Lost Highway Times...Paths in Oblivion

All right, I've just gotten done surfing some hate websites, particularly British ones, seraching for some insight onto these groups and how to stop them and the theme of 'Political Correctness' seems to be coming up again and again. What this means in the above context is that hate sites and groups use irrational examples of PC to discredit the greater movement to tolerance and diversity within the United States and the United Kingdom. While it's not true that there's any cause and effect relationship between groups messing up in terms of going overboard with zealousness and people joining racist movements, in my opinion there has to be some other factor predisposing people to it in the first place, it certainly doesn't help out our cause that often the charicatures of PC are true.

I would argue that there's a rational reason why PC strategies which take knee jerk reactions to new heights exist in the first place and that, on top of it, that while this might have been somewhat rational in other decades that it's increasingly irrational in today's environment.

Basically, I see PC statements which go above and beyond the call of duty into the fanicful, knee jerk, and down right ignorant realms as coming from an exagerrated sense of a broad liberal agreement on fundamental social issues. Because this agreement is thought to exist there's less of an attempt to convince people than there is to harangue people with the expectation that they'll just follow along. It's irrational in that agreement behind liberal values cannot be automatically expected in today's environment. It was seriously being challenged in the '80s and it's under attack again today, with 9/11 probably providing much more of an immediate basis for opposition than Reagan was ever able to create.

But back to the assumed broad liberal agreement. Ideas like this tend to see the basic questions as already having been answered and the only job left to do is to act on this understanding in totally opposing those who have different ideas. While opposing extreme notions like biological racism genuinely makes sense as a no brainer the same cannot be said of much less intense ideas, for instance the assumption that all human beings are predisposed to be good. Where I'm going with this is the following: when people stupidly assert that members of minority X are always persecuted and so therefore any time a person asserts that he or she, in acting the way they did, for example in comitting a crime, was a victim of society they tend to support this without looking at the facts, based on the idea that people are basically good, it weakens the support that other, more established, liberal concepts have. Why? Because there are good and bad people of every race and color, there are dishonest people of every race and color, there are people who are hardened criminals of every race and color---to argue without even looking at the facts that person X is automatically a victim of circumstance is to go against common sense, even if indeed people of X extraction are structurally discriminated against. This is something that people who just assume that the liberal consensus is natural or guaranteed don't seem to understand---that in not applying basic observations about human nature to everyone and instead living in this fantasy land where no one ever tells a lie and the oppressed are always ennobled and righteous they therefore cast doubt on more established liberal ideas, which can lead right up and to that which says that racism is wrong.

The more shrill people condemn a person for pointing out simple facts of human life the worse they look and the more they look like they're just ideologues who are out of touch with reality.

The inability of liberal groups to recognize that the liberal arguments aren't automatically meeting with acceptance anymore and the related failure to change tactics in convincing people that there are serious problems related to race and economic power in this country are prime reasons why, in the face of more black men being arrested and thrown in jail on drug charges than ever before, with a staggering number of black men either having been in jail or on probation, we can't get public to oppose the policies which put them there.

It's not so much that potential support isn't there as it is that no one believes the idea that people convicted of crimes are automatically victims of circumstance. If people would simply say that there's both social responsability and individual responsability it would change so much but liberals don't seem to be able to see that allowing for the possibility that some drug dealers are some really bad characters does not negate the fact that a big reason why they probably are engaged in that activity is because of the racism experienced in their economic and social life because they're black.

And to say that liberals really don't say things like that all people accused of comitting crimes from certain groups doesn't really cut it. People in fact pay attention to crucial decisions and cases which they feel represent the real thinking of a group and generalize that case to other cases. An example of this is the "black rage" defense used by Communist Party associated lawyers in New York in defending a black man who brought a sawed off shotgun onto a subway car and deliberately shot and killed white people because he hated them. Saying that he's not guilty of premeditated murder, which he literally was, because society had driven him crazy because of the racism he experiences, makes people, who can picture themselves or people they know being randomly shot by this guy while riding a bus or a subway car, decide that the liberals are fucking crazy and that none of what they have to say is worth anything if someone who has taken the life of several people can be pressed to get off scot free because of his skin color.

No matter the effects of racism in this person's life, several people lay dead as the result of his actions, people with family, friends, children, parents.

To say that their suffering means nothing because this person was the member of a minority is an insult and an outrage.

But this is how opinions get formed.

Which is why people on the left and in liberal-leftist circles would do themselves a favor, in terms of credibility with regular Americans, if they adopted some basic realism on top of their liberal beliefs. If not they're going to be further and further marginalized and in the place of a culture which is fundamentally against exploitation and injustice will come one which is fine with both concepts.

If you want people to come around to your position and to believe you, start by stop making stupid mistakes which discredit your cause.