Reparations And Whether Immigrants Should Be Forced To Act White (and Burqas!) thread

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Reparations And Whether Immigrants Should Be Forced To Act White (and Burqas!) thread

steinrokkan: Apr 2, 2011; Soiled Meat

There's no such a thing as historical guilt. If you are doing something for the unfortunate, do it because it's the right thing for the posterity.

Framing progressive work as "paying back" for past evils just raises resentment, and encourages people to find an excuse to declare the debt paid up (and therefore all the infrastructure in place to service it obsolete). Find value in good acts by themselves.

steinrokkan fucked around with this message at 07:46 on Aug 31, 2016

# ¿ Aug 31, 2016 07:43

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 18, 2024 19:46

steinrokkan: Apr 2, 2011; Soiled Meat

Trying to reform ongoing injustices can hardly be called reparations. Seems like trying to bolt a veneer of righteous indignation onto standard politics.

steinrokkan fucked around with this message at 08:34 on Aug 31, 2016

# ¿ Aug 31, 2016 08:32

steinrokkan: Apr 2, 2011; Soiled Meat

Then call it what it is - welfare / social programs.

# ¿ Aug 31, 2016 17:11

steinrokkan: Apr 2, 2011; Soiled Meat

Mel Mudkiper posted:

It's not a binary

What if the benefits of oppression were lost because the oppressor became oppressed in the intervening historical period before the first act of oppression and today? What if elements of the initially oppressed people eventually came to identify with their oppressors as to be indistinguishable today, and as such enjoyed some benefits of the violence against their people? Would they be forced to pay reparations for crimes committed against their own ancestors?

steinrokkan fucked around with this message at 17:37 on Aug 31, 2016

# ¿ Aug 31, 2016 17:34

steinrokkan: Apr 2, 2011; Soiled Meat

Mel Mudkiper posted:

Let me use a metaphor

This is a gradient between yellow and green. Can you objectively pinpoint the EXACT spot that yellow stops being yellow and becomes green? Can you say with absolutely certainty there is an exact agreed upon spot that yellow becomes green?

If you can't, does that mean yellow and green can't exist?

Any human moral idea is condemned to implode from deconstruction. Its the entire reason deconstruction exists. It's not logically possible to create a moral or intellectual framework that survives deconstructive scrutiny. However, it is nihilistic to claim that because no idea can survive being deconstructed, ideas do not have value.

All human ideas are built upon a pillar of mush, but we still need and use those ideas to function. Equality, Liberty, Justice, etc as ideas all fall apart if you push against them hard enough, but it doesn't mean they don't have value and we don't apply them to our lives.

To apply it to the reparations debate, yes, the further back in history you go and the more obscure you make the chain of interactions, the harder it becomes to ascertain a clear moral mandate. However, that does not mean that we should ignore situations in which the mandate IS clear. No, I do not think it is moral or practical to try to apply reparations to the Assyrians and Mongols. However, the fact that the line eventually becomes blurry does not mean the line is never clear.

If you want to argue the mandate has expired for colonial reparations, fine. People have done that, and I strongly disagree with them. But if you want to argue that creating some idea of moral mandate should never be done because you can imagine a situation in which the mandate might be obscured, I think you are trying to distract from the actual argument.

If you are talking about moral mandate, that can't be imposed, not at least because of the existence of a gradient of cases. What can be done is a reconciliatory procedure, which would be largely a formal exercise in historical context going back for centuries.

E: I should perhaps clarify - your idea of a gradient that has a line where the color skews predominantly to one color is naive when contrasted to the social reality where every line cutting through a gradient is in fact just another gradient of a different quality, in an infinite fractal progression.

steinrokkan fucked around with this message at 18:49 on Aug 31, 2016

# ¿ Aug 31, 2016 18:03

steinrokkan: Apr 2, 2011; Soiled Meat

What moral imperative for practical action is easier to demonstrate to the greatest number of people:

1) The need to uplift as many people as possible out of poverty due to basic philosophical principles such as the idea of seeing politics as a tool for safeguarding the growth of individual human potential, and that a society where everybody is first and foremost concerned about the well being of others is the most prosperous society possible.
2) The need to uplift people out of poverty due to the fact my great-grandpa was maybe complicit in robbing their great-grandpa.

And if even 1 is impossible in practice, what does that say about 2?

# ¿ Aug 31, 2016 21:27

steinrokkan: Apr 2, 2011; Soiled Meat

snyprmag posted:

You don't need to go back three generations to find institutional robbery: racial bias in home lending continued into this century. Americans don't care about either because we've convinced ourselves it's the poor's own fault for their status.

Well, reparations for miscarriages of justice make full sense, but that!s effectively a matter of whether there's a functional and equitable judicial system in general, isn't it. I don't think abstract forms of racial injustice that never were technically illegal can be really addressed through something other than basic good policy making, though.

# ¿ Aug 31, 2016 21:46

steinrokkan: Apr 2, 2011; Soiled Meat

steinrokkan posted:

Well, reparations for miscarriages of justice make full sense, but that!s effectively a matter of whether there's a functional and equitable judicial system in general, isn't it. I don't think abstract forms of racial injustice that never were technically illegal can be really addressed through something other than basic good policy making, though.

I mean, there's always place for reconciliatory procedures (like the many truth commissions that popped up in the past decades), but those are by definition focused on forfeiting the victim's demands for material and retributive punishment of the perpetrator, and instead promote positive change in the future.

drilldo squirt posted:

Affirmative action?

Fair enough - but is that a reparation? Affirmative action can be quite blind to the historical causes of disadvantage among the groups it targets.

steinrokkan fucked around with this message at 21:53 on Aug 31, 2016

# ¿ Aug 31, 2016 21:50

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 18, 2024 19:46

steinrokkan: Apr 2, 2011; Soiled Meat

snyprmag posted:

A lack of a "functional and equitable judicial system" from this country's founding till today is exactly why we need reparations. The forms of racial injustice were non-abstract and legal until the civil rights act, and didn't magically all go away afterwards.

Yes, and my point is that the instruments of anything that would end up labeled as "reparations" are exactly the same things a decent government would implement regardless of their intent vis a vis historical reparations simply because they make sense.
E: The significance of this is, I think, that adding the reparations rhetoric to policy making discourse makes progressive agenda a tougher sell than it already is without bringing in additional benefit.

steinrokkan fucked around with this message at 22:16 on Aug 31, 2016

# ¿ Aug 31, 2016 22:13

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Reparations And Whether Immigrants Should Be Forced To Act White (and Burqas!) thread