I have been meaning to get this, and its follow on videos, out there since November. It’s pretty clear to me what Biden has to do to ensure that Donald Trump does not find his way back to the white house. I’m sure it’s not surprising that I think foreign policy is key to this. I’m biased for sure. But it really does seem clear to me that ending the forever wars isn’t just the right thing to do, but it’s also the best way for Biden to achieve political success. It’s just such low-hanging fruit politically speaking.
The past month of protest and progress in the United States has been inspiring. The Establishment, Fox and Democratic, has expended a ton of energy on getting people scared of things like Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, and Police Abolition slogans. They haven’t managed to slow the momentum. The failure of CHAZ has actually been helpful, getting people to focus in on the possible again. All over the country, previously impossible looking things have been happening. There is certain to be back-sliding, but excellent progress has been made…
What I would like to see, and what today’s video argues for, is a shift in focus to what US white supremacy means abroad as well as domestically. Black lives matter. But so do Yemeni lives. The Yemeni catastrophe would not be possible if the US public gave a damn about Yemeni lives. Today’s video is an attempt to get people to care.
Winston Churchill is a complicated figure. He’s also a cherished one for the British, and for white dads across the English speaking world. He’s seen completely differently by the Indians, millions of whom starved to death on his watch, and there are very few others in the broader British empire that would have had much good to say about him. These historical arguments are important, and I don’t really have all that much interest in them one way or the other. But Winston Churchill is not just a historical figure. He’s a symbol. That glorious year and a half, between Churchill’s coming to power, and successfully convincing the US to save Britain, are worth emulating and celebrating. But for US politicians, the vital belligerence that made Churchill so valuable for that destroyed world, is something that should constantly be applied to our infinitely safer, happier world. That’s nuts. Which is why I made today’s video.
When should we panic? Donald Trump has obviously given freer reign to the nativist and racist instincts of my country, but how out of the ordinary is it really? There was a large industry and policy community based around fear of the other long before Donald Trump. In fact, there’s an argument to be made that his cartoonish attempt to put into practice all the ideas that Republicans used to only pay lip service to at election time has INCREASED support for immigration and multi-culturalism in the United States. It’s an interesting question. People are undeniably being hurt, but it’s often just because already existing policies are being carried out in a more haphazard fashion.
This video plays with the question. It focuses on a panic the Trump administration is creating around Chinese students and workers in the US, and places it in the context of decades of hate towards other groups that our country has been swimming in. It points out that the new China-panic might actually be a result of the diminishing panic about other groups. I don’t have any firm answers here, but it’s very worth thinking about.
US immigration history is hilarious. And also more than a bit tragic. New groups arrive. A new set of yahoos comes out of the woodwork, spouting the same hogwash as similar defenders of “Real America”, decades or even centuries before. Rinse, Repeat. Today’s video on Columbus Day peels those layers back a bit. 100 years ago, US bigots weren’t worried about Muslims or Mexicans, it was the Italians, and to a lesser extent the Slavs and the Jews. If you look back at this earlier era of bigotry, the arguments are almost exactly the same. The fear of change, “being swamped by multitudes” and having our culture changed never fades away. It’s never been justified either.
We’re in a weird panic transition moment in the United States today. Both of the great “threats” hyped by our modern morons, “Islamic Terrorism”, and the “Mexican Invasion” are fading away. As I predicted years ago, lower oil prices mean that there is less Gulf money for extremism. Also, Muslim countries outside of the gulf are getting rich enough to liberate themselves from the Saudi-CIA corruption of their versions of Islam. As I have also talked about at great length, migration from Mexico is basically done, and the few tens of thousands coming from Central America will never amount to the same sorts of numbers. Affirmative Action may keep the idea of a distinct Latin identity a little stronger than Italian-American distinctiveness, but in practical terms, the distinct group of Mexican migrants is already assimilating away.
The entrepreneurs that profit off of these old bigotries are still profiting, from YouTube to the White House. These panics are always strongest after the phenomena in question have passed, but savvier operators can already see them fading away. The Pentagon has now abandoned “terrorism” as a threat and they are now trying to push “great power rivalry” though that doesn’t really exist yet either. Forward Thinkers!
I don’t know who the next group to be panicked about will be. My hunch is that it will probably be Africans, as that continent is the only one that will be offering surplus population in the decades to come. Perhaps it will be Chinese or Indians, as the rising wealth of those countries, or perhaps a crisis in one of them leads to more migrants. We can be sure, however that there will be a new group for morons to panic about. This is profoundly sad of course, but it’s also a bit reassuring. We’ve seen these waves of bigotry before, and they’ve receded before. There is nothing new under the sun.
This one has been percolating for quite a while. I think the way we discuss Race, and “Racists” in the United States has some real problems. These issues were thrown into high relief by the events in Charlottesville this month. The Tiki-Torch White Supremacists are of course awful, but they are also a distraction. We LOVE to pick out examples of evil, and point to racists as something evil and different. Everybody can get on board the vilification train. The Alt-Right protesters are very deserving of our contempt, but that’s not always the case with our scapegoats. We get hung up on the evil of individuals, and we ignore our own faults and failings. This is a shame, because it’s the racism we all participate in that is the real problem.
I am very pleased with this one. It manages to throw together George Orwell, Steven Pinker, Jack Kirby and just a sprinkling of Jesus Christ. Good stuff as far as I’m concerned. More than anything else, the thoughts in this video can be credited to Steven Pinker’s Better Angels of Our Nature, a fantastic book on the civilizing process, the decline of war and about a million other things. You should start reading it today. It’s been at least five years since I read it, so it’s fair to assume the ideas have shifted on the way to this video…