Trump and a Post-Truth World:

2 wrongs don't make a right or as your mother said if everyone jumped off a bridge would you do it too? If Trump's message and goals are real he should not need to lie.

Trump is doing the majority of lying in American politics. I know Republicans see a biases when the facts are reported by other news outlets. They only believe what Trump or Fox says and now not even Fox since they have to report some of the facts in the percent of Americans including Republicans who want to impeach. He recently said they were "too democratic" or something like that since he was not getting his ego stroked.

England, Japan, even Belgium are all saying the same thing about Trump all the "Fake left" media says too. They can't even vote and don't really care as long as we don't bomb then or fuck up trade too much. Why would they repeat what Colbert or NBC said? None of them are lying. Everyone checks on each other. Everyone is saying he lies.

People are given facts and you either accept them with research and personal observation or you believe that everything and everyone is against one president since he makes America so awesome.

 

I agree that 'demonizing" is a bad thing. In Conflict, Holiness, and Politics in the teachings of Jesus, Marcus Borg argues that this was the issue that got Jesus nailed up: the conflict between a politics of holiness versus a politics of compassion. The Jewish religious establishment of the day emphasized holiness and purity--distancing oneself from the unclean, including prostitutes, publicans, lepers and sinners. Jesus preached and practiced the opposite--reaching out to the dregs of society. The Pharisees regarded this as subversive.

Your post about Wilber coincided with my weekly get together with my buddies who are mostly Trump supporters and racists, so I was able to ask myself how it would apply to them. One grew up on a pig farm outside a small town in rural Oklahoma, attended one year of college, and works as representative for an electric co-op. He supports Trump because Trump is the Republican candidate, and he's Republican because he thinks that they're the party of people who work for a living, as opposed to those on the dole. He doesn't like Hispanics because they he thinks they get special treatment from the church and government, and show up a lot in the news for domestic violence. But he seems to be coming around on African-Americans as a result of a course he happened to take at the Library that made him aware of events like the Tulsa race riots. He says his history teachers "lied" to him in covering up the ugly side of history concerning race relations. He's an honest, hard-working guy and devoted Christian who wants to do the right thing. Another is a plumber and recovering alcoholic who hates blacks, but is now cool with Hispanics because his daughter had three kids by two different undocumented Mexicans who have since been deported. He also voted for Obama in 2012, and even had an Obama sign in his yard, because the alternative was Romney. He credits Jesus and AA for turning his life around, and is a devout Christian. A third is a self-employed businessman, ardent Libertarian, and big time Jordan Peterson fan who doesn't so much like Trump as hates liberals and Democrats. One of the more embarrassing experiences of my life happened when I was having lunch with him in a restaurant and he was making deliberately loud racist comments within earshot of some African-Americans at the next table. I was put on the spot of confronting him and making a scene or changing the subject. I chose the latter course, and told him later how I felt. But he's changed his tune after acquiring two part African-American grandchildren, one from his son, the other from his daughter. He's even planning to go on a river cruise with the daughter's black in-laws, and if they don't throw him overboard it should be a milestone in racial progress! A fourth friend. a veterinarian, is from the Seychelles, having moved here when that country was taken over by Marxists. He has a strong aversion to Socialism, and associates Hillary progressive Democrats with that. All of these guys pride themselves in not following the news. When they do watch it, it's Fox. Their minds are pretty well made up and are not much swayed by day to day news about impeachment, etc. So that's what I'm dealing with. I seriously doubt that my own expressions of opinion can have much effect on theirs, except to make them aware that somebody they know thinks differently from them. But It's possible that external events could make a difference. If their kids keep having multi-racial babies, they could become progressive Democrats yet! Now how would Wliber's theory apply to that?

 

I highly recommend studying HIS views, rather than commentary and analysis on them.

 

I recommend watching "The Hotel Rwanda" which is about an entire country that is struggling with entrenched racism, that was made up out of thin air, and none of the locals ever made such distinctions before the white man came. The whites simply divided the different tribes up according to arbitrary physical features, such as how wide their nose was, and refused to hire those with wider noses and shunned them as somehow inferior. When the southern US started sending a few thousand black slaves back to Africa, at first they attempted to integrate back into African society, but eventually enslaved the local population and founded what is now Liberia.

Technically, humans are so inbred that we don't even have different races, and merely dividing us up by color is just the simplest and easiest way to exploit them.

 

Good flick, about one of the horrific genocides of the twentieth century--a black-on-black race war. And you're right that the European colonial background contributed heavily to it. It was about phenotype superimposed on class and exploited by politicians. By phenotype, I'm talking about conspicuous physical differences. In Rwanda, this was among the Watusi (Tutsi), the Hutu, and the Btwa. You may have seen the Watusi in the movies or on TV, doing their graceful dance that gave its name to a popular dance in the U.S. back in the day. They were cattle herders of probably Nilotic origin from the Horn of Africa who were striking in their tall, slender bodies and black skin. The Btwa (pygmies) became their retainers--an odd couple of Africa's tallest and smallest people. And the Bantu Hutu were in between, medium height and build. All would have had to sit on the back of the bus in the Southern U.S. during the fifties, but they saw themselves as different because of physical appearance reinforced by cultural and class divisions that were superimposed upon the physical ones. There had actually been enough intermarriage that geneticists said they couldn't meaningfully be considered distinct races. They all spoke the same language,but cultural differences among the groups coincided with economic differences--pastoral Tutsi vs. farmer Hutu--and were deliberately reinforced by Belgian colonialists, who favored the Tutsi, which they deemed mentally superior, and used the Tutsi monarchy as an instrument of colonial rule. But the Tutsi were a minority, and after independence, the more numerous Hutu clamored for their rights--hence the conflict.