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this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2024
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your text seems to agree 100% with one of the examples in the original posts text: ”[…] immigrants who […] simply sought better lives for themselves and their descendants“.
could you elaborate why you think it is wrong?
They cannot really comprehend the glaring "OR"s in the sentence.
understood them fine, still disingenuos phrasing. "Better life" for one was from middle class to slaveowner and for the other giving up their homes because of US backed wars and trying to find a chance at a peaceful life
thank you for the clarification.
They didnt flee persecution. Also the "better life" was built on the back of slaves, which seems a bit disingenous phrasing.
Edit I guess the point is that the people coming to steal land and genocide peoples aren't like the immigrants today, its a false equivalence
Edit2 also the first line literally disagrees with that
What about the Irish?
The entire comment is unmitigated bullshit. Think about it; it uses the years 1654-85 as a representative sample of European immigrants to North America, but that's absurd because we know for a fact that mass immigration from Europe didn't really start until the 19th century so it can't be even remotely true that most white Americans are descendants of the immigrants they use in their sample. It's shoddy and intellectually dishonest scholarship that's obviously and almost comically pushing an agenda. As such it doesn't deserve to be taken seriously.
Everything they've said is blatant propaganda word salad that they're regurgitating completely out of context.
Read the book its very good
The problem isn't the immigrants themselves that are coming to steal land or kill people, it's their children. One that comes to mind is Donald Trump whose mother was an immigrant.
So, one part of what the original post is wrong according to your source. Not the whole thing.
No, the whole thing is wrong because its a false equivalence. "Better life" meant different things for the white settlers and the current immigrants.
Why is that relevant?
Because that's what makes it wrong. If "better life" for one is profiting off slavery and genocide and for the other its "chance at a peaceful life" then comparing them whitewashes the formers intention.
Edit: it also seems to elude everyone that literally the first line in my source goes against the "seeking a better life" line, so I don't know why people think my source doesn't cover that
Some surely did. Among those who definitely did not flee persecution were the Pilgrims, those flew from not being able to persecute.
"some" sure, but definitely not "almost all" as the post says.
OP's post says "or".
I know? I don't really understand what you're trying to say here, if it is "OPs post is not just talking about people being persecuted but also about people looking for a better life" then I hope my edit to my original comment answers that
I would also draw your attention to the first line of the quote in my original comment which explicitly calls out this "seeking a better life" fable, which is only true for the white settlers ("almost" all of them) if we consider a life furthering slavery and genocide to be better than what they had at home.
At any rate the goals of the white immigrants were exploitative while the goals of the current immigrants is to escape exploitation and putting them as equal is dishonest at best.
If I misunderstood what appears to be a throwaway comment please elaborate
This is reductive. The American civil war and therefore slavery ended with 1865 -- yes I know apartheid after that, but people emigrating back then surely didn't do it with the idea of "I can become a slave-lord there". In Germany, Bismarck introduced mandatory public healthcare 1883, one of the reasons was to slow immigration to the US: While in the US there was opportunity, there also wasn't any kind of safety net whatsoever. (The other big reason was to cut political ground from under the social democrats's feet, as well as to bring mutual insurances workers had founded under state control -- he was, after all, Prussian).
So immigration from Germany was still an issue large enough for the empire to address it directly while slavery was already abolished. And the type of people this legislation addressed was squarely workers: People earning under 2000 Goldmark a year (about 17000 Euro now). Some pre-83 versions even only applied to miners, then steel workers, then it got expanded to all workers.
Another tidbit would be immigrants from North Germany in particular: While enforcement could certainly have been better any Hanse ship was generally forbidden to engage in slave trade, and people got dispossessed for so much as transporting slave chains. The whole idea of slavery just didn't vibe with North German republicanism which had the motto "Neither master nor serf be" even while the free cities were still oligopolies. People took great pleasure and pride from passing laws such as forbidding nobles from living in the city, or going after their debts and actually putting them in prison until they paid up (by selling their land): Elsewhere, as a noble, you were above the law. Socio-economic differences were stark but a liberal notion of equality was universal (or, in the still feudal parts, desired) and any immigrant would've taken that with them to the US. They also didn't tend to immigrate to the south, this is conflating North German and Scandinavian immigrants but a map of Lutheranism in the US should give an impression.
I am unable to dissect everything going on with your comment, I urge you to read the book for yourself. The profiting off slavery didn't stop with slavery, it is core to the wealth of the US empire which attracted the european immigrants who were looking to be part of an economy which at its motor had slavery for centuries and, after that, the continued oppression and segregation of it's non-white communities. The distinction is between chattel and wage-slavery where the working class was divided along racial lines. These immigrants came with the goal of taking the jobs of non-white people, tying their fortune to the continued oppression of non-white people. Again, please read the book it's plain as day. To quote another section:
And that last line is meant literally, it's about the riots and lynchings these immigrants took part in in order to take the jobs that had traditionally be held by non-white workers. Talking about the chinese workers who had built the railroad for example:
That you would paint the rise of the liberal capitalist class as something to be cheered on by the oppressed and as the beginning of an end to racism beggars belief, it were the workers fleeing capitalism in europe that formed the vanguard of the oppression against the non-white workers. The book goes into great detail about the workers that europe was bleeding, which forced it's capitalist class to make the concessions you mentioned. They indeed brought the ideas of liberalism with them into the US, its just that these ideas of "equality" never were about solidarity among workers across the present racial lines.
Note how that's not precisely not about what those people thought when they left Europe? They were American, at that point.
Don't make the mistake of confusing why people left, and what they thought they would do in America, with what US material conditions drove them to do. This is precisely what OP's post is addressing: That you should remember that people came in search of a better life, and that the conditions the American bourgeois in general (now represented by the GOP) instituted in the country made finding that better life impossible.
Also back then most Europeans weren't even considered "white", pretty much every group not from England went through an erm "Hispanic phase" -- I'll of course grant that Germans weren't terribly affected by this, but ask the Irish or Italians. The racial card has always been used by the American bourgeois to divide and conquer as they please and I'd caution against playing into that narrative by deepening grudges. If you have to choose between class consciousness and identity politics, be a good Marxist and choose class consciousness.
I don't know how we're reading the same sentence and arrive at opposite conclusions. Even if you were right about the goldrush in indian land not being a motivating factor for droves of immigrants I think my larger point, how incomparable the motivation for white immigrants and the currently oppressed immigrants is, still stands by the actions the europeans undertook upon arrival. This is not about dividing people into racist groups, but clearly talking about the racial divide that was drawn up by the capitalist class. Not talking about the deep racism in the european immigrant movement, regardless of their class status, in fear of "deepening grudges" is revisionist.
No it absolutely was the motivating factor. Setting out to pan gold is precisely not setting out to murder Chinese is what I'm saying, that was plan C or D thought up long after arriving. If the American dream had ever been real, or if American politics and society back then had not been as racialised, it would not have come to that -- it's not just up to the failed gold rushers now between a rock and a hard place but also the racist state institutions implemented by Anglo America who gave them at least implicit permission to do it, or even egged it on.
In my mind OP's post wants to say "[this group] came here for that dream, they never got it, let's finally make it real [for everyone]". Are other interpretations possible? I'd say so, but I'd also say one should be charitable.
Also didn't the Chinese come for that exact dream. Last I checked Chinese had white skin (sorry my Europeanness is shining through).
Oh I see what you meant. To me that still reads like they were simply misled on who to plunder and what the loot would be.
But regardless I do agree that what you said was OPs message and I also agree with it, but I don't think it will be achieved by appealing to sentiment, whitewashing history, especially where the wealth comes from, and in general trying to appease the crowd with false equivalences, because they serve to hide the root of the present injustices. Furthermore I see no reason to be charitable to someone like Robert Reich.
Edit I don't know enough about the chinese immigrants to comment on what brought them to the US. In racist terms chinese and east asians are considered "yellow" not "white".
"Plundering natives" is not a motive I'd expect, at least not from immigrants who read Karl May. More "get rich off the vast wilderness". I think that accusation should, among labourers, be limited to people going for agricultural land, displacing communities already living there.
The majority of the wealth comes off the back of the workers. The miners, people working in industry, it's the same in the US as it's in Europe: Other sectors are important and even crucial (e.g. food production) but it terms of GDP and capacity to produce goods, industry it's where it's at.
Y'all should definitely be giving land back but say Detroit didn't become an industrial powerhouse because natives were sent on the trail of tears, or southern farmers exploited black slaves. If all wealth the US had was only from those aspects then you'd still be an agrarian society.
Is it possible to come to a synthesis there, not ignoring the atrocities committed but acknowledging the important (not sole) role that skilled European labourers had in building the economic backbone of the US, a backbone without which implementing Utopian dreams would be, well, Utopian?
Because as I see it, if, as soon as someone says, "my grandfather was a miner" and you instantly bring up the one or other atrocity some mining community committed against other people you're saying "we all would have been better off without you, you people contributed nothing": It's way easier to get people to acknowledge past or present wrongs when you leave them their pride in their accomplishments. "All that wealth is stolen" is the exact opposite of that, grandpa didn't work backbreaking 14-hour shifts for that, without health insurance. He did it so that his kids would have a better life. Was he worse off than a slave on a cotton plantation? No, of course not, but it's still where the bulk of the wealth comes from. Wealth is not created in proportion to suffering.
I have no idea who the guy is and I probably don't want to know.
Im going to disengage here. I am one last time going to urge you to read that book. Also just because there seems to be a misunderstanding here let me say that I'm not USian, I'm german.
My gods that's even worse. Why, then, are you that steeped in reductionist, racialised, US analysis? Activists and theorists over there don't see the water they're swimming in, don't realise how their unwillingness and/or incapacity to think outside of that framework perpetuates it. It allows people to stay depoliticised by engaging in performativism, segregating hair styles becomes more important than material fucking conditions. Idpol is the worst thing that happened to the left since Stalin and the exact opposite of what you should be steeped in, and that's rapprochement. Which is exactly where I tried to carefully lead you.
Side note do watch Reservation Dogs.
OK excuse me you talk about material "fucking" conditions and ignore or relativize the colonial history of the Hegemon. You're in for a rude awakening if you think your rapprochement of liberal "hearts and minds" or whatever the fuck it is that you're looking to accomplish will ever be possible. I urge you so much more to read that exact book I'm pushing if only to see how the white communists and socialists and unionists kept fucking things up and kept playing into the racist divide with these kind of civility politics that you're pushing, while ignoring the native american or black american comrade. Because its these divides that are currently being amped up right here in Germany, the second most subservient country to the Hegemon.
Read some European post-war history. Ask the North Irish -- both sides and yes that was a settler-colonial/apartheid situation. The examples are literally endless.
OTOH, point me to a single instance where Idpol has brought peace.
Why don't you read some US history, I implore you to, then visit some of the nonwhite neighborhoods in major German cities and you will see how relevant it is for us today.
You mean immigrant neigbourhoods and I grew up in one, thank you. WTF is "nonwhite" even supposed to mean have you ever seen a Turk or Syrian. The principal systemic problem immigrants face is coming from low socio-economic status combined with our lack of social mobility, in places right-out enforced by the education system, which also affects Kevin. Reform of education is typically blocked by Bildungsbürger.
And I see you ignored my question: When has Idpol ever brought peace?
And before you mention it: No, the east didn't suddenly turn Nazi. The west still has a larger proportion of people with closed right-extremist world-view, while the east still has a larger proportion of socialists. What's happening is feelings of betrayal and people being fed up with voting for politicians who caused the issues they, as in the common man, have. We're lacking over 1m social housing units, rent is becoming more and more unaffordable while the SPD opposes expropriating landlords, the CSU is talking about sanctioning 0.045% of welfare recipients ("Totalverweigerer"), 99.99% of which should probably be judged incapable of work and fall under SGB XII, and btw social darwinism is a form of group-focussed enmity. The greens rather bankrupt house owners than do the right thing, both when it comes to politics and technology, and give municipalities money to set up district heating. Yes, the AfD programme is turbo-neoliberal and against the interest of their voters -- and the voters tend to know that. It's the same kind of phenomenon that made Argentinians vote Milei into power: It's bad, but at least not the established bad and it's a boot up the arse of the established parties. I do have a fuckton of issues with Wagah Zarenknecht but expect her to soak up the vast majority of those AfD votes.
How fucking long have I heard "You can care about two things at the same time", referring to "Yes we can have gay marriage and care about social housing". The same parties then did the former, and that's good and proper, but failed at the latter, while calling themselves the creme de la creme of leftists. That's performativism. I'm sure a gazillion of gay homeless couples are glad that they now can be gay married homeless couples. The country needs a specific focus on the latter kind of matters. Fix that shit and you'll find that a lot of other problems suddenly vanish because they were never causes, they were symptoms. "X is important to me and everyone and needs to be addressed but you aren't so I'm going to block Y" is politics as usual, you can't blue sky idealist yourself around that: If you want to fix Y get X fixed.
I grew up in Turkey. I have seen plenty of Turks, also Kurds also Arabs. Which is how I also know what it's like to be a religious minority, what it's like to have the police hound you for it or just the weirdness of sticking out in a crowd like a sore thumb. Which is how experienced the importance of the community of people like oneself, a concept that often gets misrepresented in the so-called "identity politics" which therefore should be opposed, but that doesn't make it less real. And if you think there is not a similar acceptable/non-acceptable split along ethnic, cultural and religious lines in our society then your dreaming. I completely ignored your question because this is not idpol. This is about acknowledging the material effects ones cultural, ethnic or religious background and appearance has on ones life, to which the history of how we, and for the US how they, got here is vitally important.
I don't know why you'd think I would say that the east has "suddenly" turned nazi. That just came out of nowhere and I have no idea how the rest of your comment relates to anything we're talking about. I guess you think I'm just doing "performative" leftism to ingratiate myself to minorities or something. I don't know. I'm not, I just care about clear language that doesn't hide the privilege some laborers have over others, because that's how you fight the labor-aristocracy of the AfD voters. The rationale that "if we all have the same opportunities, then how come the people with a non-standard german background are so much more dependent on social welfare" needs to be rooted out at the beginning of "we all have the same opportunities" because we don't.
Edit: Sorry I'm gonna add a bigger paragraph after posting about the whole white/non-white thing. I use these racist terms to describe how our racist society groups people according to their appearance and not as a scientific term where you can decide if someone is white or not, the fact that this is not possible is the precise contradiction that racists use to garner support from people they will oppress later. Whether someone is white or not, or "really" German or not, is very fluid and dependent on the situation. An ethnically Turkish person can pass as white and not be pulled from traffic into a routine check but they would probably be treated as non-white if during a traffic stop the cop learned their name. The way people treat a Jewish person might change after people find out that they are a Jew. They didn't suddenly switch from white to nonwhite in a material way, those categories don't really exist, but the way they are viewed and accordingly how they are treated did.
Now I don't know about how things are where you are but over here it's more suspicious to be Catholic or, heaven help, Freikirchlich, than Muslim. Turks give other Turks shit for being Bavarian. Yes, going ahead in such a situation and saying "This is all about people's ancestors being from Turkey" is precisely idpol: You reduce the complexity of societal relations to create a normative in- and out-group, ascribing to it an imaginary internal coherence that makes you kin to the Grey Wolves. Remember Cem Özdemir complaining about discrimination against Swabians? That's the Germany we're living in. It always takes a while for a population to settle but Turks are now at a status Italians achieved quite quickly (do those even register on your "non-white" radar?) and before long people won't blink at Cem's surname same as they don't blink at "de Maizière". Also immigrant background, refugee even: His family came to Germany in the 17th century when France prosecuted Huguenots. Another good example of just how little specifically appearance matters is Philipp Rösler.
It relates to the "race relations are getting worse in the US" observation, I was preempting a "but here, too" rebuttal. The very lack of idpol is what allows figures like Zarenknecht to make a dent, because the material conditions aren't buried under layers and layers of idpol-generated enmity, the electorate is still able to recognise that policies will address causes, and thereby solve problems that "We need to segregate hairstyles harder" can't dream to achieve. You still haven't answered how idpol ever brought about peace, btw.
Then talk about the education system, why the son of a baker generally doesn't become an engineer even though he has the talent and smarts. Next to capital ownership education is the primary, because inherited, class divide in Germany.
And no AfD voters aren't labour-aristocracy you're confusing them with the SPD -- remember how long they kept those coal subsidies alive? The SPD is the political arm of the big powerful unions, foremost IG Metall.
Studies show that class-wise AfD voters are predominantly precariat, as I already said: People the established left doesn't care about, even actively agitates against ("Sozialschmarotzer"). Maybe you'd know all that shit if you actually engaged critically with politics in this country instead of looking to the US of all places. Die Linke, at least in the east, on state level, where they're relevant, is also labour-aristocracy and in practice firmly Socdem. Mabye a smidge on the left of the SPD but not by much: They don't oppose expropriating landlords, but they also would not propose it. Basically SPD without the Seeheimer Kreis.
So the fact that some people make Kumpir-jokes (arguably actually idpol) is supposed to assure me that there is no anti-turkish racism? I have family members whose business gets harassed by cops for no other reason than them being turkish. Their business is in a very non-white neighborhood in the supposedly oh so leftist Hamburg. They aren't as integrated as italians who by the way I've also witnessed being "other"ed on one occasion so clearly even they aren't on-par with the non-immigrants in Germany.
Well I'm not. I'm talking about the cops double and triple checking turkish businesses in an unnecessarily disruptive manner for no reason other than them being suspicous of their turkishness. Don't tell me that it isn't "all about people's ancestors being from Turkey" because it most assuredly is.
That was really hurtful for reasons you couldn't know. But please be mindful of bad-jacketing even by association.
I can only assume that you wrote this (and the rest of that paragraph) before I edited in my last paragraph in the comment above yours, so I'll reiterate it here. I'm not the one ascribing white/non-white to people, I'm talking about groups of people that are racistly viewed as such and the effects such a view on people has. So e.g. an italian who might be too brown and gets clocked as "non-white" might experience discrimination in which case I would be talking about "discrimination against a non-white person". People that are regularly discriminated against in such a way might group together to lobby for equal rights, create safe spaces where they can just be and form a community centered around the racist prescription they were given. Such groups, spaces and communities will then get under attack by the racists and therefore need special protection. That isn't idpol. It is a vital strategy to form solidarity among people that experience discrimination others don't. Something others cannot relate to, can't see the full extent of damage caused and therefore can't be as helpful in solving. It's not about "segregating hairstyles", it's about listening to oppressed people and what they say they need in order to protect themselves and their community. I'm not saying they can't be wrong, but I am saying people that don't experience what they do, should be real careful about judging whether they are.
You got this the wrong way around. The racist enmity is what caused people to band together. Liberals then tried to "target audiences" by how they were grouped together creating idpol. By a similar logic I could claim that rainbow capitalism or pinkwashing is caused by the LGBTQ community coming together, that's absurd and frankly puts the blame for racism on the people fighting it. The people importing idpol are the german right-wingers repeating the absurd lies of the US right-wing, not people that speak against racist discrimination.
You don't know what I talk about in regards to german politics because you're replying to me in a thread kicked off about a comment I made about US politics! But I'll be damned if I shut up about the racist barriers of entry non-white germans face in higher education.
You're right about the AfD voters not being labor aristocracy, that was imprecise (therefore wrong). What I meant was the implied promise of more welfare once the immigrants stop "leeching" off the welfare systems. This promise is, as you rightfully pointed out, something every major party in Germany promises in some phrasing or another and the precariat have noticed that the established parties don't live up to it. I think that is how the BSW is going to make a dent, it hasn't disappointed yet.
But at the heart of this "X people need to go because they only leech off the welfare systems" is the lie that everyone has the same opportunities and possibilities regardless of origin (born here, refugee, turk, white, just pick a job and get busy) and the reality that people which can be grouped together by some trait depend more on welfare then necessarily implies that these people are innately more dependent on it. Coupled with the lie that there isn't enough wealth for everyone and you have an effective way to get the precariat in arms against them. Maybe calling them a precariat aristocracy would be better but where the labor aristocrats already get payed more, they simply get promised more so I don't know (precariat to-be-aristocracy? I'm just making shit up now). This isn't the only strategy liberals use to agitate obviously but it's a major and effective one.
And it must be countered by clear language that doesn't flatten the labor class into a single homogenous entity in a way Bobby Reichs tweet does. This goes for the US and for us.
Hamburg is a police state it's very easy to get harassed by police there. Remember when they declared pretty much all of Altona a "danger zone"? That wasn't about immigrants it was about leftists, they kicked off the whole thing by claiming, falsely, that a police station was attacked by "people wearing St. Pauli scarfs".
Yes, please do tell me whether Hamburg cops make a distinction between someone looking like they visit the barber thrice a day vs. a punk. By considering your groups' issues, be that Turks or immigrants in general, to be oh so special, unknown to everyone else, you're othering yourself. Is there surname discrimination when looking for a flat? Yes. Is there discrimination against Kevins? Also yes because in reality it's about socio-economic status and both foreign last name or "low-class" native first name are proxies for low socio-economic standing. The solution is not to preach "oh liberal landlord, you're being so racist, please ignore your concerns about your tenant's incomes" as that ignores their systemic financial interest in discriminating against people with low wages, it will never work, the solution is social housing, which, I already mentioned, we're lacking at least one million units of: That kind of discrimination can only exist in an environment where there's too few flats on the market, if landlords actually needed to search for tenants then they'd be willing to interview everyone -- and then discriminate by actual, not assumed, socio-economic status. It's not just immigrants that don't fit into the normative lens of the usual rightoid suspects. Remember who were the first the Nazis put into camps?
Just because you don't want to deport or do worse to people doesn't mean that the in-outgroup psychology isn't the same, and is breeding ground for worse. Yes, that realisation can hurt. It's also vital. Swimming against the stream is insufficient, you have to get out of the fucking river, take a breather, have a Mojito, learn to walk, and then throw live vests at the swimmers, first and foremost those that cling to other swimmers.
Ah, there we have it. "AfD voters and therefore the east are all Nazis". Especially Kevin, of course, why else could Kevin be angry as you're denying that discrimination against him can exist. No, they didn't suddenly become (more) racist. No, demagogues didn't suddenly learn radically new tricks that made them magnitudes more effective: The underlying conditions, the seeds of betrayal and anger, that they exploit became more and more wide-spread, the precariat grew and grew while conditions and pressures got worse and worse.
I don't think I ever said that as I disagree with it: Welfare recipients in general, the whole precariat, is getting squeezed. The whole thing started in the 90s when the federal republic lost its (nominal only, but still) socialist rival to the east. Noone is ever promising more welfare for anyone, it's always "those lazy buggers simply don't want to work". "Poverty is a choice" etc, etc. Social darwinism.
Add "organic potato but parents live off Hartz IV" to the list of people without equal opportunities and we could have a seed of agreement. "Bildungsferne Schichten", as the euphemism goes. Then, ask yourself the following: Daughter of an Iranian Doctor of medicine. Is she going to study, or is she going to work at a supermarket? The career paths of children of Turkish Gastarbeiter aren't that exceptional when you compare them not to the German average, but that of German Hauptschule graduates: None of their parents ever had a university degree (largely farmers from Anatolia), which meant Hauptschule, at best Realschule. A Turk with Abitur much less degree is rare not because they're Turks but because their parents didn't study.
Be a good leftist and spend some of your solidarity budget on Kevin. It's going to pay off a thousandfold because it will create conditions under which addressing things like racial profiling doesn't sound like "oh great another way for them to ignore us". Democracies have capacity limits, when you fix shit that concerns a huge number of people suddenly those have time and nerve for solidarity, if OTOH you try to fix particular interests you risk getting lumped up with the exact people that try to avoid fixing core issues, and resistance will be stiff. This isn't some new insight it's political strategy 101. The quickest way to address Y is indeed to focus on addressing X, and do Y as soon as there's enough trust that X is being taken care of.
You keep projecting what you think I'm advocating for when all I've so far revealed is that I'm advocating for clear language that doesn't flatten reality but acknowledges the different struggles people face, including racist ones. Why do you think that would stop short of a person born into poverty or to one born to parents who didnt have the privilege of a higher education and therefore can't pass on what they haven't learned? You keep talking about this in ways that reveal that for you other peoples struggle is an abstract thought exercise, which is why I advised caution when telling others how to safeguard against or combat racism.
Believe me I know.
Obviously they do.
No, I was othered unprompted. By Turks. They aren't "my group" any less than the "east germans". A comrade is a comrade, a racist isn't.
Not entirely. The prejudice Kevin faces is different from the one Jihad faces. That doesn't make Kevins struggle less real. I don't understand why you keep thinking I want to diminish someones struggle when I've repeatedly called for language that doesn't hide injustices. I've helped both a "Kevin" and a "Jihad" try to find apartments while needing rent relief. One was presumed to have snuck into this country and probably dangerous and the other was "just" presumed to be lazy. It both sucks, but one of them had it harder. And we aren't going to be addressing any of it if we can't talk about how or why the systems is the way it is.
Complete projection. I don't know where this is coming from.
More evidence that this is just a thought exercise for you. The grey wolves kill people like me. The fact that you persist after I told you it was hurtful because you are so sure in your (wrong) assumption for why that might be tells me that you don't know what you're talking about. Which makes it less hurtful, so at least there's that, but it's a bad sign about how I think of you because I would like to think of you as a comrade. So why persist in something I told you to be hurtful?
How about instead to those closest to drowning? What do you propose we do about the people that aren't close to drowning but steal the vests from under the people that are?
Even more evidence that this is just a thought exercise for you, when I'm talking about "the racists" I'm not talking about some abstract demographic, I am thinking of real people. I can visualize their faces. I wasn't talking about "AfD voters and therefore the east" and the fact that your first response always seems to be "but won't you think of the people voting AfD" is making me increasingly wary of you. I was working under the assumption that this "bridging the divide" thing is a pet project that you're overly invested in but I'm increasingly running low on good faith to offer you especially since I don't seem to get any in return.
To be sure I'm not against "bridging the divide" or dismissive of people in the east, especially since they got capitalism working against them double-time when compared to the west. I don't think of them as AfD voting nazis. But you have to understand that for me to call someone who did vote AfD a comrade, they have to earn my trust first because they probably need to unlearn some racist shit or at the very least learn materialist thinking.
Right, immigrants was used as a stand-in for really anyone requiring welfare. It's just that the media focus really is on the immigrants at the moment. But again I am well aware that there are other marginalised groups.
They were never off the list. I do not understand why you think they would be.
That's an untrue simplification. Turkish people are racistly discriminated against even in school. If their parents didn't have a good education obviously getting Abitur will be even harder, same as for any other person, but they might face additional hurdles or just different hurdles than others. Same for disabled people, they will face bigger hurdles than their able-bodied friends with the same background. Same for girls getting into STEM, their gender probably will cause the barrier for them to be even higher than for boys with a similar non-academic household. Naming the reasons for why some people face different obstacles isn't idpol, it's materialist.
Kevin always had my solidarity, but I expect to have his. It's not unconditional. Also it doesn't need to be budgeted? What a weird way of thinking about it.
True, which is why I'm advocating for precise language to name concerns so that we get to those with the most first. Because time and again once the majority got theirs the minority was left behind. The people whose only motivation is that their concerns get addressed will lose any motivation once they are. Tit for tat is not solidarity and will never achieve justice.
Because you kept emphasising one thing while not acknowledging the other, or misread it, like the "the precariat gets promised more welfare" stuff. I was acknowledging all kinds of racial stuff from the very start, arguing about cause vs. symptom and the order in which things are best addressed so that things get done as fast as possible.
And Nazis kill people like me. Fascists gotta fascist, no surprises there. If you ever spotted any psychological pattern of mine that matches what Nazis do I'd fucking want you to tell me.
You first have to get those clinging to them, dragging them down, off their back, or both will drown. Chances are you don't even need a second vest non-swimmers tend to choose good swimmers to cling to, but you need special water martial arts training to get yourself out of that kind of situation. I know such things I have DLRG Bronze (seriously yes I have but at this point the metaphor might be at the breaking point).
Oh, the rich. Easy: We eat them. You're the Turk, you come up with a recipe. Anything as long as it involves expropriated chilli.
Eh Mathematics is pretty much 50/50, engineering is heavily male-dominated, but then you have e.g. biology which is female-dominated. We're at a stage where you have to drill down by subject and some of it will probably never vanish (ask Lego, they tried). And speaking of: There's grade discrimination against boys and we don't have nearly enough male teachers.
Generally speaking there's lots of differences between the states when it comes to primary and secondary education. The eastern states are actually quite good when it comes to having at least remotely sane systems (the more different than Bavaria the better, more or less) but then they're (exception Berlin) also the ones with the fewest people with immigrant backgrounds. Back in my days SH hadn't yet abolished the Realschule and let me tell you Gymnasiasts are awful in comparison. You can try as you want if you tell kids they're better or worse at a young age what you get is classism and if you justify one type of discrimination, you implicitly justify, and cause, all: It's way easier to learn looking down on a new group of people than it is to learn looking down the first time around.
How in the everloving fuck has the majority ever gotten theirs. I mean short of the labour aristocracy -- which btw has a quite significant Turkish component, IG Metall and everything, you don't need Abitur to work at VW. If you count by type of employment relation the precariat is about 30% of the workforce. Thirty, not even counting the unemployed. Even more are worried that they'll land there, about 12.5% never knew anything else and don't expect better, either. The rest of the majority pays all the taxes while the rich don't even begin to pay their fair share (or the wealth gap wouldn't increase steadily).
I acknowledge that there's room for different valuations here and we could play oppression Olympics all night long, but telling the precariat "you'll have to wait" isn't going to work. You can describe everything very accurately all day long people won't listen, the percentage of people who got fucked over since the 90s is too high to be ignored. Also risking them being stirrup holders for Nazis is just not worth it.
Alright I have already spent an undue amount of time and energy on you, I'm giving up. Your reading skills are subpar, you don't seem to be able to selfcrit, you keep using ML terms even though you clearly aren't a Marxist, not even a materialist. You are an "all lives matter" liberal wrecker and bully and certainly no comrade of mine.
I'm an anarchist. It's not my fault MLs appropriated and abuse our terms and don't understand power. I mean have you read Engel's "On Authority"? Literally "Anarchists think ball-point pens are oppressing them by dictating that you shall press a button and that's all they're about" kind of reasoning, a completely bourgie strawman.
An "anarchist" that tries to keep a lid on anti-racism in case it might offend lol. An "anarchist" that keeps gaslighting about how racist actions aren't really about racism because white people face injustices as well. An "anarchist" that is openly lying to me "Mathematics is 50/50 in male/female"? Do you not see that my username is a portemanteau of mathematician and christian? Who do you think youre fooling. "Don't tell others they have to wait, you'll have to wait yourself and once the majority has theirs your turn will come" the fuck out of here lmao
Oh sorry maths is actually 55% female. But, sure, narratives are stronger than statistics that's what you learn in maths. And you have the gall to talk about materialism, if you simply made a statement and didn't know and didn't bother to look it up that's one thing, not looking it up when accusing someone else of lying is a whole different game: It's political violence.
You can't read for shit lol your vibes based leftism is not materialist and your lying if you say it is.