Sophia Coppola’s ‘On The Rocks’ As A Mediocrity

I once read a dolt’s sum up of Nelson Mandela: “He had his good points and his bad points.” The dolt got properly yelled at. Heroic giants aren’t in sum up reducible to their warts, if any there be. Mediocrities are. Which is a long way round to saying,  Sophia Coppola’s On The Rocks, which I just watched, is mediocre. 

It has a few good points, like Bill Murray in toto, some funny instances and a nice, gauzy sense of affluent New York. 

But it has more duds, an in toto flat affect, lifeless Rashida Jones—even when she bounces back, one emotionally true scene where she excoriates Bill Murray, which is afterwards ruined by it being without consequence, a double ending unsatisfying patness, one between wife and husband, the other between daughter and father. 

Other duds include the sophomoric dialogue between father and daughter about the perennial questions of love, marriage, and men and women, which is more canned, contrived and trite than anything else and, generically, a vacuum sealed cinematic world that doesn’t allow in even the tiniest oxygenated speck of real muck, and, so, is unknowingly smug in its own insular, affluent liberal certainties. 

On Samuel Moyn On Hannah Arendt As Applied To Trump

 The essay: 

 https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/philosophy/hannah-arendt-misunderstood-philosophy-fascism-authoritarianism-trump

Me:

I’ll give this a shot. 

I do believe Moyn argues that while Trump, more “charlatan” than “dictator,” is not comparable to Hitler just as Trump’s America is not remotely comparable to Hitler’s Germany, still Trump and Trump’s America are sufficiently odious that both Americans and non Americans are complicit in his ascendancy. 

Candidly, I’m not sure Moyn means to spread the blame for Trump to non Americans, but that reading seems implicit in his wanting to apply Arendt’s castigation to the age of Trump: 

... Her former aficionados will stop citing Arendt precisely when she is relevant. Not only will they skirt embarrassment at being human; few will even say that they are ashamed of being American...

After all, it’s Arendt’s argument with reference to Hitler that the net of complicity is extremely wide, indeed universally wide.

Moyn writes:

... Those who were not in Germany but condemned it from the outside were going to be tempted to punish the bad Germans. But the truth is that their crimes (while they of course deserved prosecution) spread complicity far and wide. Until such evils were preventable, even those with no relation to them should admit that they earned not pride but shame...

and a bit further down:

... Even in the face of Nazism, Arendt insisted that responsibility allowed no one to say “I am not like that.” Compared to those with vengeful zeal for the punishment of Nazi perpetrators (which she supported), Arendt praised those “who are filled with a genuine fear of the inescapable guilt of the human race.” The trouble was that their shame at their own humanity was still a “non-political” insight...

One thing I take from these two passages is that Arendt held that until the evils giving rise to and manifest in Nazism are erased from the planet, then we as humans are guilty whenever it or anything akin to it occurs, even if our connection to the depredation is beyond remote. What else can it mean to say,... Until such evils were preventable, even those with no relation to them should admit that they earned not pride but shame...?

The implication seems to me to be, we all have the capacity either for evil or the weak moral will that allows it, and we all are,  in a sense, “good Germans.” If I’m misreading the case Moyn makes for what Arendt held, then I’ll be happy to be corrected.

So, having tried to get at what Moyn and what Arendt via Moyn argue, I must say I find it ludicrous, especially, and now being a touch ad hominem, coming from a woman who tried post war to rehabilitate Heidegger, her pre war lover. 

First, I argue Moyn gives the game away conceding to Trump more charlatanry than fascism, or as he says dictatorship. In fact, if Trump is a charlatan, then he is in that assimilable to all politicians, since dissembling on Arendt’s own views is at the heart of politics: 

... In their invocations of Arendt as a theorist for a new age of “post-truth,” her new fans missed that she argued that truth and politics have never mixed. On the contrary: politics is a realm of appearance, not one of correspondence with fact. For Arendt, we have always been post-truth...

So maybe Trump wears his charlatanry more visibly on his sleeve, but if he is as politician assimilable to the “post-truth” of all politics, then from where arises in his case the Arendtian need for all the soul searching and searing self criticism resulting in “embarrassment at being human.” 

So, rounding “first,” there is nothing in Trump’s case that warrants the self abasement that Moyn via Arendt insists we have. And worse, it’s not just Trump that ought to be a reason for this searing self abasement, it’s also what America has been—certainly in the last 60 years, but, too, I must infer, from the time of its founding:

... She acknowledged that fascist lies were unique, but their novelty—and that of later American ones, like the defence of the Vietnam War that the Pentagon Papers revealed to be so deceptive—allowed no “moralising,” since “the background of past history” is “itself not exactly a story of immaculate virtue.” That same belief guided her refusal to moralise once Nazism fell...

Vietnam goes to about the last 60 years. My necessary inference comes from the incomprehensibility of imagining that Moyn thinks that before 1960 America was any more virtuous. Reinforcing this inference is Moyn’s rejection, again via Arendt, of any clean break between Trump’s invidiousness and that of the American past. He writes:

... Arendt did not believe in what the Germans began calling a Stunde Null, a “zero hour,” a caesura before a new era untainted by the old. Far from it: the idea of a clean break with guilt was just another mode of convincing ourselves that we are exempt from universal responsibility...

For me, characterizing what America is and inferentially always has been is absurdly one sided, seeing only darkness and indictable immorality. If he doesn’t see it that way, then why in the first place invoke Arendt to indict Americans as such louses that they must blanch in shame at their impoverished humanity? 

Second, briefly and finally, Arendt’s ground for our continuing necessary self abasement as but mere alive human beings, namely, ... Until such evils were preventable, even those with no relation to them should admit that they earned not pride but shame... is as far fetched as it is inhuman. She and Moyn insist on our utter saintliness, and our self laceration in its absence, until all evil is extirpated from the earth. 

Good luck with that. 

Long List On Twitter About What Trump’s Done

 https://bit.ly/3omn8cD

Are Rights Harmonious Or Conflictual

 A long note to a friend as part of a longer exchange:

Thanks for your fine, thoughtful and fulsome response Phil. 

I absolutely agree that stressing good faith dialogue, respecting the opinions and analyses of others, being empathetic about them, tolerating diverse opinions and so on are all to the good and necessary. There is 100% no difference between us here.

But then we divide. And the issue is substantive. Are all rights compatible so as to be ultimately harmonious in the sense, as you quote Young, of being “indivisible, interrelated, and interdependent” or are they as I tried briefly to suggest inherently at logger heads—generically, liberty vs equality? 

But before I go further, I wouldn’t want that issue to be sidetracked by any arguments from temperament, mine, yours, anyone else’s. There’s a philosophical question that needs to be addressed on the intellectual merits. Whether I’m disputatious, likely, and whether you get Olympic gold for equanimity, unlikely, have to be beside the point. As well, neither of our preferences for whether exchanges should be robust, even sharp elbowed or peaceful and beatific bear on the question.  

Young and you may think that with effort and imagination we can reconcile rights, whatever their source. And you along with him seem to assume the conquerable disparity is simply between natural rights and positive rights. That has you both overlooking that rights are always pitted against each other in concrete situations regardless of their source or category.

I don’t know the law of Ireland but both the American Bill of Rights and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms identify along with other natural rights, freedoms of expression, assembly and religious belief and the right to petition for grievance. 

Others include what as a term of art are called the rights of  “natural justice,” the right to know the accusation against you, the right to confront your accuser, to cross examine, to plead in your own defence, to an impartial decider. 

Others include principles which flow from the idea of the rule of law, that the law is to treat those similarly situated equally, and that no one is above the law. 

It takes no imagination to see how these rights rub up against each other incessantly and interminably, and aren’t so much harmonized in case after case as solved by (sometimes even arbitrarily) deciding what right/value/principle ought to be preferred over another in a given set of circumstances. 

An example: the state wants to tax me more so as generally to redistribute wealth. That ooh infringes my liberty, my right to the fruits of, say, my labour. Otoh, it conduces to greater equality. What are the limiting principles here, if any? How does this opposition get harmonized? Does it ever? Or is the answer, as I think it is, that in this instance we will tax more and in another instance we will tax less, at the inescapable goring of someone’s ox.

Another example: pro choice versus pro life. If you can harmonize body autonomy and the right to life, I’ll move to Ireland and worship at your feet as a disciple of a modern day Socrates. 

As you know as well as I, the examples are endless. Whenever do either policy decisions or judicial determinations or even settlements short of adjudication not involve the clash of the serious assertions of right?

What would Young say about these examples? Do they countermand his thesis of rights as “indivisible, interrelated, and interdependent” 

I’m not sure I see what you mean by “abstract victories” and even if I’m able to construe that meaning, I’m not seeing how it bears upon our central issue. Nor do I see what single issue obsessiveness has to do with it, whether coming from left or right. 

Now, to be clear, I do agree that Young is reacting against the totalitarian assertion of the unassailably superior correctness of certain values, ie, his notion of a fixed hierarchy of rights, and of course we’re both with him on that. But, again, we depart after our standing on common ground on the intellectual goods I’ve just referred to in my second  paragraph of this note. 

For you and him it seems to follow from our common rejection of the rights screeching monopolists that the alternative is an ultimate harmoniousness of rights. But it’s exactly that that I say is misconceived. My alternative is to recognize what will be an inevitable, in fact inhering, conflict in rights but with the noted intellectual goods being brought to bear in sorting out the conflicts for the most hopefully reasonable resolution of which right predominates in any given set of circumstances. 

A few final, maybe repetitive, comments: the remaining few short paragraphs of your note seem to say in essence that in the harmonizing of rights, let’s stop all the militancy and that a “status quo of fundamental freedoms should be developed, rather, through processes of analytical research, narrative, education and reflection, that include dialogue.”

Respectfully, while what you say is highly desirable, I want to suggest it misses the precise target. It rather shows a conflation of highly desirable civil exchange and the philosophical question of whether all rights can be harmonized as though the former is the answer to the latter. This reasoning is circular: it’s premise is all rights can be harmonized; it then says if we only strip out the rancorous, obsessive assertion of superior rights, if we can engage in high minded exchange, we can arrive at what we’ve premised, the harmony of all rights. But whether all rights can be harmonized is the very issue between me and Young and you and that harmonization is assumed rather than argued for or demonstrated. 

When The Idea Of Dialogue Becomes Pablum

 The essay:

 https://quillette.com/2020/10/09/how-we-lost-our-way-on-human-rights/

Me:

I just wrote the following to a friend who sent me today a link to Young’s essay.

——-

I tried my best, Phil, to read this essay attentively, to discern the outline of an interesting, perhaps provocative, argument.

I’d started it once before you emailed me its link. But that time, I trailed off, sort of nodded off, resolved to come back to it again with full concentration. Your email, as noted, reminded me of my promise to myself. So I’ve just read it now, trying to be fully alive to what I could make of its argument.

The best I can do is say it’s a bland form of motherhood. Who but the intellectual miscreants Young identifies as social justice warriors would deny the importance of allowing for intellectual diversity, respect, at least presumptive respect, for views different from our own, of at least trying to lend a presumptively sympathetic ear to what the other person has to say, which is, in the cant of the day, “seeing where the other person is coming from.” But a kind of pious meaninglessness lies at the bottom his version of these obvious goods of intellectual exchange. 

Here’s an example:

“Much of the museum’s methodology hinges on the concept of dialogue. In his 1996 book, On Dialogue, David Bohm noted that the purpose of dialogue is not to argue with, critique, or undermine another’s perspective, but instead to suspend one’s own opinion and actively engage in listening as a way to understand the perspectives of others. Dialogue pursued in this manner leads not to debate but to shared meaning, which aligns well with the museum’s mandate to contribute to collective memory, and to promote respect for others. An institutional commitment to dialogue requires less in the way of advocating particular interests and rights claims, and more in the way of collecting and sharing lived experiences that are part of our common heritage related to human rights. This, in turn, may facilitate efforts to balance different rights claims.“

Take these notions to what at least I see as their absurd logical conclusions. No disagreement, no debate, let alone, vigorous, spirited, energetic debate, maybe laced with a sharp elbow or two, with a reasoned rejection of bad, illogical, silly, simply asserted ideas? This reads to me like the bromide of toleration of which I was disabused when I studied a little bit of political philosophy. Even John Stuart Mill’s “let the market place of ideas lead to what are the better arguments,” my words of course not his, is inimical to the idea of dialogue in what I’ve just quoted.

Another related point, the long standing distinction between positive and negative liberty, freedom to and freedom from, as framed by Isaiah Berlin is persistently intriguing. There is an obvious tension between them that sounds in the perennial tension between liberty, freedom from, and equality, freedom to. It’s commonly observed that one comes at some cost to the other.

Scruton, Young rightly notes, champions freedom from, negative liberty, and is wary of freedom to, the difference lying in the former as a set of natural, which is to say, pre-state rights and the latter as positive rights insofar as they are state provided. Scruton may be wrong in his inclinations and Young describes his own commitment to both ideas of freedom, from and to. He encapsulates his commitment to freedom to. Otherwise, he says,

“…we get a never-ending zero-sum competition to assert or reassert a hierarchy of rights, an approach hardly in harmony with the principle that all rights are meant to be indivisible, interrelated, and interdependent.“

Trouble is, with this we’re back both to bland motherhood and a fundamental illogicality. The bland notion of all rights as harmonious runs afoul of the fundamental tension Berlin sees inhering in every policy decision a free society wishes to make, the tension between liberty and equality, freedom from and freedom to, negative and positive liberty. What Young describes here is a piety which real hands can’t hold; it’s pious water that is ungraspable.

The illogicality is that Young’s binary opposition between rights as harmonious as against a fixed hierarchy of rights excludes the innate tension in the very idea of rights formulated as negative and positive.

Young cites Michael Ignatieff for an informing principle of his (Young’s) commitment to positive rights, freedom to:

“ I drew from Michael Ignatieff’s 2007 book, The Rights Revolution, in which the Canadian scholar wrote that “to believe in rights is to believe in defending difference”—and so defending human rights required governments to protect “the ceaseless elaboration of disguises, affirmations, identities, and claims, at once individually and collectively.”

I can, I think, understand what Ignatieff means, that we must respect and tolerate others in all the varied and varying ways we all manifest our ideas of ourselves whether individually or as a group, which is fine as far as it goes. 

But Young omits, and omits any accounting for, Ignatieff having been a student and a virtual acolyte of Berlin and alive and open to the very tensions Young seems completely to elide. Ignatieff has a lively sense of the need to choose between competing claims and that often these choices are between the lesser of two evils, or as one fellow put it, the evil of two lessers. Which is to say, policy involves hard choices, ox goring, nearly every time.

One would think the ideas informing an institution dedicated to exhibiting and illuminating human rights would want somewhere to take into account the inexorable need to take these hard choices. But no, instead we get the pablum of “ all rights are meant to be indivisible, interrelated, and interdependent.“

Finally, in lieu of averting to, let alone grappling a little with, the inhering tensions in the very idea of human rights, Young’s “argument” devolves to the truisms of diversity, respect and sympathy for differences, for other points of view. But even in this he stops short of any notion of disagreement and debate. No, what he seems to want is to begin and end with the motherhood of dialogue.

Two Bits Of Mafia Miscellany

 Meyer Lansky And Lucky Luciano Disagree 

“But Charles,” Meyer said, “2+2 must equal 4.”

“Wrong!” said Lucky, “They can also equal less or more.”

He pointed his gun at the next table.

“Do 2+2 make 5, if you’re able?” 

The man said “Yes.” And Meyer said, ”I’ll buy and I’ll pour.”

—————-

Crazy Joe Gallo In And Out Of Stir

In stir, Joe read books all the time.

He read poetry, both free and rhymed. 

Released Joe hobnobbed in the Village 

But got caught for plunder and pillage.  

Joe pleaded Sartre, but still caught a dime.

A Small Exchange On Critical Race Theory And The Idea Of Anti Racism

 S 

I'm not sure how familiar you are with Bret Stephens. He's a rare conservative columnist for the NYT. He was featured recently with Robert Wright on Bloggingheads here if you're interested. 

Anyway, he's taken the very unusual step of criticizing a piece written by a fellow NYT writer - the 1619 project. This may be a little too much inside baseball for you, but the paper has strict guidelines against this practice, so it's a fairly big deal internally. 

You'll likely be sympathetic to his argument, but give it a read just the same. I thought it was quite compelling as well. I've downloaded and attached it, so you won't have to contend with the paywall. 

By the way, I read the essay on the myth of the stolen country. I really liked it, so thanks for passing it along.

Me:

I’m pretty familiar with Stephens. I’ve read him on and off but not much lately. I don’t pay attention to Bloggingheads anymore but thanks for the link to him on it. I’ll check it out.

I’ve only today heard about his piece criticizing 1619. I’ve just read it. It’s good but I would have been happier if it was more hard hitting. I didn’t know about NYT restrictions against criticizing colleagues’ work. I can see a rationale for that but it doesn’t make overwhelming sense to me. Those restrictions seem something of a joke considering what happened to Bari Weiss, years in the making and culminating in her leaving, and what happened because of the publication of Tom Cotton’s op ed calling for National Guard action against the rioters. 

Stephens has a mild journalistic sensibility except when he’s inveighing against Trump. I can see that mildness plus institutional/internal-political constraints causing him to tamp down his criticism of 1619 and go out of his way to stress the good it’s done, as he sees it. Yet to be fair to him, he does make the points against 1619 and Hannah-Jones that need to be made.

In a recent WSJ columns Jason Riley asks, where all the liberal voices given Critical Race Theory and the theory of Anti Racism, both despicable theories.

S:

I don't know. You think these are "despicable theories"? I'm watching a Glenn Loury/Heather MacDonald conversation about this same sort of stuff, and they just go too far for my taste. I'm not conversant in critical race theory or anti-racism theory (what would that be, exactly?), but the idea that it's all a hustle can't be quite right. MacDonald is talking about the end of Western civilization if these ideas take hold, and gives no validity whatsoever to the claims of injustice. I've shown you data and so have others that indicate there are problems to do with race, here. Until that evidence is meaningfully contended with, I think it's just a silly shouting match. 

Me:

That there are problems to do with race is quite beside the point. Who denies it? 

But CRT holds whites are ineradicably socialized in the biases, values, mores, folkways, attitudes, norms etc. etc. of the hegemonic power they have wielded since the beginning of American time. 

In fact, on some CRT iterations, we can’t transcend our inherited racism. 

The measure is disparate outcome rather than equal opportunity. So that any black white gap—of which gaps there are many, with “white” seemingly including any group that ascends, whites, Jews, Asian and with blacks low man on the totem pole, except for crime and like dysfunction, where they sit on top—is attributable only to racism operating subtextually underneath supposed de jure equality. 

Otherwise, goes CRT, the only gap explanation is black genetic inferiority. Which is unthinkable.

And as that is so, it’s insufficient to “be against racism” as a matter of attitude. That can’t begin to encroach on your own inherited racism, your socialization into it, your breathing it in as you breathe in the hegemonic air. 

No, you must be an activist against it, marshalling your efforts to combat it, starting with the baby step of recognizing and disclosing your own near-to-irredeemable racism. That in a nutshell is the theory of anti racism.

As I say, both despicable theories.

Capisce?

S

You've written a lot here, and I'm not sure how far we'll get untying all these threads. Suffice it to say, you accept none of the criticisms of the right, and all the criticisms of the left. CRT and its proponents are despicable and a scourge. That's fine.

You've asked me to point to an example of "de jure" racism as well as what work "we" have to do. 

If I understand "de jure" racism, it concerns an actual law on the books. Is that the only standard you'd accept for racism on a systemic level? This is part of the point I was getting at earlier. I linked you to a ton of examples of how racism can persist in our legal system, in spite of colourblind laws. You've either chosen to ignore it or you've dismissed all these studies. Below are just a few. Doesn't this suggest something important about the state of the law and race in America to you? 

A survey of data from the U.S. Sentencing Commission last year found that when black men and white men commit the same crime, black men on average receive a sentence almost 20 percent longer. The research controlled for variables such as age and prior criminal history.

A 2016 review of nearly 474,000 criminal cases in Hampton Roads, Va., found that whites were more likely to get plea deals that resulted in no jail time for drug offenses. While facing charges of drug distribution, 48 percent of whites received plea bargains with no jail time, vs. 22 percent of blacks. Among those with prior criminal records who pleaded guilty to robbery, 36 percent of whites got no jail time, vs. 8 percent of blacks.

In Delaware, according to a 2012 study, “black defendants who kill white victims are seven times as likely to receive the death penalty as are black defendants who kill black victims. … Moreover, black defendants who kill white victims are more than three times as likely to be sentenced to death as are white defendants who kill white victims.”

Most recently, American Public Media’s “In the Dark” podcast did painstaking research on the 26-year career of Mississippi District Attorney Doug Evans and found that over the course of his career, Evans’s office struck 50 percent of prospective black jurors, vs. just 11 percent of whites.

According to figures from the National Registry of Exonerations (NER) black people are about five times more likely to go to prison for drug possession than white people. According to exoneration data, black people are also 12 times more likely to be wrongly convicted of drug crimes.

As for what work "we" have to do, I don't have any easy prescriptions about this. The first step, it seems to me, is recognizing we have a problem, and that it hasn't been solved by government program liberals or bootstrap conservatives. In the case of policing, I think there's common ground for the right and the left in getting social workers or mental health workers more involved. Advocating for that would be a good thing, I think. Having people in the criminal justice system grapple with some of the disparities mentioned above, and how they might go about gradual reforms that might ameliorate some of this would also be good. But it's undoubtedly thorny. 

Me:

I’ll respond point by point but my abiding sense is that you haven’t grappled sufficiently with the heart of both these theories and that you’re conflating the good of wanting to try to ameliorate racial problems with the theories themselves. One can want that amelioration, recognizing that there are such problems, and still reject CRT and Anti Racism, which is a term of art, as despicable, which they are. 

Tell me what the criticisms of the right are; pinpoint them and tell me where they fall short. For example, if, say, the right, which btw isn’t a monolith, says racism is only the gross and obvious kind, and uses that as an argument against the despicable theories, then that’s a blinkered criticism to which I don’t subscribe. And so on that basis, you’d be wrong to say my views are parallel to those of the right. Btw, that specific criticism is flawed for at least two reasons: it’s empirically wrong; and even if it were empirically right, it doesn’t get at the essence of what’s despicable, the innards of the theories that make circular arguments, constitute whiteness as near to ineradicably racist by definition—in some versions it’s ineradicable, not near to, it conflates inequality of outcome with inequality of opportunity, has a power based view of society characterized at its core by the dynamics of oppression, with culture as its hegemonic superstructure and others such unlovely, I’d say despicable, notions. 

So you tell me to which of these foundational ideas do you subscribe?

In fact, in your last email you tried to strike a middle ground between the theories and their critics. This betrays a fundamental misreading of the theories. It’s zero sum, in my view. You’re either with them or against them. Partial views of the theories, some kernels of insight, are insufficient. If you rest on those alone, you land outside their perimeters. 

Btw, I did not say the proponents are despicable. Some are and some aren’t. Please don’t put words in my mouth. 

I can’t deal with your studies/examples. I don’t know the studies. I don’t know what the responses to them are. I don’t know what the surrounding statistical context is. Do the studies show improvement or worsening disparities? Coleman Hughes notes that in incarceration rates for blacks, for example, are dropping. 

But analytically there is a way of understanding disparities and unequal treatment short of concluding systemic racism exists. I’ll give you an example but need to make an initial point. When I challenged you to name an example of de jure racism, at least two things are notable.

First, it seems, you can’t, which goes a long way to show how much things have improved from slavery to de jure racism to comprehensive institutional and legal equality. That’s important because under the despicable theories nothing has changed. It’s functionally still slave times, with masters, oppressors, hegemonic whites, and slaves, the oppressed, people of colour. 

Second, where do I say that de jure racism exhausts the meaning of systemic racism. I didn’t and don’t.

But as to your studies, here’s an example, Scott introduced a long list of studies in the criminal justice system showing differential treatment including that white  cops proportionally kill more unarmed white men then black men, that black men up to a certain level of violence get harsher treatment at the hands of the cops than white men. And the assertion under the theories and by many others is that police are systemically racist.  But consider: there are about 350,000,000 yearly cop civilian interactions in the US. How many are problematic? Of those that are problematic, how many are racially so? How many of the bad cases involve innocent victims? How many involve dealing with criminals, and which raise ambiguous fact situations. 

As the numbers dwindle by this kind of slicing and dicing, then as against the whole we move further and further away from anything that can fairly be called systemic. We’re forced to recognize the distinctions between problemic and systemic and therefore reform and revolutionary type overhaul, that leads to its reductio ad absurdism of “defund/abolish the police.”

“Systemic” is way overused because it’s ready to hand and delusionally distills complex, problematic issues into a simple encompassing formulation explaining everything. In his debate with Trump Biden said most cops are good but there’s systemic racism in policing. That circle simply won’t square. 

Think of the rhetoric of rape culture to describe what was going on campuses and in society at large. The theory of rape culture is that society taken as whole promotes rape, that’s that what campus culture was and what North American culture was. The term has faded and rape was so overused as to lose meaning such that an unwanted touching was assimilated to rape under the aegis of sexual assault. I think there are analytic parallels between the notion of rape culture and systemic racism. And it’s not just words. Different remedies flow from the characterization.

Your ideas about what “we” have to do are revealing in a few ways. First, you don’t answer what you personally have to do, what efforts you have to make, how you need to recognize your inner socialized racist. I don’t think you have to do any of those things. But the theory of Anti Racism says that we who don’t individually do any of those things are racist, simply masking it rhetorically by our swell liberal ideas. It’s zero sum. I think that notion is horse shit. And I think further it’s despicable. 

Secondly, the same point really, no one reasonable will gainsay ideas for reform, whether what you briefly point to, or others. But for CRT, that’s just nibbling at the edges of things. No, I’m sorry, you need sensitivity training to help you confront your inner white racism and either transcend it on some versions of CRT or at least better manage it on others. In fact attending sensitivity sessions and declaiming racist, racist, racist, is easier than the hard work of rolling up sleeves and trying to implement incremental reform. 

Which all leads me to conclude where I started this long note, that you really haven’t come to terms with the innards of these theories and your comments reveal it. 

A Note On One Point, I Argue It’s A Flaw, In Season 6 Of Justified

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1312931146779561984.html

1. Long thread on S 6 of Justified. 

Ava Crowder is under pressure to be a C.I. on the basis that if she fails in that or refuses, then she’ll be sent back to jail by the U.S. Marshals.

2. Which means her release from prison has been concocted by their efforts.

3. But in Episode 5 of Season 6, Fekus is cattle prodded by Mikey at the behest of Wynn Duffy but maintains his silence, while both Marshals Brooks and Gutterson are in an adjoining room.

4. They come to Fekus only after the prodding and congratulate him on not spilling any beans. But they acknowledge knowing that Fekus stabbed himself so that Ava didn’t and so that she is innocent of that. But, big but, that’s the reason she’s in jail.

5. How can they in good conscience and lawfully put Ava in a life-threatening situation as a C.I. with the whip of sending her back to prison for a crime of which they know she’s innocent? 

6. How can Raylan do the same thing, since he presumably knows as well that Ava is innocent? Or does he not know?

7. I must be missing something for it seems to me a massive hole in the Season Six story line concerning her.

8. I’ve read the Fire In The Hole stories a while ago but don’t remember whether in them the Marshals or Raylan do such a dastardly thing as I’m complaining about.

9. My reading of Justified tells me that while in it corners are cut, short cuts are taken and the edges of what’s ethical get frayed and blurred, there’s still an underlying streak of straight stick righteousness in the Marshals, especially Raylan, the most righteous of all.

10. In all cases the benefit of getting the baddest guy is never outweighed by or is less sharp than or costs less than the cut corner, the short cut or the frayed and blurred edge.

11. So, as I see things, putting a relative innocent, Ava, and I’ll stress “relative,” in death’s way as a C.I. on the fraudulent pretence of her guilt in stabbing Fekus shaves little dramatic ice with me. I don’t think it works artistically, which is to say, it’s not justified.

12. I just finished for the second time—first time 5 years ago—Season 6. And I’m even more convinced that Ava’s basic innocence at least to the knowledge of some of the Marshals, namely for sure Rachel and Tim, is a flaw in the narrative.

13. When the thought is that she’s burned as a C.I., the near to unanimous response is that she’s got to go back to prison. Not a word is spoken of the fact of her innocence. It simply, like the Ghost in Hamlet, disappears from all reckoning.

14. The Marshals expend a lot of energy thinking about where to draw ethical lines. Is it ok for Raylan to work with a C.I. with whom he’s slept, which led early on to a botched case?

15. How does Art balance the reporting of transgressions at the cost of blowing a case, Rachel asks him and then answers her own question, saying Art would lean towards working the case to conclusion.

16. My point is that these instances are of a fundamental quality different from:

16(1) putting an innocent person in a deadly situation on the leverage of her trumped up guilt; and 

16(2) considering sending her back to jail when she’s burnEd as a C.I., while knowing she’s innocent.

17. I know she does criminal things after Episode 5 of Season 6 but they seem to me irrelevant to the flawed premise of her being sent back to jail for a crime the Marshals know she didn’t commit.

18. If I was a deconstructionist, then I might see this flaw as what Derrida calls an “aporia” and go from there. But I’m not and I don’t. I more simply think it’s a mistake that got away from the writers and never got resolved.

19. Though, to be sure, Season 6 is wonderful despite it, as is all of Justified.

The End