You have it backwards, the "no barriers" mainly came from being wealthy. I'll give a small anecdote: One of my friends is from a very wealthy family. He is a person of color. He was still able to gain admission to an elite boarding school, now works for a prestigious company, is respected by his peers, etc.
Privilege mainly comes from wealth. Of course it is a serious problem in society when certain groups have disproportionate poverty or less wealth, because that indicates some structural cause.
However in the modern day that cause is simply the fact that most people, regardless of skin color, do not move out of their parents' income decile. And when one group is already more economically disenfranchised than other groups, then that economic disenfranchisement will perpetuate itself.
Replace "black men from rich families" with "second-generation Italian-Americans from rich families" and you get the same result.
This is not about race, this is about belonging to a small network of Brahmin aristocracy in the US. For example, some people in New England will never invest in your startup (no matter how good it is), if your name does not look like "Landon Jefferson Bayard, III", or some such.
>Replace "black men from rich families" with "second-generation Italian-Americans from rich families" and you get the same result.
I highly doubt it.
There has been racism against lots of minority groups in the US, but few rise to the hundreds of years long legacy that exists to this day that is racism against African Americans.
Additionally, there’s the question of passing: it’s much easier to blend in with a higher status group with similar melanin levels - pick up some clothes, learn some cultural signifiers, etc. That’s just not possible for someone with the disfavored skin color. Even a black kid raised by adoptive parents can’t avoid things like worrying every time they see a police officer.
Thank you for your anecdotal evidence and the obvious truism that wealth opens doors.
Black people make 57.50 to every 100 dollars a White person makes. The majority of wealthy people in America are white. 90% of all people lose their wealth by the 3rd generation. Therefore the slim ratio of wealthy black families are going to lose their wealth and it’s going to affect them much more.
The majority Black people have only just started to be able build wealth after Jim Crow, where white people have had hundreds of years.
People enjoy helping people that look like or remind them of themselves phenotypically, therefor even people that became new money, science would suggest will receive more help from the more numerous amount of wealthy white people.
Try doing online dating as a White Guy and then doing it as an Asian guy: I can 100% assure you the response rate and experience is going to be wildly different.
If race “doesn’t matter” to rich people, but is rather used as a tool by the rich to cause in fighting amongst the powerless (which is true and seems to be what you’re implying), then in fact race does matter as it affects how the powerless relates to each other. So racism matters, so you’ve contradicted yourself.
Homelessness, both in San Francisco and elsewhere is not rooted in housing but in drugs and mental illness.
Building more low income housing won't address those root causes or noticeably ameliorate homelessness as a symptom, because most homeless people cannot hold down a job and have 0 income, aside from begging.
There is no easy solution, but allowing the mentally ill to fend for themselves on the streets in the name of freedom is morally naive. Put them in institutions and get them off the streets.
It seems like you need to address both: Utah has seen good results from providing housing because that makes treatment programs more likely to succeed but it's a very hard problem without a silver bullet.
While data security is an issue Facebook must reckon with, it is not the major issue Facebook's existence poses to democracies around the world.
The real issue in my mind is that the platform can be used by bad actors to spread misinformation. It's as if during WWII the Nazi's had the ability to publish editorials in leading newspapers throughout the US.
While this is a feature/bug of the internet in general, the vast scale of Facebook and its near ubiquitous use amongst the general voting public in the US and other democratic nations make it the most potent vector through which a bad actor like Russia could spread propaganda and misinformation.
I'm not sure the recent move to label political advertisements as such will do much to safeguard us from misinformation.
The amount of "bullying and abuse" by the US is grossly overstated.
I think many people, especially in large and proud nations, don't like the idea of being a second class power to the United States. That's certainly what motivates Putin and Xi Jinping. There's nothing wrong with wanting to be the best, of course. I welcome competition.
Unfortunately though this frustration with not being the lone superpower drives people to focus solely on what the US is perceived to have done wrong while ignoring the tremendous amount of good the US has done and continues to do for the global international order. Therefore people develop a very skewed and biased understanding of the world.
Multipolarity means warfare and carnage on a scale much greater than anything we've seen in the period of global peace and stability we've seen since the US has been the superpower.
> The amount of "bullying and abuse" by the US is grossly overstated.
How so? I don't think so. AFAICS - and I lived in the US for a decade and would do so again, I have no beef with the country, just saying what I think I see/know - the US has always been an expansionist and later empire-seeking country at least for significant (i.e. with enough influence) parts of the powerful.
It's hard to prove or disprove your 2nd paragraph claim since we cannot have the experiment. I think that while you can certainly (as always) find plenty of examples in support the opposing side won't have any difficulties either. Overall the statement is way too fuzzy and broad to be either attackable or supportable.
> Multipolarity means warfare and carnage on a scale much greater than anything we've seen
Sounds like a vote for a global dictatorship to me.
> the US has always been an expansionist and later empire-seeking country at least for significant (i.e. with enough influence) parts of the powerful.
That’s not true at all, at least not in historical context. The US is the most powerful country in the world never to build an actual empire. It’s conquests are limited to part of Mexico, and some pacific islands. It’s predecessor, Great Britain, colonized India, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, and turned China into a vassal state. The would-be challenger Germany occupied France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Poland, etc.
The US is interventionist—it intervenes in the political affairs of other countries to perpetuate the status quo. That’s very different from being expansionist or Empire-seeking. Take Iraq for example. The US toppled the government. But did it colonize the country? Annex the oil fields? Turn the oil over to domestic oil companies like Exxon? No. (Most of the development rights went to BP, a British company!) The US spent far more on Iraq then it got out of the country. That’s not how an Empire operates.
It's a fallacy to think of global affairs as a competition for some funny vague rank or doing good or bad, and of figures that represent power as tragedies characters that aim certain things and act in accordance with their stereotypes. It's a game of economics. Rest is rhetoric.
> The amount of "bullying and abuse" by the US is grossly overstated.
If I cure a 1000 people and kill 1, in still an evil killer. It's not like some kind of game system where karma is a single number. You can help some people and be abusive to others, and those will never balance out unless there's a strict cause-effect relation between them.
I see China envy online a lot, especially given our recent political disfunction as people look at the superficial stability of China and want that for their own societies.
China is emphatically not stable. The PRC was started in 1949. The US civil war ended in 1865. Revolution is a living memory for some in China and that does a great deal to help the population think that suppression at all costs is reasonable. While the US was having its civil war, China was suffering through the tail end of [1]. Historically (in the modern era), China may best be seen as a very violent place.
It's funny, hate speech laws are unconstitutional and could not be passed in the US but such laws are commonplace in Europe. Yet people like to mock the US for saying it's the land of the free.
Having to be scanned to get on a plane seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to have to do. I fly often and I'm glad the TSA exists and does what it does. I don't feel like my liberty is being taken away in the slightest.
> Having to be scanned to get on a plane seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to have to do.
Even if that scan does little or nothing to actually improve your safety [1]? If I'm going to have my privacy taken away, I want something better in return for it than security theater and wasted taxes.
>I'm glad the TSA exists and does what it does. I don't feel like my liberty is being taken away in the slightest.
If you truly believe that, would you be opposed to TSA style x-ray machines, genital pat downs, and strip searches any time you were to go to school, work, get on a bus, etc?
Well that would be an inconvenience because I and many others go to work and ride public transport every day. Which is why we don't see TSA checkpoints everywhere; it would be too inconvenient.
People fly infrequently though, and also have a very strong desire to feel safe when flying, so they are for the most part fine with TSA checkpoints. TSA checkpoints are implemented to make people feel safe.
No it's not. It's the job of law enforcement to, unsurprisingly, enforce the laws. If you have a problem with the laws being enforced, call your congressman.
Except cops don't follow the law. They setup illegal processes like automatic speed cams and parking rules designed for pure profit, they shoot people in the back, they continually promise to protect people but in reality they do nothing besides impose their will and take the peoples property and money.
Say that about anyone, if you cherry-pick hard enough. Yes there are some cops that misbehave, and its especially damning because of who they are. Get that. But blanket statements like "they do nothing but..." aren't contributing much?
When your legal system gives the benefit to the police about NOT knowing the law and to everyone else that not knowing the law is no excuse and when your legal system does not apply the same penalties to the police for infractions of the law as to the citizens (slap on wrist to police, throw citizen into prison for long periods of time for the same offence) then you have a problem.
For the USA, there is an endemic problem with all law enforcement and there is various serious documentation about this. That is not to say that the USA is the worst, there are many other countries that have a much more deadly situation. However, for a country that is supposed to be the leaders of the free world, it is rapidly getting the reputation of being third world in this matter.
When other countries warn their citizens not to have interactions with any US law enforcement then you should realise that there is a serious problem in the USA.
Cambridge Analytica served ads to people. This is something that all candidates, campaigns and their affiliates do. Sure it collected data on people through sketchy means, but the essential part of its work was to serve advertisements.
Similar companies have been employed by virtually every other presidential candidate in the last decade.
We can't be mad at CA without being mad at the entirety of industrial political adveritising.
Privilege mainly comes from wealth. Of course it is a serious problem in society when certain groups have disproportionate poverty or less wealth, because that indicates some structural cause.
However in the modern day that cause is simply the fact that most people, regardless of skin color, do not move out of their parents' income decile. And when one group is already more economically disenfranchised than other groups, then that economic disenfranchisement will perpetuate itself.