VirtualExile

I'm a hyperrational investor, which has severely limited my returns during the serial stock market bubbles of my adult professional life.  I've made solid returns, via conservative investing, which means I won't lose as much during the crashes, but, I could've made more money LOL,

But that gets boring, I have enough money, enough to make a sort of game toward the end of my life in learning how to give it away,

so why would my investing style hit for the fence?  I invest for security, and I feel as financially secure as a person can be in a world of historical turmoil, but it could all change, I could've been even more conservative, but I've put my chips down ... we'll see what I get after the wheel of life flips into retirement,

I live in a diverse neighborhood, as diversity is typically imagined or described by upper-income Democrats in the US.  The median single-family house costs around $500,000.  We have Jewish neighbors, black neighbors, hispanic neighbors.  There's plenty of LGBT rainbow flags.  We voted nearly 3:1 for Biden over Trump.  And we display lots of yard signs that say stuff like this:

• Black Lives Matter
• Women's Rights are Human Rights
• No Human Being is Illegal
• Science is Real
• Love is Love
• Kindness is Everything

These signs symbolize each homeowner's allyship on racism, feminism, immigration status, the scientific method, LGBT issues (at least those issues involving "love"), and ... otherwise being "kind".

What's missing, however, is any reference to either working class people or people living in poverty.  Nothing about a $15/hour minimum wage, nothing about union membership, nothing about providing economic equity -- such as affordable housing, health care, education, food, transportation, or child care.

The working class people who visit our neighborhood to clean our houses (all hispanic women) or work on our yards (all hispanic men) might take comfort that we're not going to ask them for their immigration papers or citizenship documents as they toil for us.  But we're not obviously concerned about how much they're paid or what their living conditions are or where their kids go to school.  Our assertions that you are not illegal are enough, according to us.

This is how "diversity" works in upper-income Democratic precincts.  We publicly pledge our support to any upper-income people who can afford to live here, no matter their identities, so long as they're 'kind" like we are.  We promise not to throw the workers who visit our neighborhood into detention centers (good workers are hard enough to find already).  But we're not going to address the economic inequalities that allow us to bid up the house prices in our neighborhood to levels that our maids and lawn care dudes will never afford.

This de facto economic segregation remains the final frontier in Democratic politics.  Some, like the Bernie supporters, are ready to start dismantling the walls between rich and poor in the US by providing higher wages and more universal benefits.  Meanwhile, the more moderate Biden supporters and the Democratic Senate aren't ready yet to share the wealth with the poor and working classes.  Oh, they stuffed a lot of temporary goodies into the "COVID Relief" bill, but no lasting changes to the tax, wage, or benefit structures.  President Biden stands for: borrowing a bunch of money from rich people to send out one-time chunks of cash to everybody, to distract us from our various culture wars and overall suckitude.  But then, won't we have to pay that money back after the crisis is over?

There's probably not a lot more Democrats can do with Senator Manchin of West Virginia as their swing vote -- I'm skeptical that Biden's upcoming $3 trillion "infrastructure plan" is going anywhere, and the Senate filibuster will ensure nothing else the Democratic House passes will become law: whether immigration reform, higher wages, climate change remedies, or voting rights protections.  But from the yard signs in my neighborhood, most upper-income Democrats are satisfied to leave economic inequality alone.  "Kindness" is all we need to address the gap between rich and poor.  Kindness is Everything.

I remember when candidate Biden caught shit from some Dems (including his now-VP) because he'd been willing to compromise with segregationists back in the 1970s. Now Republicans won't even acknowledge he won. This sounds more like 1860 every day, except the parties have flipped.

The Constitution had been drafted to give the slave-owning South disproportionate power in Congress and the Electoral College.  When the South nevertheless lost the 1860 election to Lincoln, they lost their shit.  Very similar situation with Republicans today.  They have disproportionate power under the Constitution, yet when they lose anyway, they can't handle it.

One big difference though, at least in 1860 the South didn't call into question the election result.  They didn't claim that Lincoln had actually lost.

Today's Republicans may not have seceded from the Union (yet), but they've seceded from Reality.

In 1860 we may have argued over whether slavery should be extended or limited, but we didn't argue over whether slavery even existed.  Today, Republicans deny that global warming is happening, they deny that COVID-19 is deadly, and they deny that Biden actually won.

For all of our technological advances since 1860, at least people back then had a better grip on reality.  Today, Republicans have seceded from reality, and they use technology to hide from reality.  Fox News reported that Biden won?  Then they stop watching Fox News and switch to some other upstart channel that tells them Trump won.

Perhaps the most insidious result of the Internet is this "Choose Your Own Reality" behavior.  The Left isn't immune to this behavior, but the Right seems more susceptible to it in the 21st Century, because the Right nurtures a radical individualism that rejects our human nature as social animals, that rejects our interdependence and our effects on each other's lives.

The federal government may have been more libertarian in its scope and policies back in 1860 (no Social Security, no Food Stamps, etc.) and more racist and sexist, but the people living in the United States back then were more communitarian -- "We the People", not "Me the Person".

Me the Person now uses the Internet to secede from reality, as the abandoned community falls apart.

Progressives commonly categorize Latinos as people of color, no doubt partly because progressive Latinos see the group that way and encourage others to do so as well. Yet in our survey, only one in four Hispanics saw the group as people of color.

In contrast, the majority rejected this designation. They preferred to see Hispanics as a group integrating into the American mainstream, one not overly bound by racial constraints but instead able to get ahead through hard work.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/18/opinion/biden-latino-vote-strategy.html

I don't identify as Hispanic, so I cannot speak to this issue with the same level of authenticity as these authors, but their survey result echoes the past "integration" of other ethnic minority groups into the US (White) mainstream. There was a time when German, Irish, or Italian heritage was much more salient than it is today. Now these European peoples are part of the White polyglot category in the US. It seems most Hispanic people would also rather identify with the White polyglot than the POC polyglot.

The oversimplified categories of White and POC don't work the same way for everybody. Even the US Census recognizes that there are White Hispanics and Non-White Hispanics -- and according to the Census a majority of Hispanics in the US identify as White.

If I arbitrarily threw most men into the category "women" and addressed them as "she", they would probably get pissed off.  But on the Left we arbitrarily throw most Hispanics into the category of POC, even though most of them identify as White.  Why are we doing this?  What purpose does it serve?

And is a White Hispanic today part of the supposed 400-year-old White Supremacy project in the US?  Should a White Hispanic feel guilt over the behavior of their White ancestors in the US?

-----

How would we begin to assimilate the Black identity into the mainstream?  How can we diminish the salience of black skin, the way we've diminished the salience of German ancestry?

We don't call anybody in the US a German-American the way we call people African-Americans or Cuban-Americans.  How did that happen?

It requires both the ethnic/racial group, and the rest of us, to stop focusing on their group identity, instead focusing on their individual accomplishments.  That's what happened with Germans during the first half of the 20th Century, that's what's happening with Hispanics now.  But we seem to be going the other way with respect to Blacks, focusing even more on their group identity now than we did 10 years ago.

-----

Personally, as a Leftist, I'd rather we focus on each individual's rights than each individual's accomplishments.  Because if we're playing a game of accomplishments, then we're creating a class society in which some people are greatly rewarded for being better than others in some arbitrary way.

The concept of "work ethic" is abused by our ruling classes to keep the vast majority of the population in wage slavery (or unemployment) with only a fraction of their fair share of the country's wealth.

I mean, we do have Black billionaires in the US now.  We've had a Black President and the odds are we'll soon have a Black Vice President.  We have Black Senators, Black CEOs, a Black Supreme Court Justice.  It is possible for a Black person to play the game of accomplishments and win.

I'm more concerned about the rest of us, the 99% who don't win the game, regardless of our skin color or ethnic heritage.  Too much of our national income and wealth goes to the winners.  I think more of our national income and wealth should be shared by everybody, regardless of accomplishments.

People on the Right argue that Socialism will destroy the work ethic, that the only way to motivate people to work hard is to reward them for hard work.

But can't we do both?  Can't we both reward hard work and share more of our income and wealth with the 99%?  Why is this presented as an either/or situation?  Either Socialism or Capitalism, you must pick one extreme or the other.  I advocate for more sharing, not to eradicate the rewards for hard work.

Sure, reward people for working longer hours.  Reward people for taking risks.  Reward people for coming up with great ideas.  Reward people for leadership.  But our current rewards system has gone completely bonkers, handing out extremes of wealth over $100 billion to the top three winners, while one in six children lives in poverty -- 12 million children live in poverty.  This is an unimaginable number of children living in poverty in the US, the richest country in the world as measured both by total income and by total wealth.

If you lose the game, your children grow up in poverty.  Something's not right about this game.  Way too much goes to the winners.  Not enough goes to the losers.

Yet on the Left we're consumed by the application of racial and ethnic identities to each other, sometimes to people who don't even want them applied on their behalf.  Most Hispanics don't want to be treated as POC.  Most Hispanics identify as White.  I think there's a lesson for all of us on the Left --> a lot of people care more about improving their lives than about the labels we apply to them.