Re: Once again

On Sat, Aug 18, 2001 at 10:59:03AM -0400, Brandon Griffin wheezed something about:

> Nice to see you are still fulfilling your "socially responsible" role of
> disseminating half-truths and propaganda, 

Don't you acknowledge any obligation to validate the claims you make? Come
on, even you can do better than this, I think.

  while us greedy rightwing types
> hold jobs that actually add to the general wealth. Oh but wait, wealth is
> finite, and what one gains, another loses, auch sprach Marx.

This is cute. Utter nonsense, but cute. Do you actually know enough about my
job, my bank accounts, my impact on the economy to be able to say any of
this? I somehow doubt it.

There's plenty of public claims I've made that you can take issue with;
unlike you, I take public stands on issues for public reasons. If you want
to criticize me, why not stick to the stuff you can actually know?

Weird speculation about my finances is just dumb.

> Anyway, I got your email reply, and it is apparent that you have an
> extremely caricaturized view of those who think differently from you, 

Well, you offered a laundry list of right-libertarian platitudes wrapped in
a homily; I agree with you that what you offered was a crude caricature, but
that's your problem more than mine.

  though
> they may have arrived at their views through no less an application of
> reason and intelligence than you have at yours...

Hmm, I thought the point was truth, not how much one has *tried*; wow, so
you're not really much of a right-lib after all, I guess. 

  oops, wrong again, forgive
> me, I have forgotten the sacred mantra. Intellectual diversity is
> meaningless, only melanin-content diversity is of any worthwhile
> significance, and deserving of legislative enforcement. 

This is offensive *and* stupid. Neat.

Interesting that in the name of defending intellectual diversity you're the
one sending nasty emails attacking *me*. The stuff about melanin is just, at
best, *foul*; at worst, it marks you as a racist. 

  However
> melanin-content diversity can be subordinated in any case wherein the
> individual concerned holds a divergent viewpoint, as in the case of ugly
> Uncle Toms like that guy in the black robe (dare we speak his abhorrent
> name)

I've never criticized Justice Thomas for having a "divergent" viewpoint; I
have criticized him for being *wrong* -- you know the difference, right?

He seems to be content to join Scalia in the most tendentious, often odious
judicial opinions. As far as that goes, I don't care whether he's black or
White or any other thing.

Maybe you can't get him to explain to you why Americans *don't* have a
federally-protected right to vote (!!); or how it can be the case that it's
not unjust that an innocent person be executed for a crime she or he did not
commit, as long as her or his trial met (very minimal) standards of
fairness?

I mean, how bad will Scalia and Thomas have to get before even the right
gets nervous? (And the point, here, is that they ways in which they are
atrocious will end up hurting *everyone*, not just liberals or the left or
whatever.)

> But I tend to ramble, as you somewhat accurately pointed out in your last
> email.

Indeed.

> Well, on another matter, I read your article titled "Ob-scen-i-ty", and
> though some of the quotes were cute, and perhaps obscene, as you meant, but
> I tended to attribute the obscenity to different causes as you perhaps
> presumed. In particular I was struck by the part that listed obscene world
> figures, so there I will begin:
> 
> "Half the world -- nearly three billion people -- live on less than two
> dollars a day."
> Wow, is population really that high? I thought it was still around the
> 3bill. mark, but then I don't really keep track of things like that. 

Then maybe you don't have the minimal requisite knowledge necessary to have
a reasonable public opinion about these issues? The global population is
*well* past 3B. 

According to http://www.census.gov/cgi-bin/ipc/popclockw estimates,
world pop is currently about 6.1B.

  But
> anyway, how many of those people live under totalitarian or communist
> governments, with centrally planned economies? I know that most of China,
> having been there myself, is extremely poor, as well as Africa with no
> shortage of totalitarian monsters and socialists.

How deliciously vague this is!

I hate to upturn your Randian apple cart, but world poverty doesn't really
breakdown by this simplistic western-democracy-good, everything-else-bad
worldview.

How about some facts? A much more accurate indicator of world poverty is
the colonizer-colonized distinction, usually called the "Global North" and
"Global South" respectively in the development literature.

For instance, here's a table showing poverty gaps broken down by
North/South. It tracks poverty *way* closer than by political division:

http://www.undp.org/hdro/gaps.htm

Or here's another way of looking at world poverty that's more predictive
than simplistic political divisions:

http://www.undp.org/hdro/98gdi.htm

which shows that global poverty is exceedingly *gendered*.

In short, poverty doesn't really follow the demarcations of States.

> "The Gross Domestic Product of the poorest 48 nations (i.e. a quarter of the
> world's countries) is less than the wealth of the world's three richest
> people combined."

> Again, what are these nations? And what system of government and economic
> system do they operate under? We couldn't be talking about Japan or Hong
> Kong (I know technically not a country, but might as well be) here.

I suspect that 100% of these 48 countries were at one time colonies of the
West. About 2/3rds of the world's poorest countries are in sub-Saharan
Africa, one of the most colonized and exploited places on earth. Gee,
I guess those lazy Africans should just work harder, huh?

> "The wealthiest nation on Earth has the widest gap between rich and poor of
> any industrialised nation."

> I will just assume here that you mean the United States, just because the
> sheer size of it kinda gives it an edge over others. It is interesting that
> the US also has one of the highest immigration rates. 

No, in this context, that isn't interesting.

What is interesting is that *massive* wealth disparities in the US
*destroys* your simple-minded thesis that western-democracy-good,
everything-else-bad.

If it's the case that American-style democracy is *the* engine to alleviate
global poverty, why are there so *many* poor people in the US? Why in the US
is wealth so massively disparate?

  It is equally
> fascinating that much of this immigration comes from Mexico, a country that
> enjoyed the rule of nearly a century of quasi-socialist central planners.
> And that many of these people come here with absolutely nothing. And
> continuing, that the state with the widest gap between rich and poor happens
> to be California, oddly enough, also the one with the highest rate of
> immigration! Why is it then, that the Mexican immigrants are coming north to
> the relative economic freedom of the US rather than any number of latin
> american countries shackled by the gravely bad ideas of socialism? 

Does any of the economic and social woe of Central and South America have
*anything* to do with the US's actions there over the past 100 years?

You rightly reject totalitarianism, but you fail to note (because it's
inconvenient or, again, because you're factually impoverished?) that the US
record in this region -- essentially, as a matter of formal US doctrine, our
backyard, our playground for 150 years or so -- is atrocious when it comes
to our explicit support of dictators.

You know what the very best predictor of human rights abuses in this region
has been and continues to be? US military aid levels; the more they go up,
the worse human rights abuses become. In the places where there is little or
no US military aid, human rights abuses tend to be greatly diminished or
non-existent.

This is not a mistake.

So, sure, dictators *suck*, democracy is better by far. I just wish
Washington agreed.

  And why
> is it that Mexico, is having a problem with ITS southern border? Perhaps as
> bad as mexico is compared to the US, it is still is better than the basket
> cases to the south. So yes, while that might be true, the statistic is
> disingenuous, leading the reader to think that there is no possibility for
> betterment in the US, whereas it is in fact a vindication of our system. 

That doesn't follow at all.

You're forgetting one crucial possibility: it could be the case that
immigration to the US is high because it's so massively worse in places like
El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Honduras that these people are
willing to go to Mexico and, if possible, from there to the US. Immigration
to the US doesn't vindicate anything but the proposition that, however good
or bad it is here, it's better than it is in the places from whence
immigrants are coming.

But so what? The interesting question, which is readily answered, is *why*
is it so bad in these places? You say "dictators"; yes, but what you should
say is "US-backed, US-installed, US-supported dictators". Go down the list
of regional thugs over the past 50 years, and in *every* case, you'll find
the US-sponsored dictator du jour.

As for socialism in the region, you really must put down the Ayn Rand Crack
Pipe -- in every place that socialism has been tried, by the sovereign
decision of a sovereign people, like Allende's Chile and El Salvador, what
has been the invariant response of Washington? To declare war on the
country, to smash it utterly, to install US-supported dictatorial puppets.

Watch and see as in the next few years Kissinger is brought to the dock to
answer for what he had done in Chile.

> Oh and here's another little piece you included on here:
> ".... the right of our manifest destiny to over spread and to possess the
> whole of the [globe] which Providence has given us for the development of
> the great experiment of [multinational corporate profit extraction] and
> [unsustainable non-]development of [everyone who isn't White] entrusted to
> us. It is right such as that of the tree to the space of air and the earth
> suitable for the full expansion of its principle and destiny of growth" --
> John L. O'Sullivan (updated)
> 
> Looking through the archives at some of your past articles, you have some
> serious issues with white people. 

Yes, being one myself, I'm obligated.

  Dude, get off it. Most of us just want to
> be left alone to earn a living for our families. We desire ill for no one,
> and when someone is in need, we come in numbers in greater proportion to our
> representation than anyone. 

Hmm, let's test that claim, shall we?

Is it true when "someone in need" meant:

   - US slavery?
   - US legal apartheid (euphemistically called Jim Crow)?
   - de facto systematic discrimination since 1965?
   - epidemic of racial profiling today?
   - massively disparate, racially-patterned incarceration rates?
   - massively disparate, racially-patterned state execution rates?

It seems that all of those count as instances of "someone" being
"in need", but where the "someone" is black folks -- did in any of those
cases White people "come in numbers in greater proportion to our
representation than anyone"? I don't think so.

And in most of those cases, there is an obvious and indisputabe "desiring of
ill" for black people.

  So what's with you? You sound like those people
> that talk about the "evil Jews" and black helicopters and the Protocols of
> Zion or whatever that bogus crap is. 

If I sound like that to you, I suggest you find yourself a new way of
listening.

  Do you instead see white helicopters
> with dollar signs on them? Same apocolyptic garbage. Looking at that,
> deleting your snide comment about "everyone who isn't white", that could

You call it "snide"; maybe so. But you don't claim that it's *false*. Why
not?

Let's review a few of the places where the US has been a colonial, imperial
power:

1. Cuba
2. Phillippines
3. Haiti
4. Central and South America
5. Puerto Rico (which remains a US colony to this day)
6. Africa
7. African-descended domestic populations
8. Palestine
9. Japan (specially, Hiroshima & Nagasaki)
10. American indigenous peoples

Gee, I don't see many White folks in any of those places.

The US has *never* tried to colonize a White population. Anywhere. Is that
simply an accident?

> easily have come out of 1932 Japan. There are far more Chinese in China than
> there are whites in the entire world, and many of them are getting very
> wealthy in the areas where the government has allowed the capitalist
> experiment to continue- the special economic zones. 

So what?

  If you want to know more
> about them just let me know, I travel there frequently and have many Chinese
> friends, both in business and in government. They also tell me that many
> Chinese are getting more nationalistic. Now if you were truly concerned
> about that you would be able to just as easily substitute "Chinese" or
> "Japanese" or any other nationality into that quote. 

No, that doesn't follow and it's not the point of the modified quote. Sorry.

  But as you probably
> singly loathe white people, I doubt you could summon the moral indignation
> to do so- hatred is an inconsistent beast. Anyway, get over the white bit.

I don't hate White people. I hate injustice.

> It is old, and makes you sound like you are locked into some kind of 1950's
> mentality, and perhaps will save you the trouble of an ulcer in your later
> years.

This is interesting, you really must expand on it: precisely what kind of
"1950's mentality" does it "sound like" I'm "locked into"? I really want to
know.

> Well this is about all I have time for now... I was pleased to see that out
> of 30 or so right wing wackos who wrote to you last time, you chose my email
> to reply to. I just hope I can maintain the requisite whackiness to merit
> continued dialogue. he he

You have little to fear on that front, I suspect.

Kendall Clark