Agreed on this. I do have 30,000 gallons of water in the swimming pool and a couple cases of food from the Pandemic Scare of 2020. I would guess we could last a month or so before needing to forage.
Maybe I am blind but I’m just not seeing all these Right Wing Extremists communities. Maybe they do exist outside the Leftist narratives but if anyone were privy to their existence I would think it would include me . Maybe they are “getting ready for the STHF”, but I’m not seeing it. There are lots of Republicans in the neighborhood but to my knowledge every one of them avoids confrontations and extreme situations at all costs. But I also would recommend anarchists to pick a different suburb - too high risk, low reward.
Clearly I don’t understand, but have watched a trash truck load full of made-for-Hollywood Apocalypse movies.
Are you totally sure there’s no judgment being snuck in there? Or else, why not say “what we are seeing today is no different to how good Americans were swept along in the tide during the ciivil rights movement of the 1960s”?
You seem to imply that those Germans were supporting a bad thing, and now the left is emulating them, which is also a bad thing. That seems like a judgment to me!
A new term (for me): “schismogenesis,” which literally means ‘creation of division.’ The concept was framed by the anthropologist Gregory Bateson in the 1930s, studying a society in Papua New Guinea. He described two patterns of schismogenesis between individuals or groups: a dominance-submission pattern (in which each–dominance and submission- escalates according to the escalation of the other), and a pattern of competition (e.g. non-playful rivalry through boasting, while being perhaps a mild form, still has disintegrative effects). Both patterns escalate conflict, both are self-destructive to the parties involved, and left unchecked and without conscious effort to counter these pattern-tendencies, each form causes society to break apart. Schismogenesis has been applied in various fields of study. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/schismogenesis
One way of viewing BLM is that it is the latest form of the dominance-submission pattern, in which the historically submissive group is refusing to continue the pattern. In that regard, this is healthy for society at large, regardless of the woke elements, and is a sign, imo, that “evolution is working.”
As for the competition pattern, more reason to focus on cooperation. Integral emphasizes the importance of considering both the ‘dignities and disasters’ of stages, events, groups etc. Another way of saying this might be that while we can be deeply critical of perspectives/groups different from our own, we also need to be deeply sympathetic; if not empathetic, at least able to “commiserate” with others whose experience and perspectives are different from our own.
As I posted previously, it’s a steep hill to climb for Blacks even with ending slavery, suffrage, equal rights, affirmative action. Similar but different steep hills to climb for poor whites, women, latinos, intellectually challenged, immigrants, or James trying to get into a top law school.
As @steljarkos so aptly calls it “agency”, having agency over your own life is scary stuff. It’s big boy stuff. Buck stops you you. Many would say that the only way to truly be free, to enjoy your agency, is to embrace the responsibilities required of self same agency. And the responsibility looks like looking at the hill and climbing it, often in the wind, rain, snow, rocks and bad shoes.
But is there any way to develop your own agency without taking responsibility? Without doing the developmental work of putting one for in front of another climbing your won hill?
Is it really for the “greater good” to teach anyone that they are inherently a “victim” or an “oppressor” based on an immutable characteristic? Is teaching a child that they are a victim and lessor than another child compassionate? How is teaching a child that they are an oppressor based on an immutable characteristic not child abuse? Who does any of this help? Other than the expanded Administrative class?
The zero sum game of Wokeism and Equality of Outcome is not of the same lineage as abolishing slavery, suffrage, equal rights, or even affirmative action.
The difficulty in you line of reasoning can be expressed quite simply with an analogy.
A woman is raped, and her rapists will rape her again if conditions do not change.
It is ridiculous to tell the woman “develop your own agency, put one foot in front of the other …oh, but don’t do anything to stop the rapes from happening. Don’t challenge the rapists and call them out or try to get them to accept responsibility. Don’t “freak out” and get hysterical.”
We are talking about literal police executions that have gone on for decades. White conservatives refused to allow black men to protest peacefully or even make even the most minor statement by taking a knee during the national anthem. So - now we have escalating violence. Wouldn’t it have been just simpler to not suppress all efforts of the black community to bring attention to the steady stream of police executions? Just a little bit of allowing voice 5 -10 years ago and things might be very different now.
We are getting dangerously close to agreeing here, @FermentedAgave. As I’ve said numerous times, I think the woke movement is foregrounding some very important challenges, but they are doing so within a broken frame of ethnic essentialism and perpetual grievance. The observations that have surfaced around matters such as “privilege” are important, as I think you have acknowledged here, but it gets tremendously dangerous when it gets reduced to immutable characteristics, as you say.
This is pretty much my whole trip, it’s why I keep returning to the “baby and the bathwater” metaphor. Wokism is showing us some very important babies to be saved, and those babies get lost whenever we see a reactionary dismissal of everything woke. However, those babies also get lost whenever we allow the most extreme wokists to set the frame. Because it is a frame that eliminates the deep structures of orange (neutrality, objectivity, etc.) in effort to eliminate the surface structures of amber/orange (colonialism, internalized racism, etc.), which can only produce more ethnocentrism in the long run.
I even agree that your prescription is an important one — individual dignity, agency, development, and grit. And of course, African Americans have truly excelled at this over the last century, transmuting suffering into beauty, grace, and wisdom. That’s how we got Blues, Gospel, Jazz, Rock and Roll, and Hip Hop — by transmuting pain into these incredible expressions of beauty and grace, squeezing the coal until a diamond pops out the other side.
I would also partially agree with the argument I expect you to make, that left-leaning interventions over the decades have, despite best intentions, diminished this sense of agency and personal responsibility (though I would argue that this was also perpetuated by discriminatory interpretations of the law, whereby a great many more black Americans had their agency taken from them by pushing them into the prison system, particularly with the conservative “War on Drugs”.)
Where we differ, perhaps, is that I don’t think individual agency is enough. As someone who studied stochastic processes, I’m sure you know what I mean — if the playing field is overly unlevel, we will still see some folks who are able to thrive despite the less-than-equal opportunities created by that playing field, but statistically speaking more people will continue to fall through the cracks. Which means we need genuine leadership in all four quadrants simultaneously.
This is the reason I consider Martin Luther King Jr. to be one of the world’s greatest integral leaders — not because he was running AQAL equations in his head, but because he role modeled a genuine four-quadrant leadership for the rest of us. His message was essentially “Yes, the playing field is historically stacked against us — and that’s why we need to reclaim our agency and be smarter and better and more resilient in the UL, and why we need to find greater resilience together in the LL, and why we need to behave in skillful ways in the UR, and yes, why we need to transform the systems in the LR.”
This is why I am less interested in “woke vs. anti-woke” discussions, and more interested in shifting the frame in such a way that facilitates better perspective-taking, better agreements, and better interventions.
Agreed, good points. Important to remind ourselves to be careful of how we interpret statistics. But just as important is who we choose to listen to. The minority speaking on behalf of a majority, representing a majority, are just as dangerous as badly interpreted statistics. Those scolding others need to be mindful of the log in their own eye. Why trust anyone whose narrative revolves around shaming, claiming a moral high-ground? For all too often, they are projecting less truths about the world than assumptions about how they see the world.
Ok, with you there. But let’s exercise care in who we listen to. Learn to recognize projection. Read between the lines. What is their shaming rhetoric really telling us?
BLM’s continuing support of Jussie Smollett, despite the final verdict, tells us what we need to know about what they really stand for:
I think in a healthy society there needs to be specific “containers” to allow but also at the same time limit dominance-submission and competition. Not as spectators as we have in an unhealthy USA with keyboard warriors, but as participants. Got a chip on your shoulder - use your own fists in a ring, lol. Those with the most chips on their shoulders would also have the most bruised faces - until they learned another way, lol. Have aggression and a need to let it out physically - that’s fine - here are some gloves and there is the ring. You can also just meditate when you are tired of getting your face beaten.
lol
Many of the most healthy societies had outlets of various kinds. The most unhealthy are on the USA and Rome model, where it is a spectacle and entertainment for the masses and probably contributes more to the problem in the long term. Contrast that to cultures where participation was expected within limited boundaries.
@FermentedAgave Yes, I remember your post(s) in which you have “commiserated” with Blacks. And yes, I agree there are steep hills to climb for everyone, not just Blacks. And yes, I’m all for agency and agree facing one’s personal responsibility is of prime importance. But agency and autonomy are only half the equation of what we are as human beings, the other half being that we are relational, communal beings. This is part of my point in suggesting we need to be sympathetic, able to commiserate with others; we need to stay in relation to one another, and one another’s suffering.
As for the victim-oppressor points you made, I don’t think it’s smart to deny that victimness truly does happen in the exterior world, some of it based on immutable characteristics and some not—you yourself see yourself as a potential victim of some possible future apocalyptic moment or you wouldn’t be using your agency and “prepping.” Seems to me our job is to accept that indeed, victimizing does happen in the world, but we should simultaneously dissuade people from accepting ‘victim’ as part of their identity. And I would say the same about ‘oppressors;’ they do exist in the world, but should we encourage them to adopt this as part of their interior identity?. No. We should, as Michel Burnham in Star Wars: Discovery says: “reach for the best in ourselves and one another.”
Also, just a tidbit for @FermentedAgave as well - it’s obviously clear from the LA times article that the left is completely comfortable with criticizing itself. Don Lemon is definitely Liberal, and has no problem forming his own opinion on matters regarding BLM and race. This is contrary to the standard lines I hear from @FermentedAgave
I will also add in that conservative’s insistence that no one, not even BLM support Smolliet in any way is just the right’s version of cancel culture. Just the other side of the same page.
I never supported him, but I recognize the need for groups to support such people according to their own missions. Similar to the ACLU - there are some things I disagree with them about but overall it’s important that they support even unpopular causes even after a verdict is rendered.
You’re so easily impressed! Yes, I remember that line too. I want to be like her when I grow up, part Vulcan and all. Strange, the lines that stay with us. I still am trying to decipher a line by Picard in one of the movies, where he spoke about Giotti’s “third perspective–up.” Or actually, have been spending too much time studying Giotti’s art online trying to figure out exactly what his 3-point perspective was. I think I have it–pretty integral too: depth, up, wholeness.
. Maybe they are “getting ready for the STHF”, but I’m not seeing it. There are lots of Republicans in the neighborhood but to my knowledge every one of them avoids confrontations and extreme situations at all costs. But I also would recommend anarchists to pick a different suburb - too high risk, low reward.
You know I meant Star Trek. 3-2-1 me, BS! I love this Discovery series, btw.