Unfortunately, it’s my first conversation on Medium so I don’t know how to quote your texts.

Copy/paste into your message, highlight the portion, rightclick.

The picture you shared with the sign, is the first time I see something like that and I have been on a number of protests here in Europe. I also would like to point out that this is easy to manipulate via photoshop. However, this is a single sign among many signs that are asking for things that I can get behind.

As stated before I’m against violence and the attempts at reverse discrimination. I also have to say that violence against humans is what I don’t support. I can actually sleep well with adjusting & paint thrown at racist advertisings, or similar acts of “vandalism”, although I wouldn’t do it myself.

I’m wondering at this point if the instances you are describing are a US phenomenon. The sign on the picture seems to be protected by the 1st amendment, in Europe that would not be legal.

This is fascinating to me.

I think you might be right that this sort of thing is unique to the US, but it’s hard for me to know for sure. The sign is definitely protected by the first amendment, as is the swastika and other such signs, and I don’t think signs like that should be illegal. But I do see them as a kind of bellwether for future events. We had a protest in my city a week or two ago at which a leftist collection similar to those at Charlottesville were waving USSR flags and carrying AR-15 rifles and shotguns. It was peaceful. But I don’t anticipate they’re going to continue to be forever.

Let’s dive deeper here. So why is it easier now to empathize with the dude that is driving his car into a group of people and find ways to explain why he felt threatened by a flag and a sign.

Let’s be careful with our definition of ‘empathize’ here. I do not empathize with him any more than I empathize with Osama Bin Laden, which is to say, zero. But you can’t end terrorism without realizing that the terrorists think they’re right, so you have to figure out why they think they’re right in order to beat them. The same goes for white nationalists, or for that matter the communists waving their USSR flags.

Black bodies and people have been tortured over centuries and to this days so, in my opinion, this is not even worth discussing anymore. The facts are there and they are obvious, white people oppress non-white folks, exploit them for labor and torture and rape them.

Every culture did this to every other culture every couple hundred of years throughout the history of mankind. It’s never stopped before, and I think it’s naive to think it’s going to stop any time in the future. White europeans during colonialism did a bang up job of it because white europeans developed the gun and the sextant. If the Aztecs had developed the gun and the sextant first, then maybe we’d have pyramids in Germany instead of churches in Mexico.

That is not an excuse for the atrocities of colonialism, but folks on the left need to realize this isn’t a unique thing. History’s most “successful” individual at the tribalist game was Genghis Khan. If we want to move mankind past the triablist game, then we have to quit playing the game, not use ID politics to rebuild new and different coalitions to run the game all over again.

(earning less than 10 dollars a week for your work as an underage person, makes you a slave)

I disagree with this definition. Not being allowed to quit your job makes you a slave. I think slavery is terrible, and I think it’s tragic that Americans let Hillary and Obama off of the hook for their hand in its reemergence in North Africa after they deposed Gaddafi with no governmental transition plan. In a broader sense, I think the worst thing to happen to the world this century has been US foreign policy in the middle east and abroad in general.

I was born in a socialist system, in East Germany, it was gone before I turned two years old. Still, my parents and grandparents taught me many of the principles they believe are worth living by and there are bits I found applicable others not.

My roommate in college was from East Berlin. He was very interesting. Huge Star Trek fan, for instance, but he’d never heard of Star Wars. He thought that was just Ronald Reagan’s plan to nuke the eastern block from orbit. Yay propaganda. :)

In historical discourse, the GDR is considered one of the most hostile regimes we have experienced till date, because of the 140+. How does that compare to 16,346 dead refugees on the EU borders between January 2014 and June 2018? Do you think the EU is a deadly regime that doesn’t respect human rights? Where do these refugees come from?

If I may be so bold, those dead refugees are the US’s fault for the same reasons that the reemergence of the black african slave trade is the US’s fault. As bad as military dictators are to a country, war is worse. Everyone would be happier today if Gaddafi and Assad (and Saddam Hussein) were alive and unchallenged by foreign powers. Assad would have put down the Islamic revolution in his country easily were it not for foreign aid from the US. But instead, we’ve got half a million dead Syrians and ten million more displaced into Europe.

All of those things are due to a neoconservative cabal that has infected both political parties in the USA, which traces its roots back to PNAC. PNAC disciples infect both parties, and guided the foreign policy actions of GW Bush and Obama/Hillary, and are responsible for the lion’s share of the true suffering in the world today.

But they’re not racist or white-dominating. The neo-conservatives backed Al-Qaeda in Syria against Assad out of a strategy of Russian containment. Also to try and get a pipeline built from Iraq to Europe that Putin doesn’t want. They overthrew Gaddafi because he threatened the petrodollar. Most of the really garbage stuff the US is doing abroad is blind to race, it’s all about oil.

So e.g. a black business owner is only hiring black people, doesn’t make it racism as non-black people can literally turn everywhere else and find a job. A white business that is not hiring black people, however, is racist as black people already have disadvantages to find white collar jobs.

I completely disagree with this, but I need to unpack why for a bit.

There are certain scenarios where having employees of a certain race, or gender, or appearance, or such, is part of the job description. So Hooters, for instance, hires women (of all colors) with big boobs to be waitresses. This is a job requirement. They should be allowed to do that. If, let’s say, a black person opens a Caribbean Restaurant and they want their servers to represent a certain culture, then hiring all black people should be totally fine. Same for Mexican restaurants hiring all latinos, or Chinese restaurants hiring all asians. Certain businesses have a reason to hire within gender or ethnicity

But an engineering company who hires based on race over merit is racist. Doesn’t matter which race they’re preferring. I’m okay with the boundaries within the current Affirmative Action laws in the US, which give preference to minorities when there’s an equal merit, but nothing further.

I think there’s some stuff you may not be thinking about. If an engineering company hires black people who are less qualified on merit than white people at the same position, then that creates a social dynamic within the company where the black employees are literally and measurably worse than the white employees. That feeds racism. It makes racism worse, because it reinforces racist stereotypes. The sort of social business interaction that will reduce racism is when a white employee works with and around a black employee that has just as much merit as they have.

Further, if a black employee gets hired by a company, and everyone knows the company hires black employees based on their skin color instead of their merit, that black employee himself or herself may not know if they were hired for their merit or for their skin color. That alone colors their experience.

It’s a bad idea all around.

A race-blind gender-blind meritocracy will allow minorities to thrive, because minorities do have merit.

Further, if you claim that a meritocracy will not benefit minorities, then you are stating that minorities don’t have merit, which makes you racist by R(1).