Political Roundtable Part XXX

[Wizardspride]

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[Zonkerbl]

I mean the reason I'm interested in this question is because if China is developing really crappy bioweapons yeah we need to put a stop to that right now. I just find it hard to believe they are. I also think baselessly accusing China of doing that for political gain is a really, really stupid thing to do.

[pancakes3]

i guess i'm in the camp of yeah, "we" need to put a stop to that, but none of "us" will be able to figure that out by scrolling twitter.

thinking that any of us can gain any insight from our phones is not much different than Q-anon thinking they're able to expose Killary's bildeberg pedo ring from their phones

[Zonkerbl]

Well, idle speculation is kind of what we do around here. It's a way to kill time while you wait for your coffee to brew.

The most likely thing, to me, is the Wuhan lab is being used to develop bioweapons and China would like everyone else to butt out. Biden is probably using the COVID thing as an excuse to put pressure on them. I mean that's what I would do.

[doclinkin]

the more humans encroach on environments, the more we become the environment.

As an aside, I also disagree with how you painted humanity. Humans don't encroach on the environment. Humans are a part of the environment. The belief that we can somehow separate ourselves from nature is a part of how we've gotten into this mess.
...
Any means we have of figuring out how to change that would be much appreciated because destroying the environment is just another way of saying we're destroying ourselves.

My point was that we act as a non-native invasive species when we overwhelm any existing environment and destroy the ecosystem or radically alter it, forcing sudden adaptation to the new conditions we provide. Nature will adapt in ways to suit the new conditions. Nature does this all the time. The dividing line of an epoch is commonly some mass extinction event where existing life undergoes rapid change and forces adaptation by the species impacted by their success.

My point is if we wipe out biodiversity in an area and replace it with ourselves, then we bring with us a new ecosystem, transforming the existing ecosystem into one that hive building bald apes can thrive in, but many other creatures do not. Some will however, and the ones that can adapt to this will swiftly find a niche or perhaps themselves become a dangerous and destructive and invasive parasite within the new man-hive ecosystem.

Pigeons were cliff dwelling rock doves, now they thrive in artificial canyons. Wolves were communal pack hunting endurance hunters, no more or less successful than sabertooth cats. They fed on our scraps and boom: there are more poodles, chihuahuas, and weiner dogs combined than all the wolves in the wild.

Mutations that allow an organism to thrive in human ecosystems (docile and cute in the case of puppies, quick breeding and loving moist sewer pipes in the case of cockroaches), or to hijack our biology itself (pubic lice, SARS CoVid-2) will swiftly take hold and spread.

Biodiversity insulates us against this by allowing a plurality of species to survive. No one population can be devastated by an evolutionary jump. There is healthy competition for resources; there are circuit breakers and interdependencies. Balance. Any time an ecosystem is taken over by a single successful species it become vulnerable to predation or overgrowth by the next species (or virus) that accidentally finds the gene combination to exploit it.

On this SARS mutation? 100% chance some Chinese lab somewhere was studying coronaviruses. Why not? As there are labs the world over studying all of the next likely pandemics. A modified SARS virus has been predicted for a while. Hell the common cold is a coronavirus. If a virus in a lab jumps containment protocols and got people sick, then yes China's population density makes it a fine petri dish for incubating any new pandemic. To my mind it doesn't really matter where it came from since pandemics are a naturally occurring consequence of our population overgrowth.

That said to my way of thinking there is no chance this was a bioweapon. Infectious diseases are fairly terrible weapons since they don't care about borders or nationality. If you had a germ that only affected people with certain genetic markers I mean, okay I guess? But at that level of sophistication you might as well work just a little harder and tailor a virus that can benefit humanity in some fashion, give us photosynthetic hair, or immunity to cancer, or the ability to digest plastic and garbage scraps, and presto: you're the world's first trillionaire.

[Zonkerbl]

[popper]

Don't know if anyone is interested in a Liberal's critique of CRT but I'll throw it out there just in case.


https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/what-happened-to-you-e5f

[dobrojim]

Popper

Nice of you to drop in.

Perhaps this is an indicator of the current (lack of) utility for the lib/con labels
but I'd say Andrew Sullivan is definitely a conservative.

That said, I will try to find a moment to read what he has to say.

from wiki

Sullivan describes himself as a conservative and is the author of The Conservative Soul.

[Zonkerbl]

Don't know if anyone is interested in a Liberal's critique of CRT but I'll throw it out there just in case.


https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/what-happened-to-you-e5f

Thanks for posing this, Popper, it's a topic I've been thinking about all day today.

Looks like the core of the argument is that White Supremacy doesn't exist. That's nonsense. White supremacy very much exists and has absolutely no problem coexisting with the "largest, freest, most successful multiracial democracy in human history," even though I've got a few nits to pick with that. America is the largest, freest, most successful democracy that happens to also somewhat tolerate non-whiteness" would be more accurate. Black people live in a police state in this country. There is no denying that fact. And the police state they live in now is actually an *improvement* over the apartheid state they lived in from the founding of this country to the 1960s.

"The Liberal Elites" (dehumanizing language warning!) were largely complicit in the creation of that police state in the 1990s with the War on Drugs, which, because of institutionalized racism built into our criminal justice system, which you can't deny exists, ended up being a War on Black People.

When George Floyd was murdered in cold blood on camera in front of all of us, it really drove home something that had been dawning on us slowly over the last decade or so - white liberals are complicit in white supremacy. George Floyd's murder happened in a city full of Democratic voters. That cop and his arrogant grin as he brutally murdered a defenseless black man is *what we wanted.* We, wealthy, well educated, urban-living white people, hired that guy. To do precisely what he did. The conversation about white supremacy is mostly the left trying to convince itself that it is a huge part of the problem. Because the left depends on black voters to exist. If the right can convince black voters that white liberals don't care about them and never will, they'll stop voting and the Democratic party will never win an election again. It's important that we listen to what black people are telling us about their lived experience and respond appropriately. Not just because its the right thing to do, but also to defend us from Trump's lunatic fringe GOP imposing 1984-style capitalist dystopian totalitarianism on us. For example, the current GOP attempts to make teaching CRT a thoughtcrime.

It almost doesn't matter what CRT is. The most horrible thing about what's going on right now is that the GOP is trying to tell us that black is white, up is down, and we just have to take it. Two plus two equals five, because dammit Trump says so. They think they get to dictate what is true and what gets to be taught in our schools. They want to be the final arbiters of truth, regardless of the facts. It's fundamentally unAmerican, whether you agree with CRT or not.

The fundamental assertion of CRT is that the obstacles deliberately put in place by active racists prior to 1960 remain in place today. Imagine you hate left handed people, just actively hate them, so you make it a law that it is forbidden to shoot jump shots with the left hand. All coaches in the country are required to teach jump shots with the right hand only. After several decades of this it becomes ingrained in the coaching conventional wisdom that left handed players can be pretty athletic but otherwise not very good basketball players, since none of them are very good shooters. Even after the civil rights law of the 1960s, outlawing the prohibition of left handed jump shots, the general method of teaching basketball as if everyone in the country is right handed continues to hurt left handers, even if no one actively hates left handers anymore. "God bless 'em," the right handers say, "it's not that I'm prejudiced against left handers, but it's just objectively true that they aren't good jump shooters." Not only do the left handers never get the training they need, but they don't get the opportunity to train at all because coaches tend to not even bother recruiting them.

Anyway it's not true that we no longer hate left handers. The conscious part of our brain, the talky part, the part that answers the question "Are you racist?" - of course that part of your brain has good intentions and bears no ill will to anybody. But that's not the part of your brain that makes actual decisions. The lizard part of your brain, the one that makes financial decisions, the one that determines how much you are actually willing to pay for safety features in cars, is also the one that looks at left-handed/black people and goes "ew! icky! They look different! They talk different!" Human beings are naturally wired to distrust the "other," and a lifetime of watching the white-culture-dominant shows from the fifties to the nineties conditions white people to distrust black people.

We're still in the middle of the War on Black People/Drugs. We have the highest incarceration rate among countries with incomes similar to ours. We still put the icky left handed people in jail, and even though we've removed the prohibitions on left handers getting loans and houses and education and jobs that the people who actively hated left handers put in place, we haven't changed the system to accommodate left handers. We haven't done anything to begin coaching left handers to shoot left handed jump shots. It's no longer illegal - but we just don't teach it. We don't *want* to teach it. We don't even want to *talk* about it. We're most comfortable in a right hander dominant world.

None of this stuff is really disputable. It's just fact, you can choose to try to come to grips with it or not, but it still remains the truth. I mean, you can say "wah this makes me feel guilty, I'm outlawing teaching about how we tried to teach left handers to shoot right handed." But it's dumb and anti american, and it also keeps the right handers from having to admit that left handed shooters should be allowed (and taught! and encouraged!) to shoot left handed. Which just doesn't make any sense - won't we get better players? Won't the quality of bball overall improve, to the benefit of everybody? But the right handers are very invested in maintaining their dominance of bball, to the detriment of the overall game. It's bad. It should change. Right handed supremacy must end.

[pancakes3]

lol. Some additional scholarship from Andrew Sullivan:

Writing for New York magazine, Sullivan expressed concern that high levels of immigration to the United States could drive "white anxiety" by causing white Americans to be "increasingly troubled by the pace of change" since they were never formally asked whether they wanted such a demographic shift.

no, i am not interested in his hot takes on CRT.

[Pointgod]

Don't know if anyone is interested in a Liberal's critique of CRT but I'll throw it out there just in case.


https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/what-happened-to-you-e5f

Andrew Sullivan is not even close to being a Liberal. I’d like to get Andrew Sullivan’s take on incidents like below since he’s always so concerned with cancel culture and censorship…..

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[dobrojim]

SMH at how counter productive these attempts to stop discussions about race are.
I hesitate to describe what Hawn was teaching (Coates) as CRT, but that's beside the point.
Basically every time these folks behave like this they confirm the essential need for CRT
as an academic pursuit.

[Zonkerbl]

I guess this is what they meant about freedom not being free. There's tyrannical forces around us all the time. It's just growing up I thought the enemies of democracy were all outside the country.

I guess if I were black I would be less surprised. It's weird how warped your perception of reality is when you're not the subject of oppression.

Man did evolution ever mess us up. You know, I wish Christianity were right and we were created in God's image, then we would be, you know, much better designed. Evolution sucks.

[Wizardspride]

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[Wizardspride]

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[Zonkerbl]

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All I hear is "ARGLE BLARGLE FREEDOM!"

[Wizardspride]

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[Zonkerbl]

https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/was-martin-luther-king-a-socialist-new-book-may-surprise-you

Actually if you know anything *at all* about MLK Jr. it won't surprise you at all

[Wizardspride]

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[gtn130]

Re: CRT - anyone who can't recognize that this country was built on genocide and became a global economic superpower via slavery is simply delusional. Accepting that those things are true doesn't make you unpatriotic or anti-American. It just means you want to correct past injustices and try to make the world a better place.