Russell Contreras zeroes in on findings of the PRRI "Challenges to Democracy" study. Who, precisely wants to round up immigrants and put them into camps?

William Lindsey :toad:

@CanadianCrone Polling and discussing seem to me two very different things.

Canadian Crone

@wdlindsy To my mind, polling implies reflecting on a subject in order to provide my opinion. A discussion is throwing ideas around, causing me to reflect. In both cases, we are touching on subjects that are non-debatable. People should not be put in concentration camps, people should not be rounded up and have their movements restricted within walls because of the circumstances of their birth. Like children’s rights. Discussing their legitimacy implies their rights can be removed.

A Tattered Scrapbook

@wdlindsy Indeed; and the same countries continue to profit from maintaining the same inequalities. I think this is one of the reasons that BRICS represents a real challenge to the hegemony.

As both dominant parties in the US and UK support colonial war and domestic deportations, there is little to hope for there, or in Europe. How far will the West go to cling onto its power?

William Lindsey :toad:

@Tattered I suspect that imperial nations just don't ever concede power without a fight. A big part of the problem in getting more of those nations to recognize their shameful complicity in the slave system is that they scapegoat and blame the US, and the US certainly deserves tremendous blame. But enriching itself via slavery was hardly unique to the US, as Edward Baptist's magisterial The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism shows us.

William Lindsey :toad:

@CanadianCrone If polling in some way legitimates unacceptable behaviors, then I can see the point you're making. I don't see that clear link between trying to ascertain what people think about an issue by polling and legitimating unacceptable behaviors.

Canadian Crone

@wdlindsy I’ll go back to my example about children’s rights. If I poll people asking: “Do you believe children have rights?”, to my mind that implies there is a possibility that if a majority felt children should have no rights, then we could remove children’s rights. Whether people agree or not with children’s rights, or whether people think children should have rights, is irrelevant. But my poll gives them the impression that their opinion on the subject can impact this fact.

A Tattered Scrapbook

@wdlindsy I agree that there are cases to be made. The Commonwealth conference has drawn that into sharp relief. I like the Irish response that if the king does not wish to be blamed for the past, then he cannot continue to enjoy privileges based upon that past.

And that, I am afraid, is why the focus must be on the US. Its hegemonic power is not only the continuation of a past racism, but is also a current racism, with Gaza and the Southern border as evidence.

William Lindsey :toad:

@Tattered Focusing exclusively on the US and pointing to it as a scapegoat — as much as the US deserves scathing critical scrutiny — is too easy. It allows other nations who have large complicity in what's taking place now, the horrors now taking place in the Middle East, to deny and pretend. When they are very much complicit…. I think best that each of us work on our own turf to call the powers that be to responsibility, and not engage in dysfunctational scapegoating and pretending.

William Lindsey :toad:

@CanadianCrone "If I poll people asking: 'Do you believe children have rights?', to my mind that implies there is a possibility that if a majority felt children should have no rights."

This is where I lose you. I can see that some people might choose to regard the asking of that question by pollsters as legitimation of denying rights to children. But I don't see how the question itself really functions in that way.

A Tattered Scrapbook

@wdlindsy I profoundly disagree.

When I lived in the UK, there was only one foreign power with military bases in that country.

I now live in Japan, where only one foreign power has military bases.

A hegemony is a dangerous thing.

The only time in my twenty-five years in Japan that the LDP lost an election, removing the US base on Okinawa was a vote winner. Obama said no. So much for sovereignty.

US policies define and endanger the entire world.

Canadian Crone

@wdlindsy And that’s what makes the world go around. Different points of view

William Lindsey :toad:

@CanadianCrone Yes, different points of view, for which we keep seeking factual grounding — as the nurse who gave me two vaccinations today and I said to each other as we talked about the willingness of many of our fellow citizens to believe arrant nonsense about science, fact, vaccines, etc.

William Lindsey :toad:

@Tattered And scapegoating and pointing to one easy target that allows us to ignore our own complicity in what that target represents gets us nowhere — though it's front and central to Putin's campaign to shatter democracy. I think of all the conversations I've sat through with English and Scottish friends who say, "Of course, the slavery thing was you Americans, your problem," and who are now having to face their nations' considerable complicity in the slave system, about which I've long known.

A Tattered Scrapbook

@wdlindsy If you have followed me long enough, you will know that I have posted about the British monarchy’s foundation of a monopoly on the Atlantic Slave Trade.

I think we are a long way from “scapegoating”. The original issue was one of racist policies pursued by the US. That is not diminished or excused by the racist policies of other countries, just as American and British participation in Israeli war crimes does not excuse Putin’s war crimes. Evil is as evil does.

William Lindsey :toad:

@Tattered No one denies that evil is as evil does — no one who seeks to be honest and credible does that, that is. No one denies the long record of American complicity in evil. My point is that making the US the singular object of this critique allows others who have been very much part of the web of evil to pretend that they have not been — as recently as the decision of a shocking number of British people to vote Brexit as Bannon pulled Farage and Johnson's puppet strings.

A Tattered Scrapbook

@wdlindsy I am afraid that we are going to keep repeating ourselves. British and European evils are historic and ongoing. I could continue to relate my opposition to those ills to little point.

Perhaps it is difficult to understand the concept of American hegemony from inside America.

William Lindsey :toad:

@Tattered Perhaps it's difficult to understand that many Americans deeply oppose the deformations wrought by the myths of innocence and exceptionalism, when one looks in from outside with a superior vantage point.