Fox News thread of fine journalism

I’m currently reading Ron Chernow’s excellent biography of Ulysses Grant.

Now that I’ve gotten to the post-Civil War part, it’s actually painful, unpleasant going at times, because the Reconstruction history is so incredibly frustrating and depressing. There was such possibility for a sweeping social reform the likes of which had never been seen – and in places it was agonizingly close – and it was crushed.

The problem with reparations isn’t that slavery and the following racism wasn’t terrible… it was.

The problem with reparations is that there’s no workable explanation of how it would actually achieve anything.

If writing some check somehow solved racism and made it all better, I’d be totally for that. It’d be awesome.

But it won’t. It won’t change anything in any meaningful way. It’ll do absolutely nothing beyond creating resentment, and giving people an excuse to fight against addressing actual institutionalized racism. Because you’ll have paid reparations. The point of reparations is to right a wrong. You can’t say you’re righting a wrong, and then continue to address that wrong after the fact.

Reparations are nonsensical, because you cannot calculate a numerical value to assign to the harm done by institutional racism. It is, literally, incalculable. Any monetary payment would be entirely arbitrary and meaningless. It would be nothing more than a political fig leaf, and it would serve no useful purpose. It would solve literally nothing, while creating more problems.

There is no easy way to fix these problems. You cannot simply write a check.

You need to do the hard work of slowly chipping away at the institutional elements of racism, and make things better every day. You are never going to redress the crimes of the past, and it’s a fools errand to pretend that you can. Our concerns should be about improving the world moving forward.

However, race and economy are not entirely disentangled.

Here’s an example: one of the ideas in the post Civil War period was to redistribute seized plantation land to freedmen. The idea was that if they did not possess their own land, freedmen would quickly be coerced into arrangements that were as close to Slavery 2.0 as the letter of the law would permit. Hence the whole “40 acres and a mule” concept. Broadly speaking, it wasn’t done, and we all know about the sharecropping situation that ensued.

To some extent racism is about skin color etc., but it’s also about economics. It was after all in the economic interest of the slaveowners to declare that skin color made African Americans different – not only because this way they could keep their immense wealth, but also because they could keep poor whites relatively tranquil by saying “hey, at least you have pale skin!”

I don’t know whether I’m for reparations or not, but it’s not a non-sequitur to link race and economics, at least not in our particular history and situation.

I’m sure she read or heard some factoid somewhere which may or may not have been accurate, but she didn’t understand it whatever it was, and spewed out some garbled version of it to try to make the argument that ‘Murica rocks.

Yeah, if your sentence starts, “Sure we had slavery, but…” you should probably just stop talking.

Unless you’re on Fox News, of course.

Its funny watching all you guys trying to find some kernel of sense in what she said. There is none.

What she says makes no logical sense but it doesn’t have to. It makes sense to their target audience, and that’s why they play these sorts of things. The target audience does not want reparations, they don’t want to fix anything, and they want to be told that the only problems in the world are theirs. Everything else is handouts for people who don’t deserve them so they twist everything about history and reality to ensure that the discussions about what happened and why don’t ever focus on facts.

It is nonsensical to even look at the date the USA officially abolished slavery in the first place. In order to believe that that is some magical date, you’d have to ignore everything that came after it which was, as @Gordon_Cameron stated, basically Slavery 2.0. And even after all those decades are taken into consideration, you’d have to ignore the fact that we’re still not talking about equality.

The whole this is history under the bridge argument falls apart a lot easier when you realize the ending point is closer to 1960/70s and not the 1800s. It’s almost yesterday that the law books actually really, really tried to address equality, and it never attempted to make anything right.

Could have put the owners in wage slavery and taken all their money to pay back former slaves. That’s Justice. Lifetime for a lifetime.

If we’re kind their descendants don’t get included in this deal.

“Fox News viewers are dumber than stumps! Film at 11”

except on Fox News.

Wait a minute, what is a non-republican fox viewer. Are there dozens of them?

A disaffected libertarian?

Captive waiting room viewers.

Yeah. Or work lunchrooms.

People occasionally glancing at mute tv’s at the gym.

I was in that demo for a while.

Loved staring at Glenn Beck’s face while on the treadmill. =/

Highly recommended for gym’s and waiting rooms.

So with thi’s you can turn off tv’s at gym’s and in waiting room’s?

Any TV at all. It just blasts out all 150 or so infrared “TV Off” signals for all the different brands of TV’s, takes like 3-5 seconds.

It starts with the most popular brands, so newer sets (last 5-10 years) are more likely to be shut off nearly instantly.

The maker page has some great videos of futbol fans having their sets cut at dramatic moments, Amélie style :)

So… this is a device that lets you be a jerk?