General Politics Discussion (V) [ARCHIVED] • Page 9

we're talking about the Natalie tweet that was posted in here and that was seen as reasonable while the tweet by Josh that I posted wasn't. we were not talking about Emma or Naomi.

And fwiw, poc and women can and do have problematic views that inadvertently harm their communities, both here and abroad. you can't attach someone's identity to an ideology.

 

Judge says emoluments case against Trump can proceed - CNNPolitics

Still great, but a bummer on Mar a Lago.

 

So you know white Latinx exists and many non-black and indigenous Cubans fall into this category. After all, today's Latin America exists by colonization by white people. Go anywhere in Latin America and see the inequality between Latinx of European descent vs indigenous and black Latinx.

But yes not all the Parkland kids are white. But the manifesto and overall mainstream "common sense" gun proposals whitewash gun violence in communities of POC and US military violence abroad which primarily affect POC.

 

Those people are adults! And even in being adults and supposed to be more able to handle criticism that is levied even in non hostile ways, let alone hostile. a lot of them can’t and start shutting out discussion that could educate them. If that happens with adults, what do you think happens with teenagers where everything on social media has hyper importance?


Yeah it might do that, but how many people are clicking past th first tweet? Especially the ones who feel like the first tweet is an attack instead of the begining of constructive criticism?

I said a detailed and specific critique is going to be taken as a personal attack if you start out with ‘these kids are ableist and blaming victims of violence for violence’. But yeah, it’s pretty tough to go about this the right way. It sucks to hear but it’s the truth. Putting together educational programs in communities that can attract these kids to is probably the best bet, and that’s hard.

 

Completely disagree. Making guns fewer and far between on a federal level would mean less gun deaths.

 

That idiom of the baby and the bathwater and all that is apt. Or maybe Sideshow Bob and the rakes.

 

No one classified everyone in the movement as white. The point was, given the racial differences, why are the critiques of other groups, like black people or mentally ill folks, considered irrelevant or “the enemy of good”. My argument is it’s precisely because these are the groups that are critiquing the Parkland students that they’re being criticized, devalued or written off as “angry”.

 

Sure I agree, but where?

My point is that gun violence in certain communities do not stem from the prevalence of assault rifles giving mass shooters the ability to do what they do. It comes from decades of neglect and institutionalized racism. I think society is willing to throw it's support against the former but the latter...

That is the distinction and nuance I am pointing out.

 

I can't believe you all broke my shitposting streak in the Politics Forums.

Prior to this it's literally been months since I've contributed anything to actual discussion.

 

Well, the groups that are critiquing the Parkland students are not a monolith either (just like the young activists themselves). The far right-wing groups attacking these students are different from some of the more leftist attacks are different from the moderate attacks.

They're not irrelevant. The entire point of pointing out that the Parkland students and their activism aren't a monolith and shouldn't be accepted or rejected as "good" or "bad" is specifically to say they're relevant. The issue is with sticking everything under one label and creating the permission structure to dismiss all of the student activists because one tweeted something "bad" or portions of the platform that a few worked on are not good. (A piece which nowhere near the majority have signed off on, voted on, or said they stand with or behind.) What's happening is that these kids are being all labeled under that one umbrella now. Which creates the same tribal dynamic we see and the entire movement gets written off as either too extreme or not extreme enough. These structures are in place and so well oiled that you'll see this article in The Guardian and, if you look on Twitter, see the pile on of dismissing the entire movement for gun control. It's probably not great that I can't even tell who hates David Hogg more by some of the tweets and vile shit being thrown around. There's a wide gap between "20% of a thing (written by a small group of people that doesn't actually represent the entire movement's beliefs and thoughts) is really bad" and writing off everyone and turning away millions of would be allies in this fight. As we have seen, historically, with activist movements that have failed ... this is exactly how they fall apart. They get picked apart by finding small cracks and breaking it from the inside. It plays perfectly into the hands of those that want to silence the large student led movement to sow discord at all levels.

 

Just stopping by to vent about guns. My older brother got robbed at gunpoint last night. He was put in execution style on his knees with two guns to the back of his head and neck/spine while others searched his pockets and took everything he had on him. Now, I know my thought on guns and it's already not great. I am not going to say having stricter gun laws would prevented this incident. But if guns could have prevented or at least made it much harder to happen, I think that's a win. They could use other weapons depending on how everything played out. But the fact there were guns leaves little room for re-course as the victim. There is no running away or fighting back. I am just super pissed about the incident and guns being a big part in it just further pisses me off.

 

Everywhere. Less guns everywhere=less gun deaths everywhere.

I agree that assault rifle style weapons are not the biggest issue. I'd go after handguns first and most aggressively, honestly. But they (assault rifles) are still an issue as well and I'd go after them next. Make it harder to get any type of gun, not just assault rifles, and crack down on illegal sales. Honestly the only guns I feel comfortable with being out there en masse are bolt action style rifles, and maaaybe certain types of shotguns. Take away the excuse that cops use about fearing that everyone is carrying so we can disarm them.

If the goal eventually is repeal of the 2nd, and/or making it not a right so it can be heavily regulated the way other things are, youre still gonna be left with excess guns on the street. So what do you doabout getting those? I don't really trust police to go in and get them all in some large operation, and a buy back will only get some of them, so it'll probably take years of attrition with less guns going into circulation than those that are being confiscated after crimes, stop operating, being lost, etc.

 

We have been talking about the manifesto specifically. That’s been the point of the contention here. In particular, the policing of the tone of the criticism and this idea that “perfect is the enemy of good”. The fact that The Guardian said “this was edited by the students”, and that it was widely shared as such, gives people a basis on which to criticize it as representative of their outlooks. Regardless of whether or not that’s true, it still represents something to be criticized from the left, if for no other reason than to prevent marginalized groups from being ground under the wheels of the sort of legislation proposed here. Moreover, it occurs to me that this entire argument, wherein people who argue against those bad ideas are fracturing the movement, assumes that the people that may be the faces of the movement are always-already correct and that marginalized people should be silenced, otherwise they’ll be the cause if nothing gets done, even though they’ve been fighting for their lives since the day they were born. I would say that this cause is as legitimate as that of the kids that symbolize the movement and their voices should be considered as such when assessing the ideas being proposed to counter gun violence. If you think that this causes movements to fail, I disagree. What causes movements to fail is a refusal to engage with folks who have a specific relationship to a given phenomena. It falls apart when we can’t have honest discussions about why such and such social policy would be bad. Again, it reminds me of the ostensibly progressive agenda of the ‘90’s that lead to a whole generation of black and brown men and women being put behind bars.

 

Lightskinned and white-passing Latinx folks (as well as white Latinx folks) benefit from a LOT of privilege and Latinx cultures carry a lot of learned anti-blackness. While I agree that it helps no one to classify non-white folks as white, it also doesn't change the fact that these fights get looked over and characterized very differently when black kids and black activists are at the forefront - and when they're the victims. Anti-blackness isn't just a white problem.

I initially read this as you saying indigenous Cubans are white and I was very confused until I read it twenty more times, since I'm now pretty sure you meant for the "non" to apply to both black and indigenous Cubans?

Although it's interesting in a heartbreaking sort of way - a lot of my visibly brown Cuban-American friends consider themselves white and can't fathom a world in which they aren't. Tell it to LAPD and the alt-right, I guess - I'm pasty as all get out and even I only "pass" about 50% of the time. Internalized stuff is real in Latinx communities, which just ties into the whole European root supremacy problem.

 

We can talk about the "manifesto" specifically, but my point of contention is far broader than just that one piece.

I think we should be very careful about the idea that one media publication can promote something as being representative of an entire group and taking that as gospel. You and I both know the history of that and how harmful it's been to activists causes for decades. My contention definitely starts with The Guardian pitching this as such and that line of thought being accepted uncritically.

I think it's more important to actually not dismiss "whether or not that's true" — the truth of how widespread the beliefs espoused are within the movement, who wrote it, who is backing it, and how fervently ... is very important. To lose control over that and buy into immediate criticism I think only helps those wishing to break-up this movement.

Let's take DSA for an organizing example. If everything that was proposed for inclusion as part of a platform was painted as being part of DSA without there ever being a discussion, vote, and process ... it would be rightfully shot down as being ridiculous. Because we know that cherry-picking to paint broadly is a disingenuous tool used to try and make activist movements look extreme, or dangerous, or bad.

With BLM we see one individual that says something on TV all of of a sudden become representative of the entire movement and then used to slime and try and paint the entire movement under that brush.

These are tactics used to stop movements. To silence. To take the few and make it appear as though they are representative of the whole.

I'm arguing the exact opposite, that this piece is not the face or will of the movement.

Here's the editorial staff of The Eagle Eye, the Parkland student newspaper, that put together the manifesto: Madyson Kravitz, Dara Rosen, Taylor Yon, Leni Steinhardt, Emma Dowd, Brianna Fisher, Zoe Gordon, Kyra Parrow, Carly Novell, Rebecca Schneid, Kevin Trejos, Suzanna Barna, Nikhita Nookala, Richard Doan, and Christy Ma.

That's 15 people in one school and does not include many of the "faces" this movement has created and I do not think is representative of the millions of people that marched or the thousands of people from different schools across the country.

I'm saying that if we start from the premise that this school newspaper staff speaks for the entire movement: it's a false premise. It doesn't. And I think it's getting outsized criticism for what it actually is and is being tied to the larger movement for nefarious purposes.

Do you believe twitter quote-tweets and dunking on people not involved in writing this piece, at all, and telling them to eat shit and amplifying the "they're stupid kids" talking point is having an honest discussion? I don't. I'd be all for an honest discussion, but I don't think that's happening and I think taking something 15 people wrote and painting it as representative of the entire gun-control movement, and putting quotes from it next to people that never said or signed of on it, is, frankly, the opposite of honest discussion.

 

The editorial staff of the student magazine that wrote the manifesto is comprised of a different group of students than the Never Again MSD group that organized the march.

I don’t think it’s fair to say one speaks for the other.

 

I should clarify that these friends are not immigrants and their parents are not immigrants. They were born in the USA. I know that racial identity is different in other countries, trust me - but I was speaking about Cuban-Americans in the USA, which is why it matters.

 

It's very annoying when I write a lot of words and someone says better it in like 1/50th of them.

Curse you Scottle!

 

fixed.

For some reason one of the quotation marks got turned into a smart quote and messed it up.

 

i got my car stolen at gun point last year. so i know what thats like. without the gun in the equation would i have just given up my keys? would they have even tried to rob me?

 

i also got shot at last year in a completely separate incident so yeah from personal experience not a huge fan of guns

 

damn jake