Ta-Nehisi Coates Rules, The Thread

A notion like human rights is an attempt at defeating the simple dictates of might-makes-right with an idea that people ought to be better to each other. Better ideas pursuing the same goal are welcome; potshots against the fallible character of John Locke are not.

Hey, we could endorse some kind of tear-down-the-system-violently thing - a total crapshoot by the way, with no guarantees of a good outcome but plenty of blood and chances for deep misery and even worse oppression - but if it "succeeds," then when it's over, and a bunch of people are dead...... well, what happens then? Why do they then have some kind of society free from oppression? What would be different? How does it stay non-oppressive?

I get that Merdeyeux but why is blackness destined to *always remain* the other of rationality?

Occam's razor?

my potshot at locke was cheap but one can quite well map a racial logic intrinsic to his thought which carries through. i have no firm position on what that means re current issues of subjectivity and race besides 'it's messy and difficult'.

Why has it lasted hundreds of years already?

Nb western civilization's origins and dependence on a slave class go back much further than the 18th cen

(This I think is implied in the afro-pessimist account, which seems to deny the substantive content of the recent movement against police brutality.)

Wait, did the brutality stop? Did I miss something ?

he means, what it meant, what it was about

Isn't what it meant all about substantive results

I think of afropessimism as the Adorno to performance studies' benjamin

Adorno was an elitist dumbass.

Come on D-40, the presence of slavery is not relevant to the development of logical thought. It's not like if they didn't have slavery somehow logical thought would work differently. They had or sold slaves because they could, because people are often mean assholes if they can get away with it.

by the way, do you have some kind of issue with the way that Martin Luther King used logic in his writings and speeches? Should he have abandoned the cursed racist ways of logic? Let's hear the critique.

The passage denies that the riots are about brutality at all. It says that they are "demandless," purely destructive, anarchic violence directed at society as a whole. Maybe this is true of some rioters, but overall the unrest is due to people protesting police abuse.

Right on Treeship, my point earlier.

By the way the Situationists did the same routine with the Watts riots, claiming the rioters as fellow French nihilists. First time as tragedy, 2nd time as farce...

It's not like if they didn't have slavery somehow logical thought would work differently

this is exactly the case in various well-documented ways (quick example: bond between the category of race and taxonomy as a dominant general model of understanding how things work), but luckily there's more than one kind of logic

I'll say.

Adorno was an elitist dumbass.

ehhh he's always worth visiting, like a buffet

also more of a rationalist than vic perry

I have a qn that might sound ignorant, but why is the concept of human rights necessarily rooted in racial and gender exclusions? It started out that way: purporting to speak for humans in general but really only covering a narrow group of people - white property owning men - but over time the definition has expanded. At least conceptually it aspires to account for all people, at least most of the times it is invoked. How it actually plays out is another story, but if a society doesn't live up to its ideals does this invalidate the ideals?

I've heard people argue that the issue is that other societies have different views on rights and so the universality of the concept of inherent human rights erases their perspective. But this seems different than the original problem of the concept not including all humans in its definition of "human." Also, within a single society or legal system I think the notion that every citizen has the same rights is invaluable. How can you even critique inequality without a concept that people should be equal, or *are* equal in some transcendental sense?

I'm not arguing that this and other "enlightenment" concepts shouldn't be interrogated, but like, i think we can be more nuanced about it. These ideas aren't always smokescreens for oppression, or at least they aren't always *only* that.

Change my mind on Adorno --- pick something short though!

Minima Moralia is an unofficial comp!

You can open that book wherever you want.

Change my mind on Adorno --- pick something short though!

― Vic Perry, Wednesday, July 15, 2015 10:32 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

...twitter...

I used to keep that book on my bedside table next to Montaigne, the Good News New Testament, and the Chris Heath Pet Shop Boys book Literally.

Thanks Alfred, that's pretty good company.

Bad posts itt but I'm on a phone on a plane. More later

xp 'critical models' is generally more readable, with lots of talks and essays prepared for general audience, radio appearances, etc.; you can pick and choose a relevant topic. i like the ones on teaching.

When D-40 gets off that plane it's all over for me. Goodbye friends, I am soon to be crushed beyond the possibility of reply.

I think just the bare concept of ‘equal human rights’ would often be insufficient as a tool against racist brutality. Most of these cops probably agree that black people have/deserve equal rights but will nonetheless say it’s necessary to be more aggressive/circumspect when dealing with them. This is based on observation of their behaviour, and doesn’t infringe their ‘rights’ per se. So it’s necessary to convince these people that they should treat everyone as harmless until they prove otherwise. They have to be convinced to go against their own prejudice which they believe to be rational and necessary for self-preservation.

Ultimately you can argue for this this in terms of a human right not to be pre-judged on the basis of race etc, particularly not by a representative of the state, particularly not by a white person, but it’s not as simple as a simple civil right.

oh shit that’s garbled - I mean, it’s necessary to convince cops to go against their self-preservation ‘instinct’. There’s not only the other person’s right, but also a conflict between their right and the cop’s own right to his perceived self-preservation.

Oh yeah, you need to fo beyond a civil rights model to fight racism. I was just saying that human rights is not necessarily a "compromised" paradigm. The only people seeming to claim this mentioned on this thread btw are the afro-pessimists, who argue that black people will never be recognized as human, that race is an intractable "antagonism" rather than a "conflict." I think I disagree with this.

Also, none of this has to do with Ta Nehisi-Coates. Sorry for the role I played in driving this thread off track.

Or maybe that paradigm is compromised. It definitely is worth interrogating, like everything else. I just don't think it's bankrupt.

I wanted to read the new book in barnes and noble today but they didnt have it

I kind of think it does have to do with Coates!

(Still on phone. Just leaving airport )

Also on the topic of insufficiency - human rights operate when they are backed up by some form of oversight. I have a right to clean water because ultimately if I think the tap water is dirty someone will come and test it etc. But in these extreme cases of murder by police the only process of oversight is the cop's own completely subjective, sometimes split-second process of risk assessment. If the case later goes to court then it will be re-assessed on the basis of some objective factors, but often mostly of the cops own reported subjective feelings.

The same could be said for hiring decisions, the ultimate quality-assessment process is often inside the black box of s single person's mind. We can look at the overall racial make-up of a company but proving discrimination in any given decision is going to be difficult, and how could we even introduce oversight?

so if black people depend on white (and non-black) people's largesse in these situations, and we have no idea how to introduce objective oversight to the moment of decision, do they really have rights?

I think it’s cases like these that lead people to dismiss human rights talk as a form of pleading with white people and turn to focus on balance-of-forces instead - although I think some possible demands for power like ‘black cops for black neighbourhoods’ could be addressed in a liberal framework.

http://i.imgur.com/1nNEPmP.jpg

http://www.buzzfeed.com/shani/between-the-world-and-she#.fvOBvlJeG9

Cornel West has decided to out-wrong everybody who is wrong about Ta-Nehisi Coates

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CKDsT96WcAAimln.png

as in jazz

Tony Morrison

Liking the idea of Dr. West and Freddie DeBoer hunkering down over a cup of coffee and commiserating about this tbh

lol

Omg perfect

https://twitter.com/tanehisicoates/status/621398935626756096

the first comment on West's post is so otm

Colette Ficklin
Dr. West, much love to you. Please receive that the dogmatic grip you have on the prophetic black fire may cause burgeoning flames of consciousness to...smolder. The "Race Matters" Cornel has given way to the present day, unapologetic soldier. Let's allow others to find their voices and their way through. We need all levels of conscious thought and engagement to reach the masses at the same. I.e., let's chill a sec on the philisophical implosions of internal critique. Let's be about the business of LIGHTING pilots not snuffing them out. ♡ ‪#‎SandraBland‬ ‪#‎pilotlighter‬
115 · Hide · 1 hour ago
11 replies

def think it's time to retire the term "neoliberal."

I don't get the commenters on websites claiming Coates is endlessly blaming the past, constantly cynical and negative, and that we'll never progress with that viewpoint. To me, he's optimistic -- acknowledging the past and the present as they are, but it's not in the context of blame per se, just acknowledgment. This is where we were, we are here in part due to the past and in part due to present policy, but we can address that and make things better.

I understand the impulse to start at this very moment and only move forward from there, but without the context of how things got the way they are, you'll never address a way to make things right, imo. The people who start at the present day, claiming they want to make a difference, always seem to jump straight to the "pull up your pants, stop shooting each other (black people), use these resources (that have purposefully been built to exclude you) to get ahead"

Yeah he addressed that quite thoroughly here and throughout the course of his back and forth with Chait
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/03/other-peoples-pathologies/359841/ (still think this is among the best things he's written)

Chait thinks this view is "fatalistic." I think God is fatalistic. In the end, we all die. As do most societies. As do most states. As do most planets. If America is fatally flawed, if white supremacy does truly dog us until we are no more, all that means is that we were unexceptional, that we were not favored by God, that we were flawed—as are all things conceived by mortal man.

I find great peace in that. And I find great meaning in this struggle that was gifted to me by my people, that was gifted to me by culture.

namaste

I'm not about to join in some unsupported anti- Cornel West thing, he is owed at least a systematic takedown of specific points in his argument, not just some typical ILE "oh how obvious, I don't even have to make an argument here" snark. Just going to lump him with de Boer, that will prove it.

West has earned more than that, get busy.

Not saying you can't make the case! But internet discourse is so lazy now, like "oh I'm just going to sneer, I don't have to actually make coherent arguments because sneeeeeeeeeeer" At least there is something to talk about then, not just another tedious pile-on and you're-either-with-us-or-against-us thread.

west's comments are too stupid to deserve a detailed response, but the idea that TNC has avoided criticizing obama is especially dumb

is west making any well-considered arguments to be refuted? or is he just lazily repeating a shtick?