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This reminds me a bit of something I read about why dictatorships, and corruption, are so common world-wide. I forgot the name but there was a book on it.
The basic idea was that when essential services are lacking and not guaranteed for everyone, such as healthcare and education you must sacrifice your integrity in order to secure those for your loved ones.
So, sure, behind all this can be plain crab-mentality, racism and so on. But I also imagine a significant factor can be attributed to fear of losing something seen as essential and not guaranteed.
a significant factor can be attributed to fear of losing something seen as essential and not guaranteed.
This is a lie told to us, as zephr_c alludes to, by those manipulating society for their own gain.
The reality is that there is enough food produced globally to feed 10 billion people, we only don’t because it isn’t profitable.
That isn’t to say the fear of being left without, under our current system, isn’t a very real one, it is, and I’m subject to it myself as I’m sure you are, my point is that we need to be aware (and make others aware) of who is telling us there isn’t enough (and putting our lives at risk for money by exploiting us more and more as well as withholding food and housing) and why, rather than just accept it as an inevitable reality, because it isn’t.
I’m from the Netherlands and I can’t say that I’m familiar with these issues personally.
Also how do you want to solve hunger in an area where warlords have power? It isn’t like we can do much about it from here.
I’m from the Netherlands and I can’t say that I’m familiar with these issues personally.
Then you’re not looking hard enough (or at all, if at this point you still think your country is somehow untouched by capitalism, which it isn’t)
Also how do you want to solve hunger in an area where warlords have power? It isn’t like we can do much about it from here.
You’re pointing at a tiny (and very random) symptom of the problem (one that in many if not all cases is created directly by and for capitalists and often the governments they own) and expecting an effective localised solution, but the problem is systemic, and the only way to fix a systemic problem is with systemic solutions - abolish capitalism and build a society that doesn’t need exploitation oppression and massive disparity just to exist.
Do yourself a favour, read up on ant capitalism, on socialism, on anarchism. Look in to your local community and how people in it are struggling (and they are), and how you can help, that’s probably the best thing you can do on a personal level.
For the people being manipulated, yes. That is usually a significant factor. Often the main one.
The manipulators don’t actually have that concern though. They’re generally pretty well off. They just want to change the rules to be even more in their favor in any way possible no matter who it hurts.
Aren’t healthcare and education serious issues in the US though? It doesn’t seem like a lie.
Yes, but letting the rich get richer while the poor get poorer won’t actually help if you’re in the middle. That’s just a lie to make you feel good about other people getting screwed for the benefit of the people causing most of your problems.
Can someone help explain their logic (or lack of)? What does changing their stance on abortion have anything to do with being able to maintain racial segregation?
Getting people riled up about abortion allowed them to get a large segment of voters to support their party. Anti-choice people are largely emotional, single-issue voters. Once you’ve convinced people that your opponents want to allow “baby killing”, you can pretty much count on their votes without having to actually cater to their needs.
I’ll offer a perspective on this, that isn’t exactly following the book’s argument. Broadly speaking, it does not benefit the working class in any way to vote conservative; government regulation is required to restrict businesses and protect workers’ rights. So, in order to gain votes, conservatives will often employ the tactic of publicising one particular issue that they know they are likely to be able to campaign well on, and trying to ensure that they win based off that issue. This works well, because if your candidate gets in, they are then able to vote on a whole raft of issues that the electorate may not support.
Previously in America, racial divides had been the basis of this tactic. Up until FDR, the Democrats had used divisions between black and white working class farmers to win the South (an interesting historical sidenote on this is the racial solidarity in the Populist Party, a third party that grew out of farmers unions in the south, and was eventually undermined by the democrats choosing a candidate who ceded to some of their economic demands). However, once the parties start to pivot, and especially once JFK/LBJ start to endorse the civil rights campaign, suddenly it’s not as electorally viable to openly use racial divides as your campaign strategy. So, to keep your party relevant and to be able to stall civil rights legislation, you have to a) make your anti-civil rights operations covert (Google cointelpro), and b) find a new campaign issue to get your candidates in off the back of. That issue, this book posits (and I think quite rightly) was abortion.
Hopefully that’s a somewhat clear explanation of the basic logic behind the explanation; if you’re interested I can point in the direction of sources to read/watch/listen further.
My assumption: Very few people are willing to vote for a party that outright says that they’re for racial segregation. So they invent a mostly unrelated issue that makes people ignore everything in favor of their stance on that issue. Then they can freely implement policies that keep the poor poor (e.g. the tax system, the justice system incl. the outrageous US prison system, and the hole “deliberately spread hard drugs in black neighborhoods” thing), which works to segregate because the recently desegregated are obviously overwhelmingly poor and uneducated. And that’s despite the fact that poor white people also suffer from these policies, but because of heavy propaganda and single issue voting they managed to have a lot of those poor white people vote for them anyway.
Though I have a hard time believing that segregation was actually the main goal, instead of just making rich people richer.
There’s some great behind the bastards episodes about this
The author isn’t wrong about the bible explicitly requiring first breath to indicate being a soul, the premier verse on this is Genesis 2:7 “God breathed in his nostrils and he became a living soul” I wear a ‘Jesus is pro choice’ shirt around and this is one of my arguments against those who tell me I’m wrong, the other being the whole God let Adam kill billions of unborn people thing.
