Quit publicizing racist twats

 A racist twat in Rochester, Minn., recently dropped repeated n-bombs on a Black child she suspected of filching something from her bag in a city park. The boy is five years old and reportedly has special needs.

A bystander took video and confronted her. I won't link any of it because you can find it easily, and I don't want to give her any more publicity. I also omit her name, because she has raised a reported $500,000.00 so far, based on the claim that she has been doxed and fears for her safety.

First off, she has a right to say anything she wants, including racist epithets against a child, as long as she doesn't slide into criminal threatening. Representatives of the child might sue her for slander regarding the allegations of theft, but the First Amendment gives her plenty of latitude to spew ignorant garbage. This should never have become a cause celebre.

Our zeal for public shaming has begun to backfire spectacularly. A video meant to embarrass this loser instead gave her prominence to attract her fellow racists to protect a poor waif beset by threatening Black people and their terrorist white allies.

The racists and other far right adherents constantly shift between presenting themselves as badasses that you should just surrender to outright, and poor, noble victims of a legal system perverted by miscegenated Communists. They might walk around with firearms draped all over them, and talk about how they ask and grant no quarter, only to whine piteously when someone publishes their home address. What part of "no quarter" don't you get, tough guy? Total war is total war. Are you advocating for it or not?

America is basically a nation of shit-talkers. In the course of a day, how many thousands of death threats are flung back and forth in the heat of a moment and never go anywhere? In that mix, some may be credible. Most are not. In angry discourse, it's more common to oversell and under-deliver than vice versa.

Racism won't go away if you ignore it. But individual incidents of it won't turn into fundraising opportunities if you give it less air. Racists are not ashamed. Why do you think that a particular club is called Proud Boys? Putting a racist in a viral video is no longer a good strategy.

Along with hardcore racists come fashionable racists and the business interests that simply follow the money. Those business interests were into diversity when diversity seemed to be winning. Now that racism seems to be on top, business interests are okay with it. Corporations have no morals. They try to appeal to buyers with whatever seems to be attracting them at a given time. Some business interests will hold onto their support for diversity because they know that a solid percentage of consumers will choose them on that basis. Rather than compete in the more crowded arena of racist businesses, the "good guys" can depend on a loyal customer base to tide them over until things swing back to favor diversity overall. It is morally right, but also safe business.

I originally headlined this piece Nonviolence versus Violence because of reactions I read from the anti-racist community as the story about the Rochester bitch plays out. Certain Black activists called out their white supporters for a lack of resolve. Supposed supporters take down their Black Lives Matter signs and flags of support for marginalized groups. This may in fact indicate a weak will among some of those allies, but it also acknowledges a sad and frightening reality: the right wing likes to use violence and vandalism more than the left does.

The right wing cites the left's lack of violent propensities as a sign of cowardice and weakness. Paradoxically, they also accuse the left of perpetrating violence or of threatening it as an excuse for their own armament. Back in the Cold War, we did wonder whether the Soviets would outright invade us. Long before that, in the rise of Marxism in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Communists did engage in violence. They also didn't act very communistic wherever they gained power, but that's a tangent for another day.

Nonviolent protest emerged as a powerful tool in the 20th Century. However, it was only one tool. Outbreaks of actual violence in support of civil rights, for instance, showed the government that the costs of maintaining the racist status quo were higher than the costs of expanding the rights of full citizenship under the full protection of federal law. Gay rights got their big kick forward from the Stonewall riots in New York City.

Riots are battlefield actions. The combatants form ranks under their banners on a piece of ground that's publicly accessible, often completely public: streets, parks, business districts. There have been spectacularly bloody exceptions in which mobs descended on residential areas. This has most often been white forces attacking minorities individually or collectively. A handy list is provided here.

Slavery in the United States was not ended by peaceful protest. It was ended by a bloody and wasteful war between factions that conveniently lined up with geographical boundaries, allowing the South to secede and pretend to be their own country for four years. They spent those years proving that their economic system couldn't support a long-term military conflict against an industrialized power. They were not only morally wrong, they were economically inferior in an era when business competition was evolving rapidly. But they were so in love with their hateful ideology that they let thousands of their men get killed and their land was laid waste by Union forces. And afterward they merely shifted their tactics  -- still to their own detriment -- in order to maintain racial hierarchy.

Meanwhile, the rest of the country received both Black residents and racist ideologies. Exposure to both has led somewhat to acceptance of Black and brown people as a part of normal society, but also to the persistent cancer of racism. If the Civil War happened today, battles would break out all over the country. You would also find out in a hurry who really had the stomach for it.

When Timothy McVeigh bombed the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, he thought that he would trigger a revolution against the tyrannical United States government. Instead, he set the militia movement back ten years as people recoiled at the horror of his act. We had those dopes walking around our town in their little Confederate hats, and then poof! they all ditched the regalia and shut the fuck up for a while. It was nice. They probably still met in private. You can tell by the signs and flags around town today that a good chunk of them suck up conspiracy theories and far right propaganda. And the few years of relative peace were bought at the price of innocent people killed and maimed in the Oklahoma City bombing.

My point is that large scale violence is the best advertising against itself. Too bad that it does not inoculate against small scale violence.

Bad actors on the right in this area have engaged in vandalism against targets that they could identify as holding opposing views: roofing nails in driveways, political signs cut down with a chainsaw, slashed tires, broken windows, occasional arson. During one dispute in the tiny town where I live, people were advised to put a padlock on their well cover (if they hadn't already just for general prudence) so that someone on the other side of the dispute didn't drop something unpleasant in there.

Whether to display symbols of a political position calls for a cost-benefit analysis. How many people will be swayed toward your point of view compared to the odds that some destructive, hateful chud will damage or destroy something you depend on, like your car or your house or an outbuilding containing tools you use?

The same Black activist noted that racism always attracts more funding than anti racism does. Anti-racist endeavors depend on mostly small donors. As a small donor myself, I can tell you that I view the many problems that our species faces as interlocked. Racists and destroyers have the benefit of their simple minds to help them focus their contributions on the narrow front pushed hard by their narrow minds. Saving things is much more complicated and delicate than destroying them. Because I tried to be content with a frighteningly modest income, I don't have the money to toss monthly donations totaling a couple of hundred dollars once I have paid my routine expenses and set aside some for non-routine expenses. Before I put a target on myself, I ask what my sacrifice will do to advance the greater good.

Once violence breaks out, it shapes reality to itself. The conflict becomes more important than the stakes in it. Combatants fight for their lives. We talk of the sacrifice of heroes who fall in battle, but that's a very different act from the human sacrifice celebrated by Christian churches, in which their pure messiah was executed just for being too darn good.

In either case, the gruesome deaths don't have a lasting good effect. One dead on a cross in 33 CE and millions dead by 1945, and yet here we are. Thousands obliterated in the 1860s just so some racist twat can raise a half a million dollars on the n-word and speculation that she might receive pizzas she didn't order on a few nights in 2025. I don't know what -- if anything -- will smarten up the racist dipshits. It's reached the point of unreasoning hatred, so no reasoned discourse will sway them. The death toll of racists is in the millions just since the 1860s, and yet there are still millions of them, so you won't "kill the problem out," as violent right wingers like to say.

Should the racists manage to rule the world, they will discover that they cannot make it into their utopia any more than we progressive dreamers could. Maybe the technofascists will achieve their fantasy of entirely automated labor serving a handful of actual humans living in luxury. In that case, the vast majority of people will have died out. It seems like a long term goal at best, except for the part where most humans die out. That part is too easy to achieve.

I can see it: Jesus comes back in about 2075.

"Hey, I'm back! Hey! Where did everybody go?" And then some AI planetary defense system vaporizes him.

In the meantime, we're alive now. How nice or not nice we make it is up to us. One more war or era of bloody skirmishes won't fix a goddamned thing.

Jumping off a cliff won't hurt you

 It's the landing.

Experts and concerned citizens have been warning us for years about the threats presented by the right wing elements currently in complete control of the federal government and many states. They described the dire consequences well in advance, attempting to sway voters after the 2020 election to keep up the pressure to hold back the MAGA faction and their allies and backers. They have failed at every step. Voters gave the House of Representatives to the Republicans in 2022 and the whole shootin' match to them in 2024.

Now that the Trump regime is energetically demolishing many decades of progress, we're starting to feel some consequences, but nothing like the devastation we were told to prepare for.

No one wants to see store shelves bare and businesses closing. No one wants to be part of massive layoffs. Not everyone wants a white ethno-state. Nor does everyone want to see women relegated to dependent, subservient status. I will venture that a minority of people want to see more dangerous workplaces, rising pollution, loss of cropland, privatization of national parks and other pubic lands, and unregulated drilling, mining, and transportation of resources through communities that happen to be in the way. But none of that has happened yet. Or not much. If you happen to live where lots of federal workers haven't suddenly lost their jobs, or where farmers have suddenly lost contracts they were counting on, maybe life seems pretty normal.

We're in midair right now. Feeling weightless, enjoying the view...

It's over in seconds.

What "Made in America" means

 Goods made in the foreign countries selected by Corporate America when they shipped the jobs off to maximize their profits are produced by low-paid labor, often in unsafe conditions. Sort of like the way factory workers were treated in this country in the Gilded Age, before unionization and health and environmental concerns delivered a one-two punch to corporate corner cutting.

Low priced consumer goods depend on exploited labor. In the countries where the factories are, the labor might feel well compensated for now, but if they get a taste of better and better living conditions they might upset the equation. In the meantime, anyone operating an industrial facility in the United States has to pay more for personnel, even if they don't pay particularly well by US standards. 

It's easy to say that you would gladly pay more for a US made item instead of one from China, until you start doing all the math and figure out how little you could afford. And it won't necessarily be made with better materials and workmanship. So you'll be paying more to get something that is only as good as you were getting from overseas. Meanwhile, the workers will face constant pressure from management to produce more for less. At the same time management will be fighting with regulators to ease up on pollution and safety standards.

Look at automobiles: You shell out five figures for even a dinky one, and with the best of care it starts letting you down within 3-5 years. We're talking about cars made in America. Consumer goods manufacturing is designed to make you buy things. It doesn't matter where the factory is. The calculation is the same.

We're awash in consumer goods: Televisions, computers, mobile phones, kitchen and household appliances, clothing... some stuff is produced here. Most is not. If companies tried to move the volume of production here that feeds our level of consumption, it would not only drive the prices of everything way up to cover the costs of establishing that infrastructure, it would require more land area than industry previously occupied at the height of domestic productivity. There are many more consumers now.

On the plus side, consumers now have less money to blow than in the latter part of the 20th Century, so they have less ability to gorge on the output of consumer goods manufacturing.

Economy is tricky. For all of the bullshit about "wealth creation," we're working with a finite planet. In nature, good times for any species are generally followed by a population collapse. The exception might be cockroaches. They seem to be able to thrive no matter what. When times are good, they eat the best garbage. When times are tough, they eat their own dead, and cast-off exoskeletons. As humans, we're more like the predators whose numbers boom when their prey proliferates. Those predators die off after they have eaten their prey population down to its low point. In the case of humans, we're preying not only on animals that we eat, but on each other, metaphorically, in economic competition.

Big companies don't really care where the factories are, as long as the numbers work in their favor. Since we have exalted obscene wealth as the ultimate marker of success, corporate leadership is only concerned with paying as little as possible to achieve whatever their business model calls productivity. Productivity only means how much money gets sucked in and funneled to the top.