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Torrannor posted:So imagine a minority of the Republicans in Congress would be for same-sex marriage. Can you imagine Boehner allowing a vote on it to happen, in the knowledge that it would pass with D assistance? Can you imagine a president Romney whipping up support for SSM against much of his own party? No. And they wouldn't consider the nation defaulting on its debts a good hostage in a negotiation. Edit: Also, Sarah Palin.
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Jan 10, 2014 22:42
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Torrannor posted:So imagine a minority of the Republicans in Congress would be for same-sex marriage. Can you imagine Boehner allowing a vote on it to happen, in the knowledge that it would pass with D assistance? Can you imagine a president Romney whipping up support for SSM against much of his own party? I can imagine it, given the constant state of betrayal and intrigue neo-liberal legislators find themselves in. Torrannor posted:Are the Conservatives trying to privatize the NHS? Banning abortion? Injecting intelligent design into the school curriculum? As a non-Brit I am seriously asking. I don't think they are but please correct me if I'm wrong. namesake posted:Both are right wing Conservative/Reactionary groups maintained by big businesses and supported by nostalgia and a general concept of 'Christian morality'. However the Republican party actually has true believers of right wing religion and right wing economics with actual control over the course of the party which makes it operate on completely different lines compared to the UK Conservatives who ultimately don't need to worry about rightwing religious sentiment and are more than happy to take progressive steps about gay rights and things so long as their economic agenda (consciously making the rich richer) is furthered by it. Royal Mail has been privatised and there are various "reforms" being pushed on the NHS that are privatising portions of it. The Conservative Party has prominent religious members with anti-science and anti-women views http://www.conservativehome.com/pla...alling-for.html https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevensalzberg/2012/09/10/new-british-minister-of-health-believes-in-magic-potions/
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Jan 10, 2014 22:47
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Torrannor posted:
Fighting against the welfare state, woman's rights and decent public education is the backbone of European conservatives. 
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Jan 10, 2014 22:48
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Lycus posted:Or to put more emphasis on it: Would the Tories ever threaten to shutdown the government if the Lib Dems didn't vote with them end the NHS? Doing this automatically causes the government to fall and new elections to be called. It's a hostage you can't take.
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Jan 10, 2014 22:54
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Just imagine how hard it would break the Tories' minds if a Paki were elected PM. Republicans have been acting like shits at least since Gingrich and Clinton, but they really lost it when Obama won. It was as if all of their fears (of a black planet) became real.
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Jan 10, 2014 23:01
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^^ Um, probably a bad idea to use 'Paki' like that. Doesn't help your point.Enjoy posted:The Conservative Party has prominent religious members with anti-science and anti-women views Yeah I know backbenchers are scum and I'd forgotten about Jeremy Hunt and homeopathy but that doesn't really affect what I was saying; backbenchers don't directly set policy and demonstratably don't have the weight to wreck a gay marriage bill (and I bet will get ruined again over the EU referendum) and isn't the homeopathy pretty much just directly linked to cashing in on the privatised NHS?
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Jan 10, 2014 23:33
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Imagine a Gipsy in power in literally any European country 
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Jan 11, 2014 00:19
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Speaking of UK conservatives and the poo poo they get up to, I saw an article from the Telegraph about them cracking down on voting fraud in South Asian communities. While trying to find the numbers for it I came across stats that out of ~300 reports half led to a response and only one resulted in court action, and a document that gave the reasons for investigating it as 'reports' of voter fraud and literally said anecdotal evidence. Is this actually just the Tories being racist again like the Republicans and their lovely voter suppression? If it's not that and South Asians actually did cheat to elect the Conservatives then maybe there is something wrong with them.
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Jan 11, 2014 00:30
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namesake posted:Yeah I know backbenchers are scum and I'd forgotten about Jeremy Hunt and homeopathy but that doesn't really affect what I was saying; backbenchers don't directly set policy and demonstratably don't have the weight to wreck a gay marriage bill (and I bet will get ruined again over the EU referendum) and isn't the homeopathy pretty much just directly linked to cashing in on the privatised NHS? NHS has been funding homeopathic "doctors" and "hospitals" since its inception. The private companies selling tap water with fancy labels on it as medicine have been rooking the UK taxpayer ever since then.
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Jan 11, 2014 01:11
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Torrannor posted:Are the Conservatives trying to privatize the NHS? Banning abortion? Injecting intelligent design into the school curriculum? As a non-Brit I am seriously asking. I don't think they are but please correct me if I'm wrong. Mans posted:Cargo cult when you say you're indian-american do you mean indian as in India or Indian as in Cherokee or Iroquois because i literally can't comprehend what kind of persecution you'd suffer in Europe because of it. visceril posted:Just imagine how hard it would break the Tories' minds if a Paki were elected PM. Republicans have been acting like shits at least since Gingrich and Clinton, but they really lost it when Obama won. It was as if all of their fears (of a black planet) became real. None of what I'm posting is an endorsement of The Way Things Are, I'm just suggesting that Europeans are sort of predisposed towards fascism and perhaps our republican history makes us really want nothing to do with it. poo poo if anything it's a massive endorsement of British philosophy because you've managed to enact much more progressive policy despite having a more limited republican background and have perhaps the strongest claim to anti-fascism in the West.
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Jan 11, 2014 10:05
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cargo cult posted:Organized communist parties and unions are probably filled with racists and don't really balance out the fact that you have the FN, Golden Dawn, EDL, whatever. None of those parties would last a single second in the US, was my understated implication. It won't because America is a completely business-run society, 100% capitalist from its inception. Capitalism has no essential biases - in history it has opportunistically exploited bigotry and nationalism but can just as well oppose them when it's beneficial to do so. At the end of the day the goal is to turn everything, black and white, men and women, into walking CVs, with no personal interests beyond interaction on the marketplace. You know as much as I would want to deny it, I think I have to agree that the future of Europe isn't all that bright. If you pragmatically assess the situation and consider all the facts, you'd have to be pretty bold to say that things are going to get better in the next ten, or even twenty years. I just don't see how it could happen, there's no momentum towards anything positive right now. It's more or less the same in the US. It's just that over there, you at least won't have to worry about Neo-Nazis. You'll just be squeezed in a more traditionally American way. Dusz fucked around with this message at 11:04 on Jan 11, 2014 |
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Jan 11, 2014 11:02
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I do agree with his pessimism that Holland is in a terrible state ideologically speaking. I don't see any prospects even of recovery from what is probably one of the most rapid marketizations and shifts to rightism in the world. Most people have given over to cynicism and lost all interest in engagement with the world around them, and any critical questions are usually silenced in polite conversation.
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Jan 11, 2014 11:13
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cargo cult posted:None of what I'm posting is an endorsement of The Way Things Are, I'm just suggesting that Europeans are sort of predisposed towards fascism and perhaps our republican history makes us really want nothing to do with it.
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Jan 11, 2014 11:19
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cargo cult posted:lol, c'mon man, I'm obviously part of an empowered minority group, given that I'm posting on this forum, but seriously, it's not bad at all for American minorities, please don't tell yourself otherwise, because I've experienced both sides first hand. My condolences on your having been lynched.
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Jan 11, 2014 11:24
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So fears of "hordes" of migrant workers are so far unfounded. Yeah the year is young but it's still hilarious to me 
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Jan 11, 2014 12:52
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Demiurge4 posted:So fears of "hordes" of migrant workers are so far unfounded. Clearly that means the campaign has been a success and should be extended to include other nationalities.
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Jan 11, 2014 14:00
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Torrannor posted:Are the Conservatives trying to privatize the NHS? Banning abortion? Injecting intelligent design into the school curriculum? As a non-Brit I am seriously asking. I don't think they are but please correct me if I'm wrong. The Tories are literally privatising the NHS and making abortions more restrictive (and people within the party are calling for total bans). There are religious nuts there too but they're not as infuential.
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Jan 11, 2014 14:43
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Shibawanko posted:I do agree with his pessimism that Holland is in a terrible state ideologically speaking. I don't see any prospects even of recovery from what is probably one of the most rapid marketizations and shifts to rightism in the world. Most people have given over to cynicism and lost all interest in engagement with the world around them, and any critical questions are usually silenced in polite conversation. Maybe hipster leftists (PVDA, D66, GroenLinks) should stop calling the SP 'conservative' for taking a more serious leftist position. It's an infuriatingly idiotic talking point.
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Jan 11, 2014 15:47
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It's a rhetorical device, extremely good ideological framing with no actual substance. I counter by calling those parties 'stads', 'blank' etc., depending on the audience I'm speaking to. Just use variations that imply youthful naïvete, white (petit) bourgeois bias, etc.
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Jan 11, 2014 15:54
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Rutkowski posted:Fun fact: Of all the anti-semitic poo poo I've had thrown at me(sometimes literally!) over the years not once have it been from muslims but rather from nazis and those who now proclaim to protect the jews; members of SD. I wonder if the relative paucity of far right antisemitism in Denmark might have something to do with our national history surrounding WW2, which is taught as the Danish people coming together and saving the Danish Jews in a huge collective effort right under the noses of the Nazis, making it harder to turn Jews into villains in the circles where it would normally be "natural".
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Jan 11, 2014 15:58
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Antwan3K posted:Maybe hipster leftists (PVDA, D66, GroenLinks) should stop calling the SP 'conservative' for taking a more serious leftist position. It's an infuriatingly idiotic talking point. Yeah part of the problem (which goes for most places of course) is that all serious leftism has been replaced by a kind of postmodern ersatz in the form of culturally dominant TV programs like DWDD, Man Bijt Hond (the embodiment of the rejection of the grand narratives) and parts of the Volkskrant - which predictably countered the rise of the SP in the last elections' polls with a North Korealike flood of articles praising the neolaboural Diederik Samsom. It's characterized by a preoccupation with petty ironic bullshit, identity bargaining, the disavowal of widespread nepotism and faddish praise of turds like Sywert van der Lienden. I'm kind of suspect of making any kind of "my country is the worst X in the world"-type of self-victimizing statements, but Holland probably really is the one society most totally swept by postmodern ideas and control. It doesn't help that the SP also somewhat partakes in this at times. We don't need more "ludiek" poo poo, we need seriousness and conviction above all else.
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Jan 11, 2014 16:01
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Enjoy posted:The Conservative Party fought against voting reform in 2011 and suffered a massive rebellion over gay marriage (more of Cameron's MPs opposed it than supported it, including two Cabinet ministers) so I don't see how they are so different. The Conservatives and Republicans have shared remarkably similar worldviews for many decades. This is from last night, but the voting reform in 2011 is completely different to the kind of voter suppression the Republicans are pushing. FPTP , whilst a terrible system, does not exclude certain sections of people (poor, ethnic minorities, students) from exercising their right to vote (it just makes most votes effectively useless and maintains the current two-party dynamic). Not on the same scale as the Republicans. visceril posted:Just imagine how hard it would break the Tories' minds if a Paki were elected PM. Republicans have been acting like shits at least since Gingrich and Clinton, but they really lost it when Obama won. It was as if all of their fears (of a black planet) became real. Baroness Warsi is a child of Pakistani immigrants, the first Muslim minister, and is the former co-chairman of the Conservative Party. She may be an incredibly evil woman but I doubt it would not break any Tory's mind if she became PM.
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Jan 11, 2014 16:25
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A Buttery Pastry posted:Antisemitism is probably a topic where pan-European generalizations don't really work. The (now a decade old, there has been developments since then) report on antisemitism from the EUMC identified young males with a Palestinian/Arabic/Muslim background as the main perpetrators in Denmark, and similarly North Africans in France, while in the Netherlands the perpetrators are 80% 'white'. Sweden similarly has a significant "White Power" bent to their attacks, which are also far more common than in Denmark, Sweden being one of the most antisemitic countries in Europe apparently. Pan-European generalizations are generally (sorry!) useless, since the differences in wealth/culture/education/religion etc. between various European states are immense. History also makes a huge difference. You have the Balkans, which were conquered by the Muslims and had to endure several centuries of occupation by the Ottomans. And you have the Brits, with a British Empire that colonized several Muslim nations. The fight of the Austrian Habsburgs against the invading Ottomans, culminating in the siege of Vienna is a huge part of Austrian identity. Unfortunately there are several sources of fascist ideology in the different European states.
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Jan 11, 2014 16:30
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You really can't compare parties this way, because they all operate as historical actors in their own country's political culture. In certain aspects, British Tories' love for aristocracy and extreme elitism, would be considered too much for a lot of republicans, who cherish the foundational myth of the 'self made man'. Of course, you can't get away with the anti-woman or anti-LGBT positions in the UK that some US Republicans spout. Social liberalism seems to be a majority position. (Same can't be said for France, for example. I think most republicans could comfortably be members of the UMP when it comes to social issues.)
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Jan 11, 2014 16:31
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In response to the Shibawanko & Antwan3K exchange: You just have to play the game harder than them. The New Right has cloaked itself in postmodernism because it knows it trumps the left in its ability to interpellate the masses on a visceral level. The postmodern left on the other hand has taken refuge in academia and art, which are far removed from the human condition as is, especially with the relevant demographics that the left should be targeting (not that they are succeeding in recruiting students, either). I mean, it's not like we have our own Sartre and co heading out to Limburg to instruct workers on Maoism. Meanwhile, 'conservative' leftism is genuine, and that is its problem. Any attempt at politics that is predicated on the pursuit of any genuine concern is almost immediately disqualified for not being saturated with appropriate levels of cynicism and irony that make up the intellectual morass of postmodernity. "Irony is the death knell of our age" - it's no longer a tool for the critical examination of viewpoints and structures, but a destructive meme that has seeped into every nook and cranny of human interaction that it has found permeable (much like market thought). In perfect postmodernity, everything, not just meta-narratives, is made fun of in this way, without any interest as to content. But due to a variety of reasons, including but not limited to: its underrepresentation in the interests of power, its naivete, its cannibalistic critical spirit, etc., the left hasn't been capable of utilizing this culture to any great potential. At least in the Netherlands, it hasn't. Where it has, it's been a victory for progressive liberalism, rather than leftism. I ascribe that to the nature of 'genuine' leftism, and its life expectancy in cynical postmodernity. The right has been able to do great things with it, though. POWnews uses it to great effect: cynical, ironic commentaries on social phenomena, imbued with right wing ideology, which effortlessly creep into one's mind and become constituting beliefs about the world, society, immigrants, foreigners. Serious critique can always be handwaved away as 'huilie huilie', 'not getting it', 'not being able to take a joke'; or more seriously, 'why do you care?', 'it doesn't affect you', 'you must be a rooie rakker'. There's two possible answers here, I reckon. Either get your rear end to Mars and start working on introducing New Sincerity as the new cultural paradigm, or play the irony game even harder than your enemies. Anyone that has read Marx's critiques (take those of Proudhon as an example), surely feels the fallout even today, that certain collective metaphysical assholes have yet to unpucker. It's a drat shame though, I really feel like people in this country have forgotten what it's like to be genuine and express their emotions in that manner. They are afraid to do so and necessarily couch everything they do in various layers of irony, so as to not expose themselves to the harsh resentment that their peers would inevitably show, enforcing the Big Other in pathological solidarity with this broken system. Yet, it seems as though they want to, and are suffering in not being able to. Messed up. SSJ2 Goku Wilders fucked around with this message at 16:45 on Jan 11, 2014 |
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Jan 11, 2014 16:39
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Geert Wilders takes a weird position in that light, though. Certainly, his party is the extreme endpoint of postmodern identity politics, focussing almost entirely on the 'lost Dutch identity'? It's almost like being the most postmodern identitarian, makes a party seem authentic and genuine now. e: The same is true for N-VA in Belgium. They are basically a neoliberal party, when it comes to social and economic issues. What they constantly keep repeating though, is that this conservative liberalism has been the majority in Flanders for decades, blocked by a PS dominant in Wallonia. This turns harcore neoliberalism into a marker of being a hard-working Fleming, as opposed to lazy, socialist Wallonians who waste tax money. So, even though their institutional base of support are (apart from the traditional Flemish nationalist organizations) the Flemish employer's organisations, aka the national bourgeoisie of a future Flemish republic, they are implicitly considered to represent one of the 'two democracies living next to each other', as they constantly call the Belgian state. Antwan3K fucked around with this message at 16:57 on Jan 11, 2014 |
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Jan 11, 2014 16:47
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Antwan3K posted:Geert Wilders takes a weird position in that light, though. Certainly, his party is the extreme endpoint of postmodern identity politics, focussing almost entirely on the 'lost Dutch identity'? It's almost like being the most postmodern identitarian, makes a party seem authentic and genuine now. An identity, that unsurprisingly doesn't exist! And people know it doesn't. They know Wilders doesn't believe it either. No one truly believes in it, they only have to believe that they believe in it, and act accordingly. http://www.egs.edu/faculty/slavoj-zizek/articles/cynicism-as-a-form-of-ideology/ posted:Peter Sloterdijk puts forward the thesis that ideology's dominant mode of functioning is cynical, which renders impossible- or, more precisely, vain — the classic critical-ideological procedure. The cynical subject is quite aware of the distance between the ideological mask and the social reality, but he none the less still insists upon the mask. The formula, as proposed by Sloterdijk, would then be: "they know very well what they are doing, but still, they are doing it". Cynical reason is no longer naïve, but is a paradox of an enlightened false consciousness: one knows the falsehood very well, one is well aware of a particular interest hidden behind an ideological universality, but still one does not renounce it. http://zizekstudies.org/index.php/ijzs/article/viewFile/149/243 posted:Thus, the concept of ideology would not have anything to do with the idea of a distorted SSJ2 Goku Wilders fucked around with this message at 17:16 on Jan 11, 2014 |
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Jan 11, 2014 17:11
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Torrannor posted:Pan-European generalizations are generally (sorry!) useless, since the differences in wealth/culture/education/religion etc. between various European states are immense. E: Or antiziganism, which is so pervasive and uniform you would think it was in our genes, only seeming worse in some places because there are more people to victimize. A Buttery Pastry fucked around with this message at 17:22 on Jan 11, 2014 |
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Jan 11, 2014 17:17
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Hah that's interesting because I had a conversation with my girlfriend about this a few years ago where I pointed out how much I hate that nowadays nobody is surprised by a politician lying and in fact you are the odd one if you act genuinely offended about being lied to by a politician. It is as if the very expectation that a politician will do, or at least honestly attempt to do, what they promise is not just naive, which ofcourse I know it is I'm not an idiot with no life experience, but a completely unreasonable hope or expectation in the first place. It ties into this authenticity you talked about, where actually believing in something nowadays gets you looked at as a fool, yet at the same time pretty much everyone hates the way things are going. I've always found the line by the daughter of the political organizer in Naomi Klein's documentary on the recovered factories in Argentina very striking. She identifies as anarchist and doesn't vote, whereas her mom tirelessly campaigned for Kirchner during the film. Asked about this disconnect she says "my mother is from a generation in which she still saw politics building things up, all I've ever seen in my life is politics destroying things". Nowadays, I hear even from my parents and aunts and uncles, people from that generation where they have personally witnessed politics actually building things, things like "hah, and you think any of that is ever going to get better?" or "What does it all matter? They (the politicans) are all the same anyway." It's like slowly now even just the belief that things could potentially get better is increasingly becoming seen as ridiculous and ridiculed. I don't remember the last time I heard anyone say they were happy with the state of politics or the direction the country was moving into, even right wingers who voted for the government or the PM. Do Wilders voters even really believe that the problems will be solved if Wilders gets his way? Like, really believe the country will become so much better and those Puinhopen van Paars will go away as we move into a bright future? The only ones who even talk about brighter futures and building things together and things getting better nowadays are politicians and the king in speeches, and as we know, everything they say is a lie anyway. It is as if by these people continuously repeating the same platitudes, even if ment as pandering, they are poisoning those platitudes and what they ostensibly stand for just by their constant associating of their terrible image and our expectations of them (lies, lies lies) with those platitudes. Orange Devil fucked around with this message at 17:33 on Jan 11, 2014 |
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Jan 11, 2014 17:30
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A Buttery Pastry posted:True, but I was comparing Denmark and Sweden here, on the subject of antisemitism. In that case, the two diverge a whole lot, despite their overall similarities, where anti-Muslim sentiment across Europe is the opposite situation. Yeah, this is really the one subject where it is correct to say Europe is racists as gently caress. I simply cannot understand how so many people in so many different cultures can hate Roma, who are relatively few people and who never had any kind of power, so they did never perpetrate any massive atrocities. Hating Mongols in a country that was a victim of the Golden Horde is understandable to a degree for example, but what did Roma ever do to the European people?
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Jan 11, 2014 17:32
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Torrannor posted:Yeah, this is really the one subject where it is correct to say Europe is racists as gently caress. I simply cannot understand how so many people in so many different cultures can hate Roma, who are relatively few people and who never had any kind of power, so they did never perpetrate any massive atrocities. Hating Mongols in a country that was a victim of the Golden Horde is understandable to a degree for example, but what did Roma ever do to the European people? The Roma were enslaved, persecuted, abused, and degraded by them. For this, they can never be forgiven. There's a great little speech about this in The Brothers Karamazov that I can't find at the moment, but seriously, it's common that if you degrade someone, you then see them as deserving that, and more. It's kind of a very simplistic 'just world' idea. There is also the factor that the Roma have been ostracized and kept down and hosed over so much that their culture really is 'backward', in that it is very out of tune with many modern values, and so sympathy on the 'left' is lacking for Roma because Roma culture has a lot of archaic misogyny, superstition, etc. So those on the 'right' can point to the criminality in the Roma population (caused by centuries of ostracization and persecution) and those on the left can point to the ignorance and 'right-wing' cultural traits in the Roma (caused by centuries of ostracization and persecution) and everyone can feel great about this group they've chosen to gently caress over forever.
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Jan 11, 2014 17:54
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A Buttery Pastry posted:Antisemitism is probably a topic where pan-European generalizations don't really work. ... while in the Netherlands the perpetrators are 80% 'white'. Is this true? Because if I am to believe the media the only anti-semites in the Netherlands are all those drat moroccans  But seriously, I wouldn't have guessed that there was that large a percentage of white people in the active anti-semitic group, because of the way the media portrays anti-semitism as a problem caused by immigrants (and neo-nazis). I wonder if this study includes anti-Ajax football hooligans, which doesn't strike me as actual anti-semitism meant against real jewish people, but more as dumb football rivalry.
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Jan 11, 2014 18:12
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ekuNNN posted:Is this true? Because if I am to believe the media the only anti-semites in the Netherlands are all those drat moroccans Fake edit: Reading up on anti-Ajax hooligans, yeah, I can see how that would complicate matters, on top of the general complication of finding out whether instances of anti-Israeli speech are antisemitic. An up to date report would be nice, it is a decade old after all.
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Jan 11, 2014 18:49
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Torrannor posted:Yeah, this is really the one subject where it is correct to say Europe is racists as gently caress. I simply cannot understand how so many people in so many different cultures can hate Roma, who are relatively few people and who never had any kind of power, so they did never perpetrate any massive atrocities. Hating Mongols in a country that was a victim of the Golden Horde is understandable to a degree for example, but what did Roma ever do to the European people? This is basically how the Roma are viewed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGDj0B5WQaA I'm not saying it's a good doc or it's accurate. I'm saying that's how they are viewed.
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Jan 11, 2014 19:16
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computer parts posted:IIRC there's a Norwegian PM with a bust of Ayn Rand outside of her office. Solberg has a bust of Ayn Rand? Siv Jensen ( Minister of finance) I could beleive since she has publically stated her love for Ayn Rand`s works.
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Jan 11, 2014 23:01
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Obdicut posted:The Roma were enslaved, persecuted, abused, and degraded by them. For this, they can never be forgiven. There's a great little speech about this in The Brothers Karamazov that I can't find at the moment, but seriously, it's common that if you degrade someone, you then see them as deserving that, and more. It's kind of a very simplistic 'just world' idea. The thing is, the people in eastern central Europe, where most of the Roma live don't really see the "historical" part of this. They see the Roma children begging on the streets when they should be in school, see the youths huffing paint thinner, see the adults hanging out in front of their rundown social housing, with garbage piling between the buildings, when they should be at work, see the pregnant teens pushing around baby strollers, see adults and children diving their dumpsters several times a day. What they don't see is the centuries of ostracizing that led to this. I don't think I've seen more than a handful of Roma employees in my company, that employs 3000 people in a city with 10% Roma population. We actually have more colleagues from India than indigenous Roma. On the other hand, what some of the slovakian and hungarian colleagues told me about their experiences, with Roma men especially, would blow the minds of D&Ds social justice warriors. This ranged from regularly stealing the lunch money over groping and constant sexual harassment to attempted rape and camping out in the front of houses the harassed girls fled to. When I moved to Slovakia I was initially shocked by the rampant anti-ziganism, especially due to the years of guilt-indoctrination towards Sinti/Roma (and of course Slavs/Jews) every german child gets to enjoy. I still don't condone the anti-ziganism of my friends and colleagues here and try to counter it with the positive experiences with Roma I've had since then, but I understand better where it's coming from than I would have been able to from my "western" perspective a few years ago, when my only contact to "gypsy" culture was the history of the 3rd Reich and the romantic depiction of travelling people in western culture.
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Jan 12, 2014 01:55
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goethe42 posted:
I understand it fine. People see the conditions of the Roma, don't bother to do the slightest, least, single bit of research or thought into how they got there, and declare them scum. Then they list all the various ways that the Roma debase themselves and act badly, as though those facts on their own are important. A sub-version of this is those who barely acknowledge "Of course they haven't always been treated well..." but then go on to list the things that you have, and basically act as though, well, the Roma may have been hosed over but now they're loving themselves and oh well we can't really help them. It's the easiest loving thing in the world to realize that if you see a degraded people that they probably didn't choose that life for themselves, but in Europe they look at the Roma and go "Tsk tsk how can they live like that" and in the US they look at black people on Drudge and go "Tsk tsk how can they live like that". It's amazingly sad.
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Jan 12, 2014 02:16
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In the immediacy of everyday life, no one cares how the Roma or African Americans, or the homeless, and so on, got to where they are now. They just want to not deal with it. Such a situation is the result of diffusion of responsibility, due to a lack of a direct causal link between individual action and structural, social consequence. It is why most people have not yet begun to comprehend that racism is not merely calling someone a friend of the family, but the result of a machinery of 'objective' social institutions, that emerges out of the complexity of human society and interaction, and commits as much violence against those in whose interests it was not established, as the constitutive forces of that machinery will allow. You won't change this by liberal appeals to individual tolerance. Both parties suffer and yet neither is guilty of establishing the status quo. Have you considered Marxism? SSJ2 Goku Wilders fucked around with this message at 02:40 on Jan 12, 2014 |
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Jan 12, 2014 02:36
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The problem with the Roma is that they don't have massively wealthy individuals in the western world that can act as the guiding light of civilization. Without these entrepeneurs the race just falls apart. Imagine the white man without Bill Gates. Imagine the black man without Aliko Dangote. Goethe42 i can't wait until your next adventure where you venture into a poor suburban area of France and talk about "hey i'm not racist but you should see these blacks!" The siege in Hamburg continues. In Berlin people are showing their solidarity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lFnMdXgQrQ One day Europeans will unite under the true undivisive banner of ACAB 
Mans fucked around with this message at 02:52 on Jan 12, 2014 |
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Jan 12, 2014 02:44
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Mans posted:The problem with the Roma is that they don't have massively wealthy individuals in the western world that can act as the guiding light of civilization. I've only tried to explain where the racism of people around here (Slovakia/Hungary) towards the Roma comes from. I'm well aware that the current situation was caused by centuries of oppression and ostracism of the Roma, but that is because I was taught about it in school and have learned to reflect this in my view of minorities, unlike my slovak, hungarian and eastern german relatives, friends and colleagues that grew up in a socialist/post socialist society in which racism was something only existing in the capitalist west. There is no awareness that the way the most visible part of the Roma live may be due to the way they have been treated in the past. Raising awareness about this is the first step to an improvement of the attitude towards the Roma and an improvement of their situation. So yes, if I ever com to a Banlieue, I may say "I'm not racist, but you should see in which conditions these blacks(I'd actually say "the minorities there", because AFAIK there live people from all parts of the former french colonial empire, you racist) have to live due to the policies of the french state and inherent racism in french society."
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Jan 12, 2014 04:24
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