There’s nothing untimely about correcting the age-old myth which blames Black ineptitude and self-destructiveness on white racism.

Cute schtick. I guess you have to make up for your lack of insight somehow, huh?

The primary dictionary definition of racism is: “belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human racial groups
determine cultural or individual achievement and that races have distinctive characteristics determined by hereditary factors that endow some races with an intrinsic superiority over others.”

Accordingly, there is nothing “thoughtless” about my racism; it is solidly based in empirical evidence.

What do you mean by “the experience of black people?” Do you really imagine that they experience things as a group as opposed to experiencing things individually? Wouldn’t they be better off if they started regarding themselves more as individuals responsible for their own success or failure?

It’s less a statement about “how black people should think” than an assertion that free will comes with accountability, for blacks no less than the rest of us.

I have no quarrel with your second and third paragraphs, but how any individual experiences his world is not my concern, so, I seek to make no statements about their experiences; I’m merely commenting on their behavior. Their protests of the past year are ill-founded, irresponsible, destructive and representative of half a century of blaming others for their plight.

Just look ate the first three patron saints of the Black Lives Matter movement:

Trayvon: I was 19 when a friend of the family asked that I come to her house and mow her lawn. She lived in Fieldston, a very tony, exclusive neighborhood in Riverdale. I drove my
1962 Mercury Comet clunker to her house and parked slightly down the block. When I emerged in my jeans and t-shirt, it wasn’t ten seconds before I was accosted by a resident and asked the nature of my business. I politely explained, and, when he seemed a bit skeptical, I offered him the opportunity to observe while I knocked on the door of the woman whose lawn I was to mow. Sure, I was a bit irritated at his presumptuous meddling in my affairs, but my first reaction wasn’t to tell him to mind his own business, or to let the situation escalate to the point where I was sitting on his chest and bashing his head into the ground.

Michael Brown: I’m not crazy about cops. I’ve been accosted by them often, especially as a young man, and they’ve pushed me around plenty. Once, when I was a bit drunk and not as deferential as I might have been otherwise, they beat the hell out of me and left me on the curb. The next morning I awoke
damn near unable to use my hands, so adept were those cops with their night-sticks. Without excusing them for their abuse of power, I wrote it off as something that simply happens when one runs afoul of the societally-sanctioned bully-boys. It is simply astounding that an ass-wipe like Michael Brown not only disobeyed the command of a cop, but fought him, struggled for his weapon, and then attacked him yet again, and people are prepared to write that entire thing off with a narrative painting him as the victim due to his skin color.

Eric Garner: I’ve seen the video of his arrest. Yes, it ended with several cops restraining him, sitting on him and pinning him to the ground, but it began with his resisting arrest for blatantly breaking a law for the umpteenth time after having been let go with warnings many times in the past. They went to simply hand-cuff him, and he smacked their hands away and pushed back, forcing the cops’ hand to the point where escalation was inevitable. I’m pretty stubborn and argumentative myself, but I can’t imagine defying the police that way.

We could go through each example offered as ‘evidence’ of racism by BLM, and, with very few exceptions, the facts put the lie to the claims.

I have been grossly discriminated against by blacks; they predominate on the staffs of most government services in NYC, and routinely talk down to white people and mock them while marginalizing them. I lodge formal complaints in such instances and expect little in the way of corrective action. And that’s not even mentioning the violence to which they expose whites who dare to enter their neighborhoods or even fail to guard against the knock-out game. As a remedy for this, I simply avoid them. I didn’t used to, but life has taught me too many lessons.

I care as much about blacks’ “experience” as they do about mine; the difference is that I don’t wish to bring senseless violence to their experience. Would that they felt the same way about mine.

I’m not asking you to agree or disagree with my account of things, and that has little to do with whether or not the “experience was mine.” I am conveying information; you either believe it or you don’t.

When I said, “I can’t imagine defying the police that way,” it was a figure of speech. Of course I can “imagine” a whole gamut of aberrant human behavior. More accurately, I can’t imagine defying the police that way and not expecting consequences. In fact, as I related, after the night when they beat my hands to a pulp, I awoke the next morning, and, without excusing them for their abuse of power, I wrote it off as
something that simply happens when one runs afoul of the
societally-sanctioned bully-boys. In other words, I took responsibility for my own behavior.

This is not simply a matter of my not understanding the behavior of violent blacks, because I haven’t lived their experience; this is a case of blacks acting antisocially, uncivilly and abhorrently. Their behavior is not unacceptable from some biased, subjective point of view, which can be attributed to simply not having lived their experience; no, it is unacceptable from the point of view of civility as it has been fine-tuned through thousands of years of Western Civilization.

I don’t “assume” that aberrant blacks are “idiots and bigots who are causing and perpetuating their own problems;” I am OBSERVING it.

Long before Eric Garner “struggled to breathe,” he smacked away the cops hands and refused to be cuffed. Did he deserve to die, no? Nor does a fool-hardy teen who speeds at 90mph after drinking a couple of six-packs. But actions have consequences, and, in the words of Clint Eastwood’s character Bill Munny in “The Unforgiven,” “Deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it.” The same goes for the rest of the so-called “victims.” They didn’t deserve to die for their silly antics, but silly antics get a lot of people killed who are not deserving of it.

I don’t want to blame those three or anyone else for anything more than taking stupid chances which backfired. This isn’t a matter of society decreeing unfairly that these young black men “should” die as a sentence for their foolishness; society has simply not been that ruthless OR racist. It is a natter of these young men taking stupid chances in the face of real danger. If one plays with fire and gets burned, is the fire really responsible?

We can go through example after example, and, to be fair, you’d win a couple: Freddy Gray was way out of line, but, I think Sandra Bland got a raw deal, and there should be an investigation. In fact, every one of these should be investigated on its merits. But that’s exactly my point: let’s treat these as individual cases and stop trying to weave a racial narrative that encompasses them all.

I simply don’t buy the notion that society has “cast them as villains, lawbreakers, immoral people.” If anything “society,” by which I mean the media, defaults to casting them as martyrs and innocent victims, even when the evidence indicates otherwise.

BLM is a militant organization playing upon the decades-old grievances of our black underclass to tear away at the remaining tendrils of Western Civilization. Do you think its a coincidence that their primary source of funding is George Soros?

I NEVER said that anyone deserved to die, nor did I say they are dead, and it’s disingenuous of you imply as much. That was a shitty straw-man you set up there, and, frankly, given the high caliber of you discussion thus far, it was beneath you.

Are they destroying? Yes. That’s an empirical fact, borne out by the evidence. I mean, just look what they did in Milwaukee, and that was in the wake of a shooting by a BLACK police officer.

Would you like to see an itemization of black-on-white crime that simply never makes it to the national news outlets? I’ll be happy to provide the link.

I mean, the funny thing is that I accused you of something but it was me doing it, not you. I can’t imagine it. I’m sitting here arguing with you, trying to find some way to convince you to listen to my viewpoint and understand its value, but I have no way to do the same for you. I read your words and all I feel is anger and sadness. I don’t sympathize. I don’t think or feel any of this, and I don’t want to. So why on earth would you care what I think? You shouldn’t, you don’t, and you won’t. I don’t blame you.

I don’t know what to do about this stuff, but I constantly poke at the hornet’s nest (as many of us do these days) because I foolishly think, “I’m going to be the one to help turn the tide. My understanding is so crystalline, my empathy so deep, my position so fortuitous, that I am uniquely cast among all people to finally see change happen as a result of my efforts.” Can you believe that someone would go into an argument on the internet with that kind of quixotic nobility in their head? I’ll freely admit, it’s dumb and I’m sorry to waste your time with it.

I’ve been reading a lot about Global Mind Theory lately though. I’ve got this notion that what the combination of an ever-quickening news cycle, the expansiveness and speed of our communication networks, the ubiquity of constant-connection devices like cell phones, and the systematic undermining of normal people’s financial security - they’re all combining to create something that’s most easily thought about as a different kind of entity, a new life form. A body in which each internet-connected device acts like a neuron, connected to all of the others through various synapses. Bubbles of agreement, opinionated echo chambers, develop like regions of the brain. Each has its own specializations (empathy, courage, strength, focus, and more concrete things of course like mechanical skill and conceptual acuity and on and on).

The most interesting division to me, though, is the one between the internet itself and the people using it. We’re connected to our phones and computers just like they’re connected to other devices. We’re neurons too, synaptically interfacing with our personal devices. But we’re human, and the internet isn’t. As such, the two parts perform vastly different functions. The internet can’t emote. We can’t build machines that can do that. Who knows how you would. So it stores facts, it serves up information, it connects things, it performs operations that require fast and precise processing in a way that human minds could never keep up with. Humans, in turn, provide the emotion that the internet can’t. We consume the facts and connections of our counterpart organism, and we react. We spew our personal garbage, air our dirty laundry, fight with each other, like kitten videos on facebook, secretly swap beheading videos and child porn. Humans can’t hold, process, transfer, and share all this information themselves, but the internet can, so we force it to give us things we want and not give us things we don’t want. In that way, we guide it.

The interesting thing that emerges from this is a sort of collective attention. We’ve gotten so advanced at doing this thing that we do, of interfacing emotionally with a distributed fact-collection network, that we’ve begun to point it at things deliberately, and away from other things. We watch what basically amount to state-sponsored executions of black people with such a fervor that new ones pop up almost as often as new videos of otters holding hands. We watch people tell us that ISIS is bad, that global warming isn’t real, that oil is running out, that government is bad, that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump matter at all. The common thing in all of these topics is that we ALL look at them together each time a new fact is introduced, and we all emote toward them to create a consensus response. Of course, we’re not “of one mind” and so the consensus response is actually a pattern of argument between opposing sides. But it’s become automatic.

What does this mean, what does it portend? I don’t know. I don’t think anyone does, because this kind of entity has never existed before, at least not at anything close to the scale at which it’s been born. But we see some of the effects very clearly. The global rise in “right-leaning” and nationalist identitarian groups on one side, and groups based on defending personal and divergent identities on the other. They always existed, of course that’s true, but the intensification of each side’s rhetoric and the vehemence of their response to each other continues to escalate. It’s to the point where I’m scared to sympathize with a Republican talking point or a white racist statement, because we have so many examples of contrarians who go against narrative being utterly rejected by the collective consciousness. I don’t want that to happen to me. None of us do, so we tow our lines and we watch our borders like hawks (in America’s case, hawks with machine guns and bombs).

I guess what I’m saying is, I know you’re right, within your part in this whole drama. I get it, just as surely as I get that what I’m saying is right for me and my part. But I also know that neither of us is going to become a different part of this mind. I’m not going to become a racist any more than you’re going to stop being racist, and I can’t afford to hate you for that. You’re doing what you need to do, and I can’t in good faith claim that you’re any different in that regard than I am.

I’m not really interested in your facts, is what I’m saying. I don’t care, I will never care, and I will never believe you. I wish it wasn’t this way. I wish that there was some consensus we could come to that didn’t involve things that feel like hate and obstinance and willful disregard of facts. But as long as we’re participating in this organism (and what are we gonna do, NOT use the internet? Please.), it’s going to be this way. So yeah, I’m sorry for wasting your time, and thank you for showing me more about your perspective. I don’t like it, it makes me nauseous to read the things you earnestly believe, but I won’t try to pretend that I can do anything to change your mind. Sorry, and have a good one. Good luck out there.

I don’t think racists are just idiots. I hold as a fundamental maxim that there is no such thing as a stupid person. I don’t really care whether that’s ACTUALLY true - I hold that belief because it forces me to reject any “easy” answer as to why people are behaving in a way I don’t understand.

What I do think is that racists are people who concern themselves with a different sort of facts than I do, and thus come to very different conclusions. When I make reference to our respective dramas, and to “your facts”, I don’t mean to fall back on relativism in a true, epistemological sense. I do believe there is a “Truth” that has to exist and which can’t be bargained with. But that doesn’t mean we have the same facts. You can see by observing the things each of us make reference to that we know about different things from different sources and organize that knowledge in different ways. One way to talk about that is to say that “you and I believe that different facts are central in explaining [x or y phenomenon].” But I’ve found that people HATE it when I try to ascribe beliefs to them, so instead I say “we have different facts.” Not because there ARE different facts, but each person only has access to and knowledge of some finite set, and so mine and yours can easily differ.

Sometimes, though, it’s just disagreement about the interpretation of those facts into frameworks of understanding. You, for example, point to the preponderance of successful black athletes in professional sports as being evidence of some sort of inherent physical superiority among black populations as against others. I don’t. I see other phenomena at work behind that surface appearance, just as you see other things at work “just below the surface.” What’s to be done? It’s clear that you’re no longer interested in believing a different explanation, and I frankly don’t have the energy for the kind of painstaking point-by-point arguments it would take to hash out the reasons for that. But the fact that you have a coherent, self-confirming model for explaining the world doesn’t mean you’re right. It just means you believe what you believe. I happen to have a model that’s exactly as compelling for me, so I don’t take your vehemence as a sign of anything other than your ideological entrenchment. I gather that you return the favor.

I honestly don’t care about dictionary definitions. Dictionaries are political documents generated from within a cultural consensus as much as Daily Kos or Fox News, and the fact that someone decided to put some explanation of what people mean when they say “racism” first in line really doesn’t mean anything to me. You want to foreground the “neutral” version of racism that you proudly ascribe to, but your dismissive and shallow explanations of the actions of people unlike yourself illustrate very clearly to me that you’re happy to use that “neutral” position as a bludgeon. You tell yourself that you’re just being honest, but from where I sit you just look like you’re putting your fingers in your ears to keep from having to deal with complicated truths.

I also don’t really care about the right/left thing, but it’s a relevant frame for the simple reason that lots of people think they’re supposed to care about it, so a large portion of the conversations in our culture are carried out with explicit reference to it. I realize that it’s a limited distinction, and that it doesn’t really capture what’s happening in a deep enough sense. Hillary Clinton IS scary, despite me identifying as a democrat and a progressive. Nationalists DO have a point, despite being nauseatingly adherent to racially divisive and often-violent rhetoric. It’s just a rhetorical device, and one which I’m happy to abandon at the point that it becomes irrelevant enough that I can.

Finally, no, Global Mind theory doesn’t account for everything. There are many levels of social organization between the individual human and the global networked organism. Churches, governments, corporations - they’re all different kinds of organization that mimic some aspect of the individual in order to persuade individuals to participate in them for the purpose of helping the whole succeed. I don’t think I need to explain the entire mechanism of the global consolidation of power to have a good point about the internet. The devices are here, the controversies have been manufactured, we’re all broke. While it’s important to understand who the people are who are contributing at an executive level to the entities that have gotten us here and which continue to sustain it, it’s not the level of the problem that I’m concerned with at this moment.

I will note, though, that to me it’s laughable to describe the middle class as “independent” or “individual” in any real sense. Yes, there’s a belief that something called “individuality” is important, but the middle class is a stratum of society that is manufactured through the divergence of the upper and lower classes, and is sustained by the existence and activities of the things around it. Take away the corporate-feudal lordships that organize our society and the low-to-no-wage labor that keeps people like me and you from having to live dirty, demeaning lives, and the vaunted middle class collapses into what it was always trying to avoid being: a bunch of people who are just like everyone else. I don’t see the middle class as an achievement. I see it as a consolation prize and a false idol. We’re consuming the fantasy we’ve been sold by our controllers because we don’t want to fall into the nightmare of those whose backs we stand on. Independence. Hah. I know I certainly didn’t build any of this, to paraphrase Obama, and I’m pretty sure you didn’t either.

Dude whatever, you are literally saying that I’m denying the status of someone by not calling them stupid.

Come on though, am I really supposed to take an argument like that seriously? You’re contorting words and logic into strange shapes. I say that I respect intelligence enough to believe that everyone has it and you construct a frame in which that’s an insult. When you’re willing to go that far, what point can there even be? You’re playing a dumb and pointless game. Stop it.

Fine. I’m bad at arguing. I’m sorry. This isn’t pleasant. I don’t like talking to you. I’m going to stop now.

From high-handed, arrogant camp to total capitulation and full retreat in just three days.

That didn’t take long, you lightweight.