mdpm

My singular observation has been that you seem to repeatedly wish to project a view that asks the audience to treat a group with suspicion and doubt. Based on their race and origin.

I think that's spurious, and as it applies to me and just about everybody I know, I know it to be patently false. My first-hand account also seems to be of no value.

A direct parallel would be like me propagating something negative or disparaging about Jews as a whole, due to my feelings about Palestine. I wouldn't do that, and I expect the same courtesy. Group biases are discrimination, and discrimination generally leads to collective punishment. None of these are good things, nor do they make better people of anyone.

Comment · 5 years ago

I'm not looking for a comforting fantasy, I'd just like to not phrase things in a way that implies that a group identity perpetuated something that clearly many or most didn't agree with, vocally, and with their ballots. I've just noted that your comments seem quite insistent on trying to find that a group holds fault, but that's the very thing I'm stating is not logically valid. Did every German want what happened over the middle of the 20th century? No-one thinks that it wasn't 'the Germans' who did things - but thinking that's 'German nature', or that we should 'remember that was Germans!' is massively offensive to those who tried to resist, and I believe, just a leaky abstraction. Sometimes trying to cast your net around an abstraction, your definitions can lose more utility than you gain with the abstraction. Instead of 'white' - I could point at colonial descendents[1], the Boer, or Christians being the most racist group and racially motivated in that period - in the aggregate, it would be mostly correct, but in the application, it misleads and misinforms. What does "Remember the WHITE perpetrators did this!" achieve when we're a generation past when we proved that wasn't true? I'm after a more refined viewpoint that doesn't play with identity politics, but instead realises that power and disinformation are capable of growing in any soil. The banality of evil is the lesson, not attempting to racially classify people.

[1] Not all white people here are 'colonial' like you'd imagine - see the Highland clearances https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highland_Clearances

Comment · 5 years ago

White people are a minority in the country. Given an opportunity to change the story, the overwhelming majority of them supported that, and were willing to hand over power. [1] It was obvious that would mean a black majority government, and they still did it.

The government lied to everyone, and some believed it. You'd seemingly like to make a villain out of all white South Africans, but that's not helpful in any way - many, like myself, were born into apartheid and struggled against it. So were my parents - they had no part in making those laws, and yet were born before the Union was established. It's easy to miss what it's like to try to counteract a regime - you and your loved ones will suffer. The populace did not wield the power of transformation itself, it was international intervention that allowed it to happen.

Were some complicit? Yes, obviously. Did many know? Probably. Was it the majority that supported a status quo for some time? Yes, but not without being manipulated. It was standard education that there were 'grades' of people for most of the 19 and early 20th centuries, and in South Africa this was redoubled. Narratives like 'black people are the result of the snake and eve' were common. I've spoken to many older people who are horrified at what they believed. It's incredibly hard to escape a bubble when it's all you hear. State TV, state sanctioned news, international sanctions mean you didn't ever hear how SA was seen internationally. The TRC was asking people to recognise what it saw, and what many others saw - that evil is banal, and within us. It deliberately did not pursue further actions against those that were not directly involved in harm, or who ordered it.

You have taken 'large numbers' and seem to have interpreted it quite liberally to mean 'the majority', and then further concluded that there is then some obvious flaw in their moral character. I could say the same of the US forever wars and destabilisation, but would it help? To accuse and paint with that shame every citizen?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_South_African_apartheid_r...

Comment · 5 years ago

I was a child of that transition, and part of a family that worked and fought for that transition. Don't decry the efforts that led to it having the broad support it did. Did some people want to remain in the past they'd been conditioned to? Sure. Some East Germans did too. They're victims alike, but not in proportion. Wanting to consider the nature of the people as evil, we end up applying the fundamental attribution error, but on a group, which is far worse.

Comment · 5 years ago

We use the Google Families setup to provide some safety features (location), and have device schedules to limit constant use. Families also shows which apps are used, and for how long. We don't track websites, or filter them other than for ads. I also use the similar setup on the google wifi (now nest) mesh devices, to have schedules so that time limits are enabled for all children's/media devices. They often ask for overrides, or extra time, and that's fine - interactivity over health boundaries. We don't collect any data on content, contacts, etc. Just apps and how long per day/week/month, so we can share that with them.

We have to teach our children to be good people, and how to process the world, and what we've already managed to process out of what we've seen throughout our own lives. If your strategy depends on censorship to provide a healthy path, I don't think it's going to be that healthy of an outcome.

Comment · 5 years ago

think of it as a self-closing element. Like <br/> became <br>.

Comment · 5 years ago