***Official Political Discussion Thread***

whywesteppin said:
Great, let's keep solving problems that don't exist and keep ignoring the ones that do.

While this might sound good at first blush, this is just another move by Trump to do to the entire federal work force what he has been doing for years to his cabinet and to the executive branch. It's hard to find a well-trained MD who will be anti-vax and agree that you should try mixing hydroxychloroquine with bleach to cure that cough, but finding some quack with years of experience peddling junk medicine on infomercials is a dime-a-dozen. And who needs a structural engineer from a top program to build that bridge. Just hunt down Ol' Larry who built a bridge on his farm.

I mean if we're talking someone to man the phones or deliver mail, sure. But if we're talking the scientists, doctors, and engineers who form the bulk of agencies like the FDA and the CDC, we could be screwed.

Likely though it won't really matter. The top jobs already look for both education and experience anyway.
Click to expand...

Social power is so important that non college educated people with rich parents are more likely to have a high paying job than college educated people who grew up in a poor household.

Basically you got a bunch of white dudes who dropped out of college their freshman year, started managing one of their dad’s boat dealerships.eventually they inherit the chain of boat dealerships or get a managerial job at one of their dad’s golfing buddies’ businesses.

Those people have it all but they want to be told that they are actually smart for not getting a college degree. This is why people like Mike Rowe are so popular among the petite bourgeoisie because Mike Rowe tells them that college is a waste of time and he also tells them that hourly employees should be happy to have low wages and no benefits.

That petite bourgeoisie contempt for education seems to inform Trump’s latest decree.

That’s not even the most sinister aspect.

As disgusting as it is that de jure and de facto legacy admission exist, as immoral as it is that student loans exist and as odious it may be that “networking” aka nepotism play such a big role in landing good jobs after college, it is still the case that college is the best path to upward mobility among poor and/non white young people.

Discounting education in Federal hiring just bad college that much less effective as vehicle for upward mobility fir anyone who didn’t grow up wealthy and well connected.
 
elpablo21 said:


Edit: wrong tweet



20200626_151336.gif
Click to expand...

This administration clearly has the ability to pass criminal justice reform that otherwise wouldn't get passed under democratic leadership.
 
junglejim said:


Something something something First Step Act. something something something Biden Crime Bill
Click to expand...

Ah, yes, the first step act. Specifically, I think you're referring to this Executive Order being the first step towards criminalizing political dissent, right? Protest in the streets, spend an indeterminate time in the jail bed sheets. #MAGA!
 
rexanglorum said:
Social power is so important that non college educated people with rich parents are more likely to have a high paying job than college educated people who grew up in a poor household.

Basically you got a bunch of white dudes who dropped out of college their freshman year, started managing one of their dad’s boat dealerships.eventually they inherit the chain of boat dealerships or get a managerial job at one of their dad’s golfing buddies’ businesses.

Those people have it all but they want to be told that they are actually smart for not getting a college degree. This is why people like Mike Rowe are so popular among the petite bourgeoisie because Mike Rowe tells them that college is a waste of time and he also tells them that hourly employees should be happy to have low wages and no benefits.

That petite bourgeoisie contempt for education seems to inform Trump’s latest decree.

That’s not even the most sinister aspect.

As disgusting as it is that de jure and de facto legacy admission exist, as immoral as it is that student loans exist and as odious it may be that “networking” aka nepotism play such a big role in landing good jobs after college, it is still the case that college is the best path to upward mobility among poor and/non white young people.

Discounting education in Federal hiring just bad college that much less effective as vehicle for upward mobility fir anyone who didn’t grow up wealthy and well connected.
Click to expand...
Yup, good points. I was thinking about it but didn't even get into the social/class aspects of it. Many (most) of those entering government jobs who are highly educated are minorities, immigrants, women, etc. They would never be getting these government jobs if education level was no longer a criteria.

This has nothing to do with trying to get the best people in these government jobs. This is purely driven by the "contempt for education" as you put it. Just wait till he replaces Fauci with Guiliani (but he has experience managing crises!).
 
Ezra Klein wrote and insightful essay about identity politics and the Democratic Party...

In praise of polarization
How identity politics changed the Democratic Party — for the better.
By Ezra Klein@ezraklein Jun 24, 2020, 8:30am EDT

Democratic lawmakers take a knee to observe a moment of silence on Capitol Hill for George Floyd and other victims of police brutality. Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images
Polarization, party sorting, and identity politics are central villains of our time. Politicians lament them. Pundits loathe them. Book after book has been written blaming them for society’s ills, from the decline of reason to the electoral travails of the Democratic Party to the death of American democracy.

But the past month of sustained, mass activism against police brutality offers evidence for the defense — that sorting around identity can be inclusive, that polarization can be productive.
The historically multiethnic nature of the Black Lives Matter protests, and the rapid change in polling around racial issues, is partly the result of decades of polarization that have put African Americans in coalition with Hispanics, Asians, and white liberals. The Democratic Party is increasingly a coalition of people who experience racism directly or base part of their identity on opposing it ideologically. This is something new in American politics, and it carries within it real reason for hope.

“If we were ever to have a national reckoning with our legacy of racial violence, it would require immense political power on the side of the people who wanted the reckoning,” says University of Maryland political scientist Lilliana Mason, who studies polarization. “We’ve never had a political party that was almost entirely in agreement that systemic racism exists, particularly among the white partisans. But that’s changing very quickly.”

Racism is America’s founding sin, and it cuts the deepest divisions in our political history. But those divisions, across the 20th century, existed in both political coalitions simultaneously. In 1994, 39 percent of Democrats, and 26 percent of Republicans, said discrimination was the main reason Black Americans had trouble getting ahead. There was a gap, but it was modest. As Michael Tesler, a political scientist who studies racial polarization at the University of California Irvine, has shown, up through the 2000s, the parties were more similar than different when polled on racial issues.

Barack Obama’s election, the Black Lives Matter movement, and Donald Trump’s rise changed that. Race became a central division between the parties, driven by demographic changes that gave a multiethnic Democratic coalition the numbers to win power, and drove racially conservative white Democrats into the Republican Party. By 2017, 64 percent of Democrats said discrimination was why Black Americans had trouble getting ahead, but only 14 percent of Republicans said the same. A 13-point difference had become a 50-point chasm.

Screen_Shot_2020_06_23_at_9.15.48_AM.png


The same massive levels of polarization were on display in the polling following George Floyd’s death. A Monmouth survey found that 71 percent of Democrats, but only 37 percent of Republicans, thought the anger driving the protests was justified. A CNN poll found 92 percent of Democrats, but only 37 percent of Republicans, believe the criminal justice system is biased against Black Americans. A CBS poll found that 76 percent of Democrats, but only 24 percent of Republicans, believed African Americans face “a lot” of discrimination in daily life.

The alternative to polarization is often suppression
Polarization can create the conditions for overdue reckonings, for broader coalitions. When the parties were mixed, and racially conservative whites were seen as the key swing vote, racial issues were suppressed in American politics. The passage of the Civil Rights Act is the exception that proves the rule: Civil rights laws had been blocked in Congress for decades, and the rupture required to unblock them broke the party system of that era. The polarization of the parties around race and ideology — a story I tell in detail in my book Why We’re Polarized — created an incentive for one party, at least, to prioritize issues of racial justice.

“As the parties became more polarized around racial issues, it became much safer for Democratic politicians to embrace racial issues,” says Christopher Stout, a political scientist at Oregon State University and the author of Bringing Race Back In: Black Politicians, Deracialization, and Voting Behavior in the Age of Obama. “Even in 2008, there was a lot of hesitancy to talk about race. Think back to Obama and Jeremiah Wright. But as white working-class voters who were racially conservative left the Democratic Party, it created space for Democrats to talk about race and be rewarded for it rather than punished for it.”

Joe Biden’s career reflects the arc of this change. As he has gotten in trouble for saying, when he entered Congress, in the 1970s, he worked often with conservative, segregationist Democrats. These weren’t just coalitions of expedience: He took positions on issues like crime and busing meant to mollify racially conservative white voters. But Biden changed alongside his party. By 2008, those Democrats were gone, and Biden was Obama’s vice president, in an administration that cemented the Democratic Party’s identity as the party of a multiethnic America.

Then Donald Trump emerged as a backlash candidate to Obama, further clarifying the divide for both sides. “So much of what defines being a Democrat right now is hatred of Trump,” says Tesler. “And so much of what Trump stands for is racially resentful positions and ethnocentrism. So it became really dissonant to be a Democrat who’s not on board with a racially progressive agenda.”

Today, Biden is the Democratic Party’s expected nominee for president, his success powered by black voters, his opponent Trump, his most important supporter America’s first black president. In his first remarks after George Floyd’s death and the ensuing protests and uprisings, Biden warned white Americans that “the pain is too intense for one community to bear alone,” and said that “with our complacency, our silence, we are complicit in perpetuating these cycles of violence.”

In a sharp analysis, the New York Times noted that Biden’s statement was notable for what was missing. “He made no attempt to soothe the fears of those white Americans who, while sympathetic to the plight of people of color, are just as uneasy about the kind of disturbances that left parts of Minneapolis in flames Thursday night.”

A few weeks later, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) dropped out of Biden’s vice presidential search and called on Biden to choose a woman of color for the ticket. “After what I’ve seen in my state and what I’ve seen across the country, this is a historic moment and America must seize on this moment,” she said. “I truly believe, as I told the vice president last night, that I believe that this is a moment to put a woman of color on that ticket.”

How identity politics can be inclusive
Identity politics is often tossed around as a slur, an epithet. A politics of identity is said to be exclusionary, pitting Americans against each other, denying them the common ground of shared experience. This is oft-made criticism of “Black Lives Matter” as a slogan, by those who prefer “all lives matter.” But we are seeing the rebuttal to that argument in the political reality of this moment, where 91 percent of Democrats — and 92 percent of white Democrats — express support for Black Lives Matter (as do 40 percent of Republicans). A politics of identity can be inclusionary, building bridges across experiences that would otherwise remain siloed.

The modern Democratic Party, for reasons of both demography and ideology, takes seriously the idea that to be Black in America is a different experience than being white in America. And that has formed a coalition that now takes Black Lives Matter as a multiethnic rallying cry. As Matt Yglesias shows in his essay on “The Great Awokening,” white liberals now express more liberal views on some racial issues than Black Democrats. In this case, the Democratic Party’s openness to “identity politics” has led white liberals to a politics that reaches far beyond their own experiences.

“If Democrats want to talk about public health or the environment through a racial lens, they don’t need to worry their white base will be turned off,” says Wellesley political scientist Jennifer Chudy, who studies the political dynamics of cross-racial sympathy.

Identity is never singular. We have many identities, some of them linked together, some of them sitting in tension. The story of modern political polarization is identities fusing together: Black, Jewish, liberal, atheist, urbanite — Democrat. White, evangelical, rural, conservative, hunter — Republican. Identity fusion creates stronger bonds of solidarity between those who share identities, and can create more conflict with those who become the out-group. It is both inclusionary and exclusionary. But for groups who’ve long been marginalized, who haven’t had the power to force their concerns and their experiences to the forefront of national politics, it can be transformative.

There is no action without reaction, of course. The promise of change that thrills some Americans unnerves others. Trump is president because Obama was president. We will not suddenly find agreement on America’s oldest divides, easy redemption for our oldest sins. And our political system is designed to reflect consensus, not resolve conflict. This is why, in part, polarization is so feared: It breeds government paralysis, wanton obstruction, dangerous brinksmanship.

Even so, we should prefer the difficulties of political conflict to the injustice of suppression. Police brutality is as old as America, but it has been rare for either of our major political parties to take it seriously, much less make it — and racial inequality more broadly — central to their agendas. Change at the level America needs may not be likely, but it would be impossible if neither party was willing to fight for it. That one is beginning to do so now is the product of relentless organizing, activism, and courage among Black Americans, but it is also the product of polarization, sorting, and identity politics.
Click to expand...

Yeah, that's why leftist, liberals, centrist, and conservatives that bemoan identity politics on the left can piss off, IMO. Most of these critics never want to engage with the subject in a productive manner. It is always framed as something negative that doesn't allow the truth to come through. And maybe it is time for the people that claim they want to build a multiracial coalition to fight the for the greater good, but feel that the only way to do so is embrace a form of politics that makes white people comfortable, might want to do some self reflection.

And the Dems needs to prioritize pushing through electoral reform so we can strip socially conservative whites of all the dispropriate amount of political power they have.
 
Last edited:
Nereyda Vuelve Por Dios said:
man white people crimes just hit different.

man can report to jail on a designated time. While our people get dragged, beaten, and killed without charges

got to tell the homeys to invest time into embezzlement or witness tampering. **** like that.
Click to expand...
:lol:

The day black people become the face of white collar crimes, will be the day white America decides that bankers are thugs that need to be put in supermax prisons if convicted of things like embezzlement and insider trading.
 
Nereyda Vuelve Por Dios said:
man white people crimes just hit different.

man can report to jail on a designated time. While our people get dragged, beaten, and killed without charges

got to tell the homeys to invest time into embezzlement or witness tampering. **** like that.
Click to expand...
This is a great example of how this administration is paving the way with criminal justice reform (for white people).
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

shaboozy
What's your NT routine?
2
Replies
37
Views
4K
ogbobbyjohnson773
ogbobbyjohnson773
chezzer10
***MLB FEET, EQUIPMENT, AND UNIFORMS 2024***NEW THREAD
2 3
Replies
74
Views
7K
mp23
mp23
datznasty
Official Niketalk Custom Basketball Shorts Thread
Replies
5
Views
1K
MakeNTGreatAgain
MakeNTGreatAgain

Thread Gallery

View Full Gallery

The ultimate sneaker enthusiast community.

NikeTalk was created as a way of giving back to both the sneaker enthusiast community and to the greater global community of which we are all a part.

NikeTalk is NOT affiliated with Nike Inc. in any way, shape, or form. All opinions expressed herein do not necessarily reflect those of Nike, Inc.

© 1999-2024 NikeTalk.com

Share this page

Back
Top Bottom