I don’t think the issue with Civil Rights legislation was the Civil War, I think the issue was equality.
As President Lyndon Johnson said, "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket.”
Racism isn’t about race at its core, it’s redirected anger from being exploited and abused by people in power. There is a reason people in power always blame “the immigrants” or “the Jews”; it’s redirection.
This doesn't just apply to race. The whole "trans people in women's bathrooms/sports" panic was another example of people being told that a tiny minority of people are a huge threat that we all need to focus on, while we were being screwed over by a kleptocracy. Same with "Antifa."
And it worked. Politicians do this because it works.
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> the aspect of males in female sport, highlights a set of absurd beliefs that are unfortunately quite common on the left
You're playing right into the hands of the kleptocracy by trying to start this dumb-ass discussion up again.
There are several other wacky beliefs that get circulated on the left, such as abolishing the police, abolishing prisons, that speech is violence, and so on. These also get pointed to when a politician on the left shows support for these. However the belief that men can become women is next level bizarre, trying to upturn something so fundamental to our existence and understanding of the world - like flat-earthism - and that's why the right have focused so heavily on it as an attack line.
> the belief that men can become women
To be more charitable: people should really read more and try to understand more about the difference between biological sex and gender. Many people think there is no difference and that's why they have such a reaction: "but they are trying to change something fundamental about biology!".
I used to have trouble with it as well, coming from a more traditional society.
As for the other wacky beliefs: they are mostly exaggerated. When talking about police, most leftist I know don't _literally_ want to just dismantle the whole thing and replace it with nothing. The point is to highlight the absolute lousy state of affairs, more than it is to discontinue the notion of policing.
Dunno while I'm replying to a random anon, but anyways.
People can not (mostly) change their sex (AFAB etc).
However, there are a vast proportion of potential gender expressions, and it should be entirely uncontroversial that people can choose from them.
And now, given that I have disagreed with both partisan (US) positions on this, I'll withdraw.
Agreed, and if the position being advocated by many on the left was merely that people should be free to express themselves however they please, I don't think the right would have found it an effective line of attack. Most people on the libertarian branch of the right would likely agree in principle too.
I think that it was very strange how this became such an issue. Like, as long as it doesn't hurt anyone, who cares about another's gender expression?
But it's such a tiny proportion of the population, and matters much less than making things better for the populace (which is the whole point of governance).
I'm not a Marxist, but the whole culture war stuff is very very convenient for those who don't want to work on reducing inequality (by taxing the upper earners more). And given how much of the Democratic vote is dependent on these people, I guess it makes political sense in the short term.
if I remember correctly, Howard Zinn covers this pretty well in his A People's History of the Unites States: racism was promoted by the wealthy in order to keep the poor divided and weak (the fear of poor whites and blacks uniting was real)
Ed Glaeser is a Harvard economist and has a paper about how racism was promoted by those making money from it. That seems more believable to me.
https://glaeser.scholars.harvard.edu/publications/political-...
Socialists like to frame everything as a class war, but reality is not so black and white. Rich people aren't a monolith and this was especially not the case with civil rights. The American elite were thoroughly embarrassed by their European counterparts laughing at their countrymen being so boorish as to lynch people for the color of their skin. Civil Rights came from the top down just as much, if not more, than it came from the bottom up. Without the Supreme Court that gave us Brown v Board and LBJ's warm reception of the NAACP, we would not have Civil Rights as we know it. At best, we'd get half measures that the kind we got under Reconstruction.
This seems like an oversimplification and one of your own examples shows it. Aren’t “the Jews” today in power or in very close proximity, not just locally but on the world stage? Are they redirecting the anger to themselves? Or is there more to the reasons people would direct their hate or dislike towards an entire group of people?
Not saying that you’re wrong, but there’s more to it. Even when not directed by those in power, some people need an external reason for their own failures. They need a target for their anger that is not themselves.