Willfully ignorant vs. aggressively skeptical

Seth Godin analyses the screaming in Willfully ignorant vs. aggressively skeptical when the status quo is challenged:

But there are two ways to do it, and one of them is ineffective, short-sighted and threatens the fabric of the tribe. The other seems to work.

It may appear that demonstrations are just a lot of screaming people with simple slogans. The slogans are the agitation. They are designed to break through the status-quo quickly to people. The screaming is necessary because of the restrictions on amplifiers.

The theory is that agitation leads to propaganda. Unfortunately, the following is too often true:

The screaming is a key part, because screaming is often a tool used to balance out the lazy ignorance of someone parroting opposition to an idea that they don't understand....

The main danger is that activists find:

It's easy to fit in by yelling out, and far more difficult to actually read and consider the facts. Anytime you hear, "I don't have the time to understand this issue, I'm too busy being upset," you know that something is wrong.

The best thing for activists is to be the best informed through readings and discussions. This is what propaganda is about - one-to-one indepth discussions with another person:

If you want to change what your boss believes, or the strategy your company is following, the first step is to figure out how to be the best informed person in the room.

The best way to do that would be subscribe to Green Left Weekly.

Read more!

Atticus Finch: a fictional portrayal of real life racist failings

From Crikey, I found the following article about Atticus Finch: a fictional portrayal of real life racist failings at The New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell. His conclusion is that:

...Atticus Finch is faced with jurors who have one set of standards for white people like the Ewells and another set for black folk like Tom Robinson. His response is to adopt one set of standards for respectable whites like Boo Radley and another for white trash like Bob Ewell. A book that we thought instructed us about the world tells us, instead, about the limitations of Jim Crow liberalism in Maycomb, Alabama.

Gladwell puts Finch in the cross-currents between racism and class warfare. Finch is portrayed by Gladwell as a Southern Liberal such as Alabama Gov. Jim Folsom.

Folsom wanted to treat African-Americans as separate but equal even though he integrated some events such as campaign rallies. Folsom and Finch endured the opprobrium of other whites for their civility to blacks.

Gladwell is of the opinion that only the legal rulings such as Brown vs Board of Education were the only effective way to overcome the racism in the South. He scorns the personal approach of Folsom and Finch as not attacking the legal basis of racism and accomodating the Jim Crow Laws.

However, Gladwell is wrong to suggest that racism only existed as a legal problem. He ignores the economic basis of racism and the consequent neccessity of political and cultural norms to support that economic base.

Without addressing the exploitation inherent in the Capitalist system, Gladwell cannot see the reason as dividing the workers among themselves. Racism adheres the white working class to the exploiters by letting them partake in some part of the exploitation. This portion is through better wages and conditions as the myth of class mobility. White workers agree to this in the belief that competition for betterment is reduced by excluding others such as blacks. This exclusion also extends to migrants, women, homosexuals, etc.

Read more!