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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32438 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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What kind of left-wing person do you think comes here and would argue something other than "all rape should be investigated and the culprit found"?

It's a question about sanewashing, I guess. You see a lot of that here from people explaining away extremist positions from people on their side.

99% of any sanewashing going on is going to be for the right in this forum. The natural demographics skew that way.

The natural demographics may work that way, but the ground-level issues being discussed work overwhelmingly the other way. Progressive ideology generates most of the controversies we discuss here, and often does so in ways that are quite challenging to effectively defend. Sanewashing is one of the more effective techniques for defending the indefensible, so if one side's positions are generally less defensible, you'll see more sanewashing from them.

I think you are missing the flow of argumentation that drives lefties into anti-white corners.

Why do blacks rape a lot? Because of poverty. Why are blacks poor? Because whitey made them that way.

It's not that anyone goes out there and says 'whitey gets raped and that's good'. Or at least not any notable person since George Jackson, though there are probably a lot who share his black activist sentiments chirping on twitter right now. It's more that this is an ugly truth derived as a consequence of lefty priors.

It's very similar to 2nd Amendment arguments that flare up when the topic of mass shootings pops up. I don't think any gun control advocate would rest their case against a 2nd Amendment advocate who says that 'all mass shootings should be investigated and the culprit found'. That's not really a relevant answer. The relevant answer would be to a question of why people should settle for this as a status quo. How many mass shootings do we need before we do something about guns? How many white victims of black crime to do we need before we do something about blacks?

How many white victims of black crime to do we need before we do something about blacks?

I reject the framing. The focus on race can be useful when talking about why people commit crime, and perhaps even where you do your policing, but the fundamental goal is to go after all criminals. The demographics of crime should not alter the goal. I think this is somewhat of the foundation for how a leftist would respond, but I acknowledge that they're fully aware of the politics surrounding talking about disparity in black-on-white vs. white-on-black crime.

I wouldn't expect to see it here, but advocacy for black men raping white women is not a completely foreign concept in the left.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eldridge_Cleaver

Soul on Ice (1968)

"In the most controversial part of the book, Cleaver acknowledges committing acts of rape, stating that he initially raped black women in the ghetto "for practice" and then embarked on the serial rape of white women. He described these crimes as politically inspired, motivated by a genuine conviction that the rape of white women was "an insurrectionary act".[4] When he began writing Soul on Ice, he unequivocally renounced rape and all his previous reasoning about it.[1][2]"

And before we dismiss this as the ravings of a criminal psychopath (which Clever most assuredly was), "Soul on Ice" was on the bookshelf of my not-particularly-radical Midwestern parents. You can find lesson plans online for teaching it, presumably to high school kids.

Except your own excerpt says he renounced rape entirely. If I trust your excerpt, it actually sounds like okay - the author is explaining his own beliefs at the time, not continuing to believe those going forward. I would be leery about a child having to read it, but it's not literal advocacy for rape any more than an ex-fascist's description of why they believed in fascism once is advocacy for fascism.

Could a white supremacist who was a serial rapist of black women be rehabilitated in the public eye? Would his books be studied in school? No, of course not. Why not? Because the left, which controls the educational apparatus, believes that black on white crime is less serious than the converse.

"Could a white supremacist who was a serial rapist of black women be rehabilitated in the public eye"

I'm pretty sure that despite the best efforts of my fellow wokists, we still cover Thomas Jefferson in school fairly positively.

There's a conundrum with that one on the left, I believe.

Is MLK still left-coded at this point? I suppose it's a conflict between the MLK kinds and the newer versions.

Things like civil rights laws are based on the Constitution, and the idea of 'democracy'. They still call themselves 'Democrats'.

It would be somewhat awkward to acknowledge that all of the Founding fathers that wrote the Constitution -that all of the current corpus of laws used to bash right-wingers with are based on- were white supremacists.

The United States of America were founded on an explicit, European and Christian nationalist basis.

The Naturalization Act of 1790 (1 Stat. 103, enacted March 26, 1790) was a law of the United States Congress that set the first uniform rules for the granting of United States citizenship by naturalization. The law limited naturalization to "free White person(s) ... of good character", thus excluding Native Americans, indentured servants, enslaved people, free black people, and later Asians, although free black people were allowed citizenship at the state level in many states. The courts also associated whiteness with Christianity and thus excluded Muslim immigrants from citizenship until the decision Ex Parte Mohriez recognized citizenship for a Saudi Muslim man in 1944.

I'm sure the left will finally cut that umbilical cord at some point, but it's still somewhat awkward for now.

Why should anybody even bother tolerating all of these other people that the left want us to tolerate, if we do away with the historic mythical essence of the country, which is already pretty hollowed out? The 2nd Amendment doesn't need to be written on a piece of paper to have a value, after all

But this has no bearing on whether reasonable people could come together and agree upon the book's inclusion in school plans.

Remove the object-level details, and you're left with the question "If a criminal publishes media that explains why they thought their crime was acceptable at the time, but currently does not avow that reasoning, is there something wrong with teaching kids the media?" I suspect the answer is not a unanimous "yes", and questions of the left and right wouldn't even enter the discussion.

You specifically presented this as "advocacy for black men raping white women", though, when it is - within context - the exact opposite of that.

Yes, you are right. It's more nuanced. It's more like

"Criminal rapes white women for leftist reasons".

"Criminal admits he was wrong"

"Criminal is celebrated by other leftists for his amazing personal journey".

Clearly, mainstream leftists were not advocating for rape here. But they are also clearly apologizing for it if the demographics fit the right profile. Overall, second most disturbing book I found on my parent's bookshelf after "Naked Lunch".

see how the conversation would go towards "actually maybe we shouldn't investigate too much".

But the fact that we don't see that suggests that leftists aren't interested in that. The argument about disparate impact of lower standards in Title 9 has penetrated discourse for a while now, I even saw it years ago in a left-wing dominated place.

What kind of left-wing person do you think comes here

TBF you could leave the question there.

Curious, open-minded, and confident?

What are you driving at? Do you want to imply most left-wingers aren't this way?

I mean, there IS a strain of leftist who advocates for a form of 'racial justice' that allows oppressed groups more leniency for criminal acts, particularly when it is only damage to property involved.

There's also a much more common strain that blames criminality on poverty and inter-generational trauma and thus advocates for an approach that addresses socioeconomic inequality rather than harshly punishing offenders.

I think the question is would the leftist acknowledge the racial disparity, what would they attribute it to, and how would they suggest is should be addressed? Because investigating all rapes would, after all, end up with a racially disparate outcome in incarceration.

What would this discussion achieve? I dunno.

There's also a much more common strain that blames criminality on poverty and inter-generational trauma and thus advocates for an approach that addresses socioeconomic inequality rather than harshly punishing offenders.

Is there any way to know how common this strain is?

To within some degree of uncertainty.

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/11/09/progressive-left/

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