rant of the day
Ok, so i am looking around a little researching a few things before I really get into talking about Mexico and I stumble across some guy named Mark who is apparently in Mexico and I am not linking to his shitty site because I do not engage with conservatives at all now. I think they are liars on their faces and I believe that the 35% or so who still support the administration in washington do so really and truly ONLY because they are racists and support the race hate movement and the other kinds of hate (brown people, gay people, people who support taxing corporations or taxing rich people) . There is simply no other explanation that I can think of to STILL support the administration except from deep-seated emotional hatred of other people.
But here's the point: A lot of them really think that being "Called a racist" is just as bad as suffering from official or unofficial or historical racism. I don't encourage you to read it, but this guy's rant about how "tired he is of being called a racist" is just so typical and pathetic. I am so tired of hearing you try to explain that you are angrily entitled to not be called a racist. poor little guy, he got called a racist and that's so not fair. Not like racism itself is such a big deal. I mean, imagine actually thinking and feeling what other people must think and feel ?
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Update: Actually, when I think about it, living in Mexico, you really learn how much of a racist you are. I am constantly catching myself attributing romantic or noble characteristics to the many different faces I see here. I think part of being an adult and a decent human being is understanding that we all come from a historical and psychological background that encourages racism. Part of being an adult and a decent human being is understanding that we have an obligation to recognize that in ourselves and in our socities and try to stamp it out or flush it out into the open. We don't rely on the submerged hatred of the most ignorant and vile among us to shore up support for our ideological fantasies (if we just get the support of these hateful fanatics we can push through these tax breaks for ourselves) - purely disgusting.
We are all racist in the sense that we all asign attributes to people based on their non-voluntary characteristics such as skin color, sexual preference or gender, the problem is when this cognitive shortcuts based on our inhability and unwillingness to get inform make it into office and become a shortcut to the formation of political preferences. Governing has a lot of speech making, punch lines that somehow hit peoples minds, reinforce previous conceptions or draw a smile on their faces (no brains required in the process). The irony lies in the fact that both sides, yours and that guy Mark, are sustained by dividing the world in a binary logic of good and bad, I personally place myself to the left of the political spectrum not because I think corporations are bad, or poor workers are good, but because I think government has a duty to allow people's freedom to choose and grow. Private actors should be social actors in this process. Nothing hurts the left more than assuming that private money is evil and that government should kick their asses and take over their role. That is just the perfect formula for unconstrained political power disguised as social justice. There is no easy exit, but realising that is already a good start. Naming others is just cheap. Do I like racist economic conservatives? no, I don't, does namming them makes me a better person relative to them? I don't think so. Information gathering is costly in time and effort and we choose what to learn, unfortunately we devote our resources to read things that to not teach us much beyond what we already think 'cognitive screening'. I don't dream of a better world, full of armony and equality, it sounds like a happy place but not an achievable one, it would imply one of two things: 1) we all have the same preferences over life, society and politics (I wonder what kind of humans would those be) or 2) we all are under the preferences of a single leviathan who decides what is good, forces us to live under that concept, so that armony is a way to call lack of voice and equality is a way to name lack of freedom. So, Madison said it more than two centuries ago, humans are not angels, we should think of a place with rules for humans, no angels. We tend to blame the market for the mistakes of the State. The market is not a 'good' place, is a place for exchange. The State affects market's self-equilibrum, sometimes for good (allowing some comsumers to buy for less some key goods as health or food), sometimes for bad (replacing competition by the unobjective selection of economic actors, like private corporations under Bush). Thus, the problems of the market ought to be resolved by the State by implanting fair distributive policies that reduce inequality of resources and skills (taxes are just a part of that equation). It is a problem of our institutions, and I don't see Democrats in the US talking about it or not accepting campaign donations. Same with Mexico which needs an Intitutional reform urgently to allow democracy to become a way of GO VERN MENT. About gringos in Mexico, well...who cares really.
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