accusation, somethings get done. I hope that before it alienates educated professionals that income inequality, joblessness and the fact that corporations are not people in any sense gets pushed to the front of the national consciousness enough that it won’t be at all easy to pretend, in six months, that it never happened and for the Beltway media to revert to “What joblessness? The deficit will kill us all!” But I knew that inevitably it would come to this, the inevitable ‘we must smash capitalism’ talk.

Later, in a demonstration that they only love certain *kinds* of working class people--those who aren’t, for instance cops or soldiers--there’s this bit:

They lecture working class youth when we chant “fuck the police” or “cops, pigs, murderers”. They don’t understand that we face police brutality all the time, and we’ve been struggling against it for a long time. Unlike us, these folks (used to) own property , and are used to the police protecting it. They have not yet learned that being part of the working class means owning nothing of significance, it means being dispossessed, and that means getting pushed around by the police who function as enforcers of the rule of the 1%. The police exist to make sure we don’t steal the luxury cars of the wealthy- or occupy the factories that make those cars.

We lecture you because cops ARE working-class people! We lecture you because the cop who deters you from stealing the luxury car is *also* the cop who deters some rapist from breaking into your house at night and violating you or someone you love.

We need to reach out to everyday people in our communities, those of us who are people of color, who are unemployed, who are mothers working more than 1 job to care for our children, who are workers and students. We do not need self-appointed leaders, more interested in their bureaucratic positions, and politicking, than in our collective liberation from white supremacy, police brutality, patriarchy and capitalism.

Best of luck with that.

It is difficult to speculate about where this movement is headed.

Actually, no, it’s not at all difficult to speculate about it. To the degree that OWS listens to this kind of campus radical bullshit the movement is doomed. Capitalism is not going to be overthrown and a whole lot of people aren’t going to trust anyone who is talking about overthrowing capitalism. Some of us--the writers of this piece are not among them--know some history and know how the movie that starts with people shouting about the glorious day when all will own everything in common turns out. It turns bloody and brutal and resembles nothing like a free society. It does not become more equal and just. Rather it becomes more unjust. It didn’t work in Russia. It didn’t work in China, or Cambodia, or Vietnam or North Korea or anywhere else.. It always went wrong, it always turned oppressive. We know this movie.

Earlier in the piece the authors say:

When we work, we produce goods and services to sell for profit, not to meet each others’ needs and desires.

Yes, in fact that’s precisely what we do. I do not go to work because I love my CEO. I do not work hard because I love the people who own the company. I go to work because when I do, I get paid and I can then take that money and buy the things I need and pay others who then go and buy the things they need and so on. There is nothing inherently wrong with that system. It should be a regulated system, but there is nothing inherently wrong with it. They are not going to do away with capitalism and they aren’t going to get all that many people to WANT to do away with it. The authors seem to forget that OWS started out as a protest about jobs. People who want to be able to work aren’t trying to ‘smash the system’ but to reform it so that they can be part of it.

To the degree that OWS buys into this campus-socialist crap it dooms itself to irrelevance. It breaks my heart, though, I so wanted it to be different this time. I wanted my side, the side that is for the people and not for the rich and the powerful, to be smart. Alas, it isn’t so.

The whole sorry thing is posted at People of Color Organize!

Herman Cain thinks we're that embarrassing uncle at the BBQ

Some people go through a struggle and make it out on the other side and think, "Man, that was hard. It shouldn't be so hard for people. I made it, but think of all those who didn't. We need to change our system so that it isn't holding people back, but instead making things fairer for everyone."
Then there are those who experience something similar and think, "I succeeded because I was special. You're not special. You don't deserve what I have because you weren't willing to do what I did to get it. You're weak and you make excuses. I did it, so why can't you?"
The above is from the very excellent blog, The Black Snob in a post riffing on the always brilliant Leonard Pitts column on Herman Cain. Both authors make excellent points about the psychological bag of rocks all black people carry around with us. We all have it and we should probably admit this. If you are a black person who is at all successful, who did well in school, you’ve probably had some period of life where it started to get you down.

For me, it started in junior high school. I started hearing ‘why you trying to be white’ and it was coming from other black students. I was psychologically prepared (or so I thought) for that kind of sentiment coming from white students and even white teachers. I was not at all prepared for that sentiment to come from my own people! Some of that was probably being sheltered in amongst a horde of black academics and white-collar professionals in the Sacramento area in the 1970s. Our AME church was not someplace anyone was going to say that those of us who were doing well in school were trying to be white. The adults had all struggled too much to say it and any youth who thought to speak that way to another young person was not going to have a pleasant go of it should their words fall into the ears of an adult. The extended family in California were all middle-class or upper-middle class so the expectations on us were the same. The extended family in Alabama and Louisiana didn’t necessarily get my sister and I and they probably resented us because our parents provided us with a level of material comfort my aunts and uncles (particularly on my father’s side) didn’t. But again, no one would have dreamed of discouraging academic excellence. The young black families who rented from my parents wouldn’t have dared to say anything about trying to be white. My sister and I were cheered on as the vanguard of what was going to be a glorious generation that, when we were adults, would march forth and really show America a thing or two!

So when I ran into this sentiment as a seventh-grade student I didn’t know what to make of it. It was a kind of psychological perfect storm because along with the racing hormones and gangly body that makes the early teens just a cavalcade of fun, the attack of ‘you trying to be white’ hit me in the precise spot I had absolutely no psychological defense for. High school was no more fun than junior high in that respect. It may be hard out there for a pimp but that is a day at the spa compared to the life of a black geek in high school in the 1980s. Dante himself wouldn’t have put such exquisitely sadistic characters in his Divine Comedy. I got angry. I mean really, really angry. For reasons I did not understand at the time, I blamed my black skin. The logic being that if I had not been born black, I might have been a nerd but no one would claim that I was not really white. To this day, three decades on and counting, the term Oreo is like nails on a chalkboard for me. So through my high school years, I tried hard not to be black. I didn’t want to but by the time I was in the Army I realized that wasn’t changing so I had damn well better make peace with it.

Sometime around the early 1990s, after I had come out (which, honestly, was made much easier by being estranged from the black church and the mainstream black community) I had the psychological epiphany that is highlighted above from The Black Snob. I realized that I was lucky, privileged, gifted and special and that with all of that I still had to work harder. I thought of my own circumstances, the ways in which I had to do more just to get the same recognition and I thought of my parents and how much more they had to do and my thought was not “I’m special, you’re not” but “I had so many things going in my favor and this is how hard I have to work. How much harder would it be for someone who didn’t have the advantages I did. Life is hard, anything with a decent payoff is going to require a lot of us, but it shouldn’t be that hard on people. Certainly not for something so completely arbitrary as skin color”. At that point a psychological weight lifted off my shoulders and kept me from becoming the kind of black person personified by Herman Cain and, even more poignantly, Clarence Thomas.

I am not calling either of these men Uncle Toms. I won’t throw that accusation around, certainly not cavalierly. I am saying that both of them seem to be, well, embarrassed by most of the rest of us. It seems as if they believe that if it weren’t for all of us blacks who aren’t conservative Republicans their lives would be substantially better. We are the relatives who are an embarrassment. It’s like there’s them and all the rest of us are that uncle who shows up at the BBQ that everyone knows is going to get sloppy drunk, say something really inappropriate and embarrass your parents.

For Mr. Cain to claim, as he has a couple of times now, that racism just doesn’t hold anyone back any more is not right. It’s not even wrong. I’m not saying that in any given situation where a black person does not get the job, the promotion or the grade they believe they deserve that race is a factor. It may be but it is not always a factor. This isn’t 1957 or, for that matter, 1967. I’m not saying that too many of us are too quick to jump at the racism explanation for our disappointments when, chances are, we’re the cause of our own problem or, for that matter, simple bad luck or timing. When I was laid off from a start-up in 2000 it wasn’t because I was black, it was because the dot com bust was upon us and my timing was, in a word, crappy. It would have been wrong (and demeaning) for me to claim that I was singled out for layoff because I was black when my boss and I were the ones to turn out the lights for the last time. Somewhere in between Mr Cain’s fanciful notions that racism simply doesn’t intrude in people’s lives and the knee-jerk excuse making is the real world. It would be nice if Mr. Cain and Justice Thomas were to join us there but, alas, there is no sign of that happening soon.

It could be worse

Got a nail in one of my tires on the sidewall. Which means I have to replace the tire. Which means I have to replace all *four* tires. Because I have an all-wheel drive vehicle and the way the AWD transmission works either I can replace all four at once or I can eventually have to replace the center-differential on the transmission. Probably going to run about $700 for the set.

Now THIS is the life

It’s a bit past four, I’m streaming Duke Ellington to my iPhone and listening using Bluetooth headphones so if the phone rings I can just answer and immediately put on my tech-goddess hat. I feel like the weight of a certain amount of pretending to believe certain things for the sake of having the community I live in has passed from me because I realized, earlier this week, I couldn’t stop pretending that things that are nonsensical really made sense provided you just didn’t think about it too much or didn’t try to apply it to the real world. If you simply put that stuff to the side, the ideas were as solid as possible.

I also realize that I have been squandering my mental energy and writing talent on message boards for far too long. The ideas that I’ve been trying to communicate over on ButchFemmePlanet are altogether too complicated for a message board format and there is a kind of persistent reflexive pseudo-egalitarianism that I think is, ultimately, toxic to really good, meaty intellectual discussion. Plus it’s all on a message board so it’s never going to be seen by a publisher or editor or blog aggregator or, for that matter, anyone else who might be able to help me move toward publication.

So the energy that doesn’t go into writing my book is going to go here.

There are two projects that I have been going back and forth with (my writing habits appear to mirror my reading habits) committing to neither. One is a sci-fi spy novel set in the Pacific Republic, a Asia-bloc nation that spun off when the United States breaks up. The lead character, Grace Nakamura, is a spy-master who specializes in defections.

The other, the scarier book, is non-fiction. What I am after is nothing less than to show, from the point of view of one of the people who is supposed to benefit from the postmodernist/deconstructionist ideas that have seeped out of the left-leaning academy and made it into the mainstream of left-leaning (but not necessarily liberal) thought. There are a whole lot of ideas and theories that have been bandied about, most of which do not appear to have been checked to see if reality was at all in agreement. The goals of postcolonial thought are the right ones, from my estimations. The methods, on the other hand, I know won’t help.

The Left in America needs a reset, which is the working title of the book. I intend to call it Reset. Sometime last night or perhaps this morning I had an epiphany. If I took all the little scraps of writing I did when posting on those message boards, sometimes casting--forgive me for saying it--pearls before swine, and redirected it into my actual writing I could get this book to a place that I’d feel comfortable trying to find a publisher. So that is my goal. I’m either going to write a spy novel (which I’ve always wanted to do) or I’m going to write a non-fiction book (which I’ve also always wanted to do).

I’m about to go mix myself a cocktail, in 37 minutes I can log off the phones and then take a nice hot bubble bath to just let it all go and then spend a weekend with my wonderful and beautiful wife. Damn I’m a lucky woman.

Good bye, good luck and I tried to warn you

We used to be on the same side. I used to sit next to you and thought we were all rowing in the same direction. I have to leave you now because I cannot ally myself with the Left any longer. For twenty years I tried to ignore the evidence of my own eyes and ears. I tried to tell myself that the things I read that seemed nonsensical did make sense but I didn't understand them. I was wrong.

I thought that the Left, more than the right, wanted to build a society where people would not be judged, as much as is humanly possible to do so, on the basis of their skin color. I thought that the Left wanted a society where a black woman and a white man were seen as having the same legal and political rights. I thought that the Left wanted a society where anyone who worked hard and play by ’The Rules’ would not be left behind unless things had gone wrong for everyone. I thought that the Left conceived of the problem as being a matter that a qualified woman could only rise so high in corporate America. Instead I found that they thought the problem was that people had jobs in corporate America at all.

The straw that broke the camel’s back came today when someone on a message board where we were discussing race posted the following from Russell Means:

At this point, perhaps I should be very clear about another matter, one which should already be clear as a result of what I've said. But confusion breeds easily these days, so I want to hammer home this point. When I use the term European, I'm not referring to a skin color or a particular genetic structure. What I'm referring to is a mind-set, a worldview that is a product of the development of European culture. People are not genetically encoded to hold this outlook; they are acculturated to hold it. The same is true for American Indians or for the members of any culture. 

It is possible for an American Indian to share European values, a European worldview. We have a term for these people; we call them "apples"--red on the outside (genetics) and white on the inside (their values). Other groups have similar terms: Blacks have their "oreos"; Hispanos have "Coconuts" and so on. And, as I said before, there are exceptions to the white norm: people who are white on the outside, but not white inside. I'm not sure what term should be applied to them other than "human beings."

This idea that the people who disagree with you, particularly if they share your skin color, are fair game for slurs like apple, Oreo or coconut was a bridge too far for me. Perhaps that is because I well remember the stings of being called that because I did well in school and read for pleasure The same argument was made ‘you’re black on the outside, but you think like a white person’. If we took those words and put them in the mouths of a white man, there isn’t a person anywhere on the North American continent who calls themselves Left, Socialist, Liberal, Progressive, or anti-globalist who would not, in heartbeat, condemn the speakers. But since the speaker was not a white man but an American Indian, no statement he could make would invite condemnation.

I can no longer call myself a woman of the Left because to do so puts me in bed with people who, while claiming to be against racism, cannot bring themselves to call it bad or wrong. This raises the question of whether or not we should care about racism if we aren’t ready to put a judgement on it and call it wrong. If it’s not bad, if it has no more moral or ethical weight than whether one likes science fiction or mystery novels then there’s no point in expending energy about it. Who cares? Racism should only concern us if it is bad behavior but on the Left we have decided that there are very few actual bad behaviors.

Being a conservative is bad behavior and being a Republican is just this side of homicide to the Left. But racism? No. Not bad. Something that white people do and should feel guilty about, yes but not bad. Capitalism? Yes, that’s bad. We don’t much like that on the Left.

This is disingenuous. Either racism is actually bad--in which case we should be prepared to stand up and say that it is unacceptable behavior or it isn’t. If it really is bad but we’re not going to say that it is so that people will ‘feel heard’ or ‘feel listened to’ when they make racist statements we are lying. We are pretending that our motives are noble and in this case we will do rather ethically dubious things in service of our agenda. There is very little concern about that behavior.

The list could go on and on. The Left likes to mock right-wing populists for their creationism and for their denial of climate-change but they are no more pro-science than those they oppose. The following, again from Russell Means:

"This is what has come to be termed "efficiency" in the European mind. Whatever is mechanical is perfect; whatever seems to work at the moment--that is, proves the mechanical model to be the right one--is considered correct, even when it is clearly untrue. This is why "truth" changes so fast in the European mind; the answers which result from such a process are only stopgaps, only temporary, and must be continuously discarded in favor of new stopgaps which support the mechanical models and keep them (the models) alive. "

This was plucked out and posted to the thread by someone who claims to ‘love science’ but that is because he has mixed up actual science for New Age interpretations of quantum physics. Those interpretations have as much to do with actual science as Neo-Nazi historical revisionism has to do with actual historical study of Germany during the Nazi period. The language is the same but the methods could not be further from one another.

I used to see these right-wing populists on the message boards, screaming at people because they felt liberals were hypocrites. I still think they are out to lunch but I have a bit more sympathy for them. I don’t think they’re out to lunch because liberals aren’t hypocrites, I think they’re out to lunch because they’re solution was to buy into ideas that are no more grounded in reality than the Leftist idea that quantum mechanics means that we can wish ourselves rich or other such New Age nonsense.

The Left is going to go into 2012 with a profoundly confused mindset. They are not going to know what hit them. No small number of people on the Left will, ultimately, vote for a Green candidate or not vote and encourage others not to vote as a way of “teaching Obama a lesson”. Obama is going to lose next year and they will wake up January 2013 and will then try to ignore the fact that President Perry is being inaugurated. There will be a lot of gnashing of teeth and wailing. Then they will paint their signs and fire up the chants of “Hey hey! Ho ho! Capitalism has got to go!” If they have other designs for 2012, I wish them luck.

So, I’ve said good-bye and I’ve wished good luck. Now, the part where I say I tried to warn the people who I was formerly allied with.

I am a reasonably intelligent woman with an ability to turn a phrase from time to time. I have a very analytical mind and am a formidable debater. The Left does not want me on the other side. For a while now, I’ve hinted that I may turn my back and if I do, I will be disgusted and if I am, I will write about it.

For all those anti-racists who are actually okay with racism, as long as white people aren’t the one’s being racist, for those who think that we should not even try to have moral conversations about what is right and wrong or what is the best way to live, to those who are willing to stand up and applaud the most racist, sexist, homophobic statements provided that the speaker is non-white I tried to warn you. I tried to tell you that this path was troublesome and ill-conceived. But you loved your Foucault and Derrida too much to realize what they were actually on about. You enjoyed your anti-Western, anti-European posturing so much that you got into bed with any non-white person with an anti-imperialist cause even though, at the end of the day, they would happily take your queer ass to the gallows. If you are of the Left, if you believe that the West is the cause of the world’s problems, if you believe that it is nothing more than imperialism for American feminists to condemn the fact that Saudi women can neither vote nor drive, you have--through your own ideologies and defenses of them, sloppy and nonsensical as they were--created an adversary. Well done. I did try to warn you.

Welcome to Britain, a breeding ground for talking hate

Welcome to Britain, a breeding ground for talking hate: "

The British convince themselves that they loathe extremism. Continental Europe experienced the devastation caused by fascism and communism in the 20th century, but Britain has not had a revolution worth talking about since the 1640s. In France, Marine Le Pen of the Front National may well be the runner-up in the 2012 French presidential elections as her father was runner-up in 2002. In this year’s British local elections, the pathetic BNP managed to win just two council seats, while in the 2010 general election Labour took the sole parliamentary seat held by Respect, George Galloway’s alliance of the white far left and Islamist religious right.

The success of the mainstream in vanquishing the fringe has reaffirmed a cheering stereotype. Dear old Blighty may not be the most exciting place on Earth, but it is a steady, sensible and, above all, safe country. Yet although extremist parties fail as badly in Britain as they have always done, Britain has become the European capital of extremist ideas.

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