On Personal Responsibility and Privilege

The ideal of personal responsibility is the only part of conservatism that holds any value or appeal for me. I do agree that there is a valuable truth there, that there is something deeply imbalanced placing all of the responsibility for inner-city problems on "society" and giving the gangstas, their parents, their community a free pass.

The problem I have with conservatives (and libertarians) emphasizing personal responsibility is the total lack of appreciation for the big picture, the context in which folks are failing to raise good kids, or kids are failing to become good citizens. By emphasizing personal responsibility over the reality of ghettos, of police crime & abuse, of joblessness, of systemic racism that makes it 3x more likely for a white to get the job over a black, that makes the loans 3x more expensive for a black, that makes the car 3x more expensive for the black, ... these things all matter. Not just a little. A freaking ton.

To me, I can't understand the lack of understanding of the set & setting (the context) except to frame it for myself as a matter of white privilege. Privilege is the ability to not-think about a lot of stuff - to take a lot of stuff for granted - and not even be aware of what you're not thinking about, not worried about, not concerned about, doesn't enter your thinking at all, because it is true for you, due to your privilege, and you're simply not aware of it at all because of your privilege.

So, a lot of people who experience life growing up in middle class or better families in America (sometimes regardless of skin color), believe with all their hearts that if the folks in the ghettos would just work as hard as they do, they would succeed. That their sense of personal responsibility and self-determination are what sets them apart. That life is hard, but if only these other folks would put their noses to the grindstone they'd have a solid chance to succeed, just as they themselves do.

This line of thinking - is so fundamentally intertwined with a world-view born of privilege. Of seeing things work out when they try hard. Of only having themselves to blame for things not working out. When they themselves are lazy, then things go badly. Or when a friend or class mate is lazy, they see the problems that flow from this. But even then, most times, such people can redeem themselves by learning their lesson and getting with the program.

But this whole world-view is one supported by having stable parents. By having only to worry about yourself, for the most part. By not worrying about whether you'll eat today. Whether your father will come home and beat you. Or some other man your mother just brought home desperate for love and attention, even if it means the kids getting beat up a bit. Or no parents around at all, and the responsibility of feeding your little siblings falls on your 10yr old ass. Or of being shot at on the way to school. Or pressured by your friends bigger brothers to run drugs for them - which would pay some bills, get you some standing (and you'd be "protected" by your gang), and so on.

I just... I cannot imagine living under those conditions and being expected to just "study harder". "Focus on school." And worst of all - "It's my own fault - my laziness - for not doing better under these circumstances". I just... I would be livid with fury if others who have "everything" came down to tell me I'm a moral failure for being unable to cope in the way they think I should be able to when they haven't lived this life for one friggin' second of their pampered-ass privileged-ass mutherfucking-lives!

Yes, responsibility has to also be shouldered by those who live in ghettos. I think there are many, many heroes who try to stand for justice and reason every day in such communities. But corruption, police-abuse, governmental incompetence, and outright hatred of blacks get in the way time and time again, and reinforce the social structures and patterns time and again, all the while some ass-hat at Fox is screaming about you having "a refrigerator!" - as if that is what marks living the easy life, or having privilege like they do!

And to sort of head-off a really common response by other whites and privileged folks I've had this conversation with -- whatever degree of "but I grew up poor / underprivileged / worked my ass off to make it where I am today / I struggle to make ends meet / I had less than perfect parents / I was abused as a kid / etc" -- sure, all of those things are true enough - but they're a pittance compared to what ghetto kids face. And you have every opportunity to change things for yourself. You can go get a job, and are 3x more likely than any black to get the same job you're both competing for. You very likely have family with some resources to help you out should your ship really tank. You can definitely go get public assistance, and you're very likely to face a streamlined process that doesn't immediately suspect you're cheating the system and you're a lazy bastard mooching off of society. You have resources you can fall back on, so you have a level of freedom to take chances in life because you freakin' know you'll likely be okay in the long run.

Ghetto folks do NOT have this same level of assurance of support. They have much worse chances for a good outcome in every possible direction they look. You're likely to get that job, not them. You're likely to be paid more when you land that job, because of the unwritten rules that indicate that a white person is worth more than a colored. You're likely to be trusted more, given more autonomy and respect in any position you hold. I'm not saying you're going to be treated wonderfully by everyone, but you're likely to be treated better in every single thing you do and try in life, as compared to a colored / immigrant. You don't have to worry about deportation, and you worry a shit ton less about police brutality or wrongful imprisonment!

I really don't think personal-responsibility is the primary issue here. It's important, for sure, but emphasizing it is exactly what every racist and privileged person does, and it only adds more weight to pushing down the exact folks you're thinking you'd like to see succeed.

On Gang Culture, Racism, Classism, and Radical Self Reliance

In response to the idea that inner city kids are a product of poor parenting...

I really doubt that this was due to the parenting - at least for most of these kids.

I would suggest that it is due to living in a world surrounded by people who shoot each other - the gangs. Why are there gangs? Because of a pervasive hopelessness. Because everywhere an inner city child looks, there is poverty and guns and killing and hopeless adults who aren't able to find jobs and pay the bills, and stressed out mothers who also can't find jobs, and schools where the teachers are freaking out because everyone is shooting each other and bringing guns and knives to school and on and on.

The very conservative (and libertarian) idea that this is a product of a moral failure to raise children well is .. as far as I can tell, naive.

I'm not trying to say that culture isn't important... at this late date, there is a strong element of gang-worship, of bling mentality, of live fast because living for the long run ain't worth it.

But that just underscores the liberal point: there is no real evidence that if you're a black kid in an inner city that you have any rational reason to think that you will be better off if you study and work towards a long stable life of fitting into the larger world.

The reality is that our prisons are full of black inner city folk. The big majority are the people from their neighborhoods - their fathers, their uncles, their mothers, their brothers, and so on.

And I don't know how that anyone can honestly believe that human beings are born equal yet turn into such horrible people unless you're implying that there is a strong element of genetic predisposition to moral failing.

And there are many studies that show if you take an inner city child and raise him or her up in a suburban home, they're likely to have white people attitudes. You're saying it's entirely what their mother & father said to them that makes that difference?! Or maybe it is seeing everyone around them preparing for a life of paying the bills and being a citizen? And critically: seeing that they're succeeding.

Watching those who struggle to do right fail in the face of overwhelming poverty and racism - with the police attacking you or your friends or your parents or your neighbors; you're just not going to get the sense that you're on the same side with the cops, or with society as a whole. You're clearly the wrong color, coming from the wrong side of the tracks, and unless you're a basketball / football star, your prospects are shit, is going to give you a very different view of your potential futures and what strategies might be sensibly applied to your life.

Seriously! Parental upbringing is the problem?! That's flat-out vastly insufficient to explain the phenomenons of inner cities, and would fit well with every racist group on the planet: the Jews are garbage. The Spics, the Beaners, the whatever. Their culture is to blame. Their upbringing. There is something fundamentally wrong with them.

No, there is something fundamentally unfair about the world, and kids aren't stupid. They get it by the time they're about 10 yrs old. This shit is rigged, they're on the losing team, and any attempt to change teams will be met with fierce opposition by both sides. They're fucked up, down and sideways. So, if they're fucked, then there's nothing for it but to get what you can before you're shot. To do your best for your tribe. There's honor in that, clearly. Fuck the man.

"Liberal"

For those who are still confused by the vitriol aimed at "liberals" and "liberalism"

I'm far from the first to point any of this out, but it seems to me that many continue to be baffled by why "liberal" is a dirty word in my book:

Basically, American "liberals" (self-identified) are better referred to as "neoliberals" or "bourgeois liberals" - liberals of middle and upper classes who wish for personal freedoms and ignore the suffering imposed by liberal capitalist markets at home and abroad.

Certainly that is the core of my criticism - "liberals" in American common parlance - i.e. as most Americans understand the term (i.e. those on the "opposite" side of the political aisle from "conservatives/republicans")...

That sort of liberal is happy to be ignorant or self-deluded about the evils perpetrated in the name of America and Capitalism and Globalism to untold billions of suffering fellow human beings who are effectively made to live in slave labor in nations which are themselves enslaved to America or its western allies.

It robs people of their autonomy, dignity, self direction, local accountability, right up to and including death by near starvation wages and inhuman working conditions.

This is not a happenstance or a fringe effect of American style capitalism - but rather a direct desired result to grease the wheels of resource extraction - whether it be raw materials robbed from the ground, water, wildlife, or vegetation; or human labor robbed from the populace...

Rather, this outcome is intentional and deliberate and orchestrated with the use of propaganda and terror viz the CIA and black ops and outright military intervention and color revolutions and bribery of local officials. This terrorism includes the funding of local (or even non-local) violent groups - who are often trained, armed, and aided by the US in order to carry out attacks against any who oppose our enslavement - most often targeting the civilian populations in order to murder and instill fears or mislead them into believing that they're actually being attacked by another group and should help the American agenda for their own good.

American "liberals" claim to be the dictionary definition - accepting, loving, compassionate, open to change, etc., while absolutely turning a blind eye and deaf ear to all of the above - denying its existence - insisting it is all propaganda - siding with the USA's doctrine of "Exceptionalism" to "justify" the rape and pillaging of most of the planet so that they get the material benefits of a bourgeois lifestyle.

It's a quid-pro-quo arrangement: I, the American Liberal, will turn a blind eye to the evils you perpetrate and not agitate politically for reform as long your evils keep me relatively well off.

That's the core of "American Exceptionalism" - we can do what ever we wish to the planet and are above international law or even the most basic levels of human decency because we're full of "exceptional" people who deserve only the very best at any conceivable cost...

Atheism is not a religion - or How 5 is like pie... (or NOT)

From Wikipedia:
"...most agnostics see their view as distinct from atheism, which they may consider no more justified than theism or requiring an equal conviction.[43] The supposed unattainability of knowledge for or against the existence of gods is sometimes seen as indication that atheism requires a leap of faith.[44] Common atheist responses to this argument include that unproven religious propositions deserve as much disbelief as all other unproven propositions,[45] and that the unprovability of a god's existence does not imply equal probability of either possibility."

Arguing that Atheism is a theism, is akin to arguing that "5" is a "fruit". It is not, by its very nature, and cannot possibly be. One can confuse the issue and make confusing observations such as "there can be 5 fruits, 5 fruits taste delicious, my favorite pie has 5 fruits in it..." and so on. But you're simply confusing the issue... not proving that 5 is a fruit, or fruit is a 5.

A person could, to my mind, spend all eternity positing unprovable possibilities, and then engaging in the pointless exercise of trying to prove or disprove each of them until he or she collapsed with their last breath. Such a life is, to my mind, wasted. I much desire to avoid that fate. To give credence to the argument that in order to not believe in god - to outright claim that it doesn't exist - requires such a meaningless waste of a lifetime is tacitly buying into religion's frame of reference - the very world-view that leads to so much human suffering.

I reject outright any such frame of reference, so I don't need to waste my life disproving every possible proposition, no matter how ridiculous. And any argument that requires that we limit our minds to that frame of reference has already lost - has already proved itself a doomed enterprise, by failing to recognize the absurdity, the suffering, the pointless waste that it is to try to disprove every goofy thing that could-possibly-be-but-there-is-no-reason-to-think-it-might-really; and by that, proves the questioner to be profoundly confused and ignorant of the underlying truths - essentially to be ignorant of the most important thing: their frame of reference.

New Atheism - the kind that doesn't piss-around with useless "we cannot know therefore we cannot really say", or the equally mealy-mouthed "we don't think it's likely, but we respect every goofy thing everyone might believe no matter how destructive to society and the very health of this planet" - is not trying to win hearts or minds or play the stupid game that religions do. New atheists acknowledging what is inevitable, indisputable, fundamentally true. What science shows to be fact.
All religious beliefs are by their very nature mental masturbation and wasteful of life, mind, and existence, due to the fact that they don't have any error-correction mechanism. They can posit any ridiculous notion and because someone believes it - it is sacred and indisputable.

I don't mind others having all sorts of goofy religious beliefs, per se. But I don't need to waste my time on them, insofar as they don't curtail my own life, or insofar as I don't care about the poor schmuck who's so abused him or herself with those blinders.

However, I take passionate unction towards anyone who tries to shoe-horn the conversation of atheism into one that can only support the untenable world-view that proof of the ridiculous is required in order to dismiss the ridiculous.

I understand that emotionally and culturally (and even humanly) that folks often find that they are afraid. Afraid of death. Afraid of the unknown. Afraid of pain, loss, suffering. Human beings often feel the need to appeal to a higher authority, someone they feel they can trust to tell them what is the right thing to do.

This is a need to feel that there is a parent-figure watching over them so that they can feel confident that everything is okay.

However, that is an emotional short-coming on their part, and by no means requires that I, or anyone else, participate or prove to them anything, nor justify my own rejection of such stupidity and short comings for any purpose whatsoever.

Again, the perspective that a world-view, or frame of reference need prove itself to be "good" is already devolving into the blinders of religious dogma and foolishness.

Atheism doesn't try to justify itself. It doesn't acknowledge a connection between one's religion and whether you're a good or bad person. Goodness and badness are relative to who benefits, who suffers. People's behavior is far more motivated by our basic biological necessities and circumstances than by such ephemeral minutia as religious beliefs. We're the product of millions of years of trial & error, of brains that got eating and shitting right, and later mastered social grouping behaviors. We are quite literally layers of minds - deep down we have our lizards stems, and above that a much larger mammalian layer, and above and to the fore of that we have our uniquely Human frontal lobes.
Atheists have a wide variety of spiritual beliefs, have a wide variety of "goodness" or "badness" or "charisma" or "bluntness" or any other characteristic you wish to name. None of those traits has anything whatsoever to do with Atheism per se, any more than 5 has to do with pie. They're not related. At. All.

What sparks me about conversations with religious folk is that I see you as requiring that we speak in religious terms: goodness, badness, beliefs. Atheism doesn't doesn't exist inside of any of those. It is not a belief, nor is it a faith. It is, inexorably, incontrovertibly, the search for that which honestly, truly is. It is in fact the very essence of 'reject that which has no evidence,' and simply trying to find 'that which is.'

This is quintessentially why atheism lends itself to science. Not the magical pseudo-science that most religious and laypeople believe in - but rather in the actual, provable, incontrovertible, inescapable, what-is (or in Buddhism, suchness: Tathātā/Dharmatā).

It is also worth awakening your mind to the fact (not belief, not faith) that Buddhism is not a theism, and should not be lumped into religion anymore than Enlightenment or Humanism or Secularism should be. Philosophy is better term, because it is better grounded in an honest desire to discover the truth, rather than the deceitful desire to hide the truth from oneself in order to conform to the will of others and "fit in".

I would posit that the word belief is inappropriately applied to Atheism by religious folk. Atheism is not a belief - it is not subject to the "might be true, might not be". It simply rejects that which has no basis in reality. Religion exists within the world-view of belief - it might or might not be true, and it desperately tries to hide the truth and divert people's attention away from even thinking about the truth or falseness - the likelihood of what it posits to be truth. If you don't look too hard, don't think too much, you can stay happily ignorant in the fold of religions.

But science looks for what is, what is repeatable, what can be observed by everyone, consistently, repeatably. Its only "belief" is that these things constitute solid evidence of what is, and that there is something that-is in the first place. i.e. that there is a reality that we all share that is independent of our desires for what it should be, but simply is what it is.

I certainly believe in science (i.e. I have no way to prove the existence of existence). Science is the most useful philosophical point of view I have encountered in my life, and requires the least faith of any philosophy. Again - only the belief that there is something real that we're learning about.

But atheism is even simpler: It only rejects the silly magical invisible guy in the sky stupidity. It makes sense from multiple logically self-consistent frames of reference, and I know it equally from several coherent spiritually satisfying frames of reference.

But what you choose to believe, or come to know for yourself, is your own business. And I couldn't care less (other than a basic desire to see you not force the suffering upon yourself that comes part & parcel with all theism and religion in general).

But please do not limit your thinking so drastically that you insist that 5 is a fruit - that atheism is a theism. It is not, nor ever will be.