SCOTUS under Trump

Pretty sure I wouldn’t want to deal with the local cops in a place where someone would think this was a good idea.

That’s Mississippi Burning kinds of trouble.

I really appreciate your optimism here but after the last election have a hard time sharing it.

Like most libertarian solutions, this entire thing falls apart when confronted with reality. There is plenty of that upthread (nice work, fellas), but dude, Timex, your position here is absuuuuuuurd.

I mean, I like that your basic premise is to assign all powers to the people and then only give them to the government in direst need. But there are so, so many cases where “just boycott it, guys, geez” is a downright stupid answer to the problem of “people of a class being refused service.”

What do you think happens when Texas goes full moron and decides you can refuse service to anyone for any reason, protected classes be damned? Do hordes of protesting brown people convince those adorably backwards white business owners to reconsider their positions and sing a Randy Newman tune at the end of a Very Special Episode?

We know exactly what happens. A decade or so of terrible violence inflicted upon the people by the state, ethnic balkanization and retrenchment, followed by the National Fucking Guard having to be deployed to keep the worst of the assholes in line. We’ve literally done this before. Yes, people are literally that shitty. I’m sorry that the evidence doesn’t comply with your worldview, but when that happens the evidence ain’t gonna be the one to change.

I understand, but I think we need to keep in mind that there’s only a relatively small core of people who are actually hard core racists.

There are a lot more who simply “don’t really care” about racism, as long as it isn’t in their face. That’s why the groundgame matters, because it forces them to deal with it. It make them choose a side. And I think that, as long as you do it right (i.e. non violently) you can get them onto your side.

Honestly, if that’s not the case, then you ain’t gonna win the fight anyway. If the majority of the population opposes something, trying to force it upon them from courts is unlikely to work real well anyway.

Maybe. That happens. But, again, that kind of thing draws national attention. It forces people to acknowledge what is happening, and forces them to take a side. It removes the ability for them to just pretend nothing’s wrong.

My position is how it actually got fucking done in the civil rights movement. Saying, “That’ll never work!” when it fact it did actually work, is absurd.

Maybe this is the part where the disconnect is:
To me, the triumph of the civil rights movement was not in the passage of laws, but in the changing of peoples’ minds. The fact that more people reject racial bigotry is the manifestation of lasting change, not laws passed by congress.

As someone who lives in what was purple state, I can tell you it was the laws.

No one’s minds changed, they’re still racist as fuck. And the ones that aren’t are mostly still pretty racist for the most part. What happens when the side people take is the racist side? Because they will. I don’t recall where you live, so maybe in your area it would work out fine. I can tell you from over here it would get ugly, in the South people would die.

But I think folks minds DID change, even if it wasn’t all of them. Overall, nationwide, thoughts about race are different. Perceptions of racism are different now.

And that didn’t come about due to laws. The laws came about due to that change in perception.

For the record, I’m in rural PA. There’s definitely some degree of racism here, but it’s probably less overt than some places in the south.

Straight-up bigots hold the seats of power in many areas. In fact, we live in a country in which a man entered the sphere of politics by promoting a racist lie, and was then rewarded with the presidency.

We have a long, long way to go.

Which means we need to fight to retain and expand laws that protect the vulnerable, not roll them back.

My Congresscritter is an open white nationalist who wins over 60% of the vote and who’s minions death threated his opposition out of running.

Did you try boycotting him?

I just flat-out don’t believe this, but maybe I’m wrong. I’ve never heard that the Civil Rights Movement owed its success to economic boycotts. If that was the case, I can’t imagine why Republicans haven’t rolled that factoid out at every opportunity. Are they just ignorant about history? Actually, I already know the answer to that.

It seems to me you’re giving way too little credit to legal activists, courts, elections, and especially laws. If the free market was able to keep discrimination in check, we wouldn’t need laws. Besides, you’re assuming it’s just a matter of people buying cakes. It goes much further than that, into issues of hiring practices, higher education, even marriage. Miscegenation was illegal in some states as recently in the 60s. You honestly think there was some economic groundswell that countered this? It took a Supreme Court decision to hold in check the racist fucks who kept those laws on the books. In my home state, the governor called out the National Guard because he didn’t want to comply with federal laws about letting black kids go to predominantly white schools. You think some sort of boycott was going to get those kids through a perimeter of armed soldiers? And in that environment, where armed soldiers showed up to keep those kids out, you think the local country club was going to take a membership hit that would cause them to reconsider their policy about letting blacks join?

It takes laws to keep people from doing ignorant, selfish, and craven things. It never ceases to amaze me that there’s an entirely political ideology based on denying that simple truth.

-Tom

If you Google “EEOC lawsuit”, you will find that racial discrimination in the workplace is alleged all the time.

Now to be fair, many of the companies accused of discrimination could be targeted by a boycott. But the sheer volume of cases brings up an even bigger problem. Are consumers somehow supposed to investigate all these cases themselves, without the benefit of discovery? Are they supposed to keep track of which cases have merit and which are frivolous, and cross reference that against a shopping list? Or maybe just focus on the high profile companies and give everyone else a pass?

Imagine we took your approach to other types of injustice. Maybe we don’t really need the government to tell us what we can copy, either. If a company infringes your patent, we would rely on indignant consumers to organize a boycott. That will keep everyone from misbehaving, right?

Unless it doesn’t. If only there were a branch of government that ensured justice was consistently and fairly applied, without need of mobilizing the masses…

Not just economic boycotts. Marches, sit-ins, etc. All of that stuff is what got the job done. It sure as hell wasn’t new laws.

The laws marked a point where those grassroots efforts had actually had an effect. The reason we got those laws, was due to the actions of civil rights groups that forced the nation as a whole to recognize what was happening. Which forced people to take sides.

Laws changed because peoples’ minds changed, not the other way around.

But you guys keep saying that I oppose these laws, despite the fact that I’ve explicitly stated that I don’t. And in various cases they could be useful. But in a bunch of cases they aren’t going to get the job done.

A few months ago I was listening to the WTF podcast, and there was some actress who was on, I believe, I forget who it was. But what was interesting about her story is when she described what her parents did. They were a white couple who went throughout the South in the 60s and 70s, after the civil rights act was passed, actually going to businesses and places, making sure that people were complying with the law.

It was interesting to hear about people who were involved peripherally in the civil rights movement, in the part that you never normally hear about: the actual enforcement, and making sure that people in the South actually changed and followed the new laws, and didn’t just continue to discriminate. I think she mentioned that they found lots of places that still discriminated, and this couple (her parents) would file suit against them.

So even in the case where a law was passed, there was still a lot of grassroots legwork to be done to actually enforce the law.

I think the confusion is in our many-layered systems of federal, state and local government. Many of the boycotts were effective in raising the attention of the national government which subsequently imposed upon state and local governments either new laws or enforcement of existing laws which they had ignored. And said confusion is thus I think a misapprehension of the levels of political power and how those levers are applied in practice. Boycotts and protests during the Civil Rights era would never have worked if they relied solely on state governments or local governments. They worked because they brought the attention of the national government and national “cultural consensus” to their side.

That’s why relying on local level boycotting of bigoted businesses doesn’t make sense from an historic point of view. The local communities or even statewide communities may well support bigotry.

Clearly they should have just brought signs and boycotted a diner in the deep south. Would have solved everything.

You forgot the sit-in, to be fair.

I didn’t forget em. They were beat-up and arrested, sometimes in the reverse order, by the law. You know, because the law didn’t support them initially and even when it did there was still problems.

Well the state is supposed to be neutral in this libertarian ideal, which it is far from being in such circumstances.

They worked on Indiana. The local state was forced to change their shit, not because of federal laws, but because of economic pressure brought down on them by the nation’s population at large.