If Democrats were smart, they’d put a kibosh on this idea immediately.
But knowing how much they love to shoot themselves in the foot, there are going to be a few rogue Democrats who will continue to float this idiotic idea just long enough to lose a few more elections.
It is amazing how good the Onion is.
The only people bringing up reparations are those who want to spoil the election for Biden. Mostly foreign actors pretending to be soooo progressive that their liberal guilt pushes them to want to give out reparations.
Mostly foreign actors
do you have proof?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soYkEqDp760&t=9s
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/06/technology/russia-misinformation-midterms.html
The FBI has been warning us about an online misinformation campaigns that has been going on for almost a decade now.
none of those sources mention reparations at all
you should stop doing cointelpro shit
I have no doubt foreign agents help seed this stuff - there is boundless evidence of how Russia did this for 2016 for sure. But there are just enough idiots with lots and lots of time on their hands that pick this stuff up and then shrilly start denouncing others that point out that their endless sanctimony is not going to win hearts and minds of most Americans…
I think this seems to flange in with Bob Altemeyer’s work on Right Wing Authoritarians (RWAs) - he doesn’t spend much time talking about left wing ones because they are not much of a problem at this time and this place (U.S. and Canada). But you can see a glimmer of some of authoritarian tendencies in those that argue this way - they don’t CARE about winning hearts and minds, they’ll say, because their orthodoxy is correct and it just should BE. Without question. They don’t even think they should have to explain anything about their beliefs, either, most especially if they tick off some boxes on the Oppression Olympics.
Again, I think they are a tiny, tiny sliver of what makes up the left, but the noise they generate and the power they wield in some forums is hard not to notice. I think the only thing they achieve is some kind of point-scoring system that only matters in their heads, and helping to hand elections to Republicans. I’m sure they think they are winning some kind of progress on intersectionality or something, but what I think most others see are people that are very broken from a mental standpoint and who are ruining the brand of progressivism.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/watch?v=soYkEqDp760&
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
I do think there are an awful lot of people that have bought into it that are not foreign actors - if you venture into Oppression Olympics type of zones of the 'net and you’ll find them. I suppose some of those might be agents looking to put Republicans into power, but in some cases, questioning the ridiculous, childish orthodoxy (all xtian white cishet men bad; virtually anyone else is good) is bound to get you banned or at least your comment deleted in some of these zones, so it’s also moderators.
I fear this kind of stuff is what harms progress in this country so much. I’m pretty sure people adhering to absurd, ivory tower, useless orthodoxy are a very, very tiny minority, but any time they say/do something really dumb (stuff like this, or “defund the police”), it gets picked up by the fascists and all progressives get painted with this brush - which, going by polls on issues, is most of the country.
I think it is a mix. Some of the people you mention might have first heard about this nonsense from some bad actor (fascists posing as liberals) who was spreading lies, and now they are taking up the mantel for real.
When it all comes down to it, the regular Left (not the extreme “liberal guilt” idiots) do an awful job at getting their point across to middle America. They do a terrible job at communicating with average Joes. They don’t understand how to connect with real people. They do such a bad job at it, that they actively push away people who should be welcomed to their fold.
On the flip side, Republicans have done an amazing job at painting themselves as “real Americans” and have commandeered the blue collar, hardworking, cowboy, freedom-loving image all while their number one lord emperor is a billionaire from the bluest of states who shits in a gold plated toilet and wants to over-rule democracy. It is a master-class in marketing and image.
Yes, this. This seems like a redux of “defund the police”. And wow, do some on the left just seem to love the constant infighting and hairsplitting so much more than winning actual hearts and minds…
If people want more Republicans, this is how we get them…
Preach!
It’s like some of these people ENJOY losing elections just so they have something to bitch and moan about. They will find any position to be as abrasive and counter to public opinion as they can possibly think of just to be edgy. Your “defund the police” is a perfect example. I hate the cops as much as anyone else, but holy fuck is the defund movement so utterly ridiculous. Push for more accountability. Push for better training. Push for more public involvement in PD duties. But for fucks sakes most regular folks don’t want to see their police departments shuttered due to lack of funds.
Yes, IIRC, most Black people - if anyone bothered to ask - were not down for “defund the police” thing, it was more the white knight types that were having a meltdown on their behalf.
I don’t think any (reasonable) person can deny that cop-on-Black crime is awful and problematic and something like BLM was nearly inevitable as a result of this egregious criminality, but the answer is most likely not to turn your neighborhood into a war zone by defunding the police. White people wouldn’t want the lawlessness that is sure to result in their neighborhood, WTF would they think that Black people would?
Anyway, I know many people were saying “it doesn’t really mean what is sounds like”, but yeah, the messaging is fucking terrible, and yes, some people were proposing exactly what it sounded like too, so…get a much better slogan and messaging around it, maybe? If you want to disband one department and replace with an all-new one, for example, say that.
Again, all this seems almost perfectly designed to hand our country over to fascists. There are some on the left that will call you all kinds of names for pointing out what is fairly obvious, though.
Everything is about details. Yeah, most voters (myself included) will probably disagree with any 1-sentence plan on what is certainly a controversial topic.
So build out a robust plan and let’s start tweaking it. When I look for such plans, I see a lot of high-minded rhetoric about why we should do SOMETHING, but no specifics.
Pretty sure the implication is they oppose cash payments regardless of the details.
Ugh. This is one of those ideas that might seem just peachy to a certain type of person that has not thought about it very much, but I honestly think it is almost designed to create more Republicans and hand more power to the fascists.
Human history is an uninterrupted sequence of one group of people fucking over another group.Should Saudi Arabia pay reparations to Italy for conquering northern Africa in the 600s? Should Greek cities pay reparations to each other for the incessant warfare and enslavement they inflicted upon each other?
The last living freed slave died while Joe Biden was a Senator.
This is not ancient history. Fuck off.
As long we we make descendants of slave owners pay for it… there is no issue!
People who got generational wealth from it, should pay!
The only possibility of washing that stain is to abolish wealth inheritance for at least 3 generations. Anything else will just lead to more division.
So your plan to solve racial wealth inequality is to… make everyone poor?
Why don’t we also improve ADA compliance by breaking everyone’s legs, too?
You think wealth inheritance is the only way anybody ever gets money?
Of course not everyone. Just the people without the resources to set up corporations to “loan” 0% interest capital to their children!
If you redistributed the money equally instead of having some people inherit it, I kind of doubt everyone would be “poor” in the way you seem to mean. It’s more that no one would be “rich,” which would probably be a stabilizing factor, given that right now we have pre-French-Revolution levels of inequality.
