Even if the answer is both. And blurring those two concepts doesn’t really serve any useful purpose except to obfuscate the role race actually plays in all this.

So it seems to me.

I disagree completely. It does serve a useful purpose if your goal is doing something measurable to improve the circumstances of the people most impacted. The problems of racism and inequality overlap and to the extent we can fight what might be called disparate impact racism by attacking inequality and the policies that entrench it we should.

I'm not saying that there's something wrong with arguing for more enlightened attitudes and/or sensitivity about race. I just don't think it's as valuable at our current point in time as improving material conditions and ending the policies that create mass incarceration.

This is why, despite all the praise Coates receives, I think he can be such a bad spokesman for his cause. He has a unique voice but his insistence on never really coming out and confronting the hard, nitty-gritty questions make him easy to dismiss. I can't tell if it's just his style or if beneath it all he is an intellectual lightweight posing as someone much more profound.

I agree with @kolohe and think that you could make precisely the opposite argument (which I assume many Sanders supporters would) just as plausibly. The mainstream progressive movement pays lip service to systemic racism but I think, at least in its online manifestation, often treats it more like an individual sin, where the solution is tongue clucking and shaming of individuals who with varying degrees of intent say something mean, stupid, or insensitive.

The other perspective is that racism at the personal or emotional level of individuals is hard to address from a policy perspective. From that point of view the best thing we can do is to try to improve the actual material conditions of racial minorities along with the poor generally and hope that over time racism at the individual/emotional level not only appears more absurd but causes less damage where it persists. That would mean basic wealth redistribution in the form of government programs. Better yet we can also set in place policies that force general accountability in law enforcement (BLM has some good ideas on that issue) so that individuals are less likely to be abused and if they are there is some recourse.

My personal perspective is that race and poverty are intertwined in America in such a manner as to make it ridiculous to argue either that racism is the sole cause of current entrenched inequality (its racist roots of course aren't debatable) or that the disproportionate poverty of (some) racial groups would go away if only we could solve racism. Is a black man more likely to be in prison in this country because he's black or because he's more likely to be poor. The answer can be both.

I didn't mean that they don't have their heroes (Obama had his own interesting cult of personality thing going in 2008) but I don't think they have something like Fox News producing contenders for the presidency.

My thesis is that the search for a hero (combined with a certain strain of know-nothingism) is the result of conservatism becoming more about culture and less about policy combined with the consolidation of a 'conservative' media. Fox News and Talk Radio create heroes designed to appeal to the demographic from which they profit. These figures end up overshadowing more normal politicians when it comes to election time until they're inevitably exposed as, at best untested for a national stage.

The Democratic coalition I think is far too fragmented to suffer from this particular pathology.

In theory I agree, A is better but its also a tall order. Reality tends to be what Jay bird said. Even if I disagree with the decision to select B in principle I find it hard to argue against it for any individual family.

The result in the county I grew up in was that virtually all white college bound students ended up in one of two magnet programs, going to private or parochial school, or moving (I went to a very blue collar parochial school then my family moved over the county line once they could afford it).

I will say that my experience was not the result of a policy decision to integrate poorer black students from dc into a predominantly middle class white county but was the result of development policies. Maybe it would go better if it was done more purposefully but I think a lot of similar dynamics would be in play.

What if the sacrifice is sending your children to a much more violent school and/or staying in a much more violent county? That was the experience my family and many others had in the late 80s through 90s just outside of DC.

My point isn't that de facto segregation is good or even that it's not racist (the roots of it absolutely are). My point is only that some of the concerns that make it hard to undo are legitimate (as opposed to those that aren't such as not wanting your kid going to school with people of a different race).

That's a good question and what makes th e issue hard. It's easy to argue for something when it isn't you and your family making the sacrifice (or at least facing uncertainty).

I think it's hard to talk about why Finland has had success without reading this article by Pasi Sahlberg:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/05/15/what-if-finlands-great-teachers-taught-in-u-s-schools-not-what-you-think/

I find his conclusions a lot more compelling than proposals for school choice or merit pay or making the education model more corporate. Finland's education system is good because it doesn't face the same socio-economic problems (some) US school districts have. Here we expect teachers to solve problems our entire government struggles with.

Without getting into the tenets of commmunism I think that the debates about how murderous it is tend to be too removed from the historical context of the times and places in which these conflicts occurred. I would argue, for example, that the greater lesson from the Russian revolution and subsequent events illustrates the dangers both of maintaining a backwards political system that is unable to adapt to modernity but also of trying to forcibly change a backward society in radical ways in a very short period of time.

There's an interesting alternative history where the revolution of 1905 leads to slower and more moderate changes and prevents the much more radical revolution once the Tzarist state had been weakened by World War 1.

I have the feeling that most of the communist revolutions and counter revolutions of the Cold War could be similarly dissected.

I actually think the more straightforward answer is that there's a difference between what we can and should allow when it comes to private versus public institutions. Public institutions are there, at least in theory, to serve everyone and as part of the government it's actions need to be looked at through a constitutional lense. I wouldn't argue that there's never a reason to advocate for certain types of regulations on private universities but part of living in a pluralistic society I think requires tolerance for private institutions behaving in ways that are more arbitrary.

I actually think it will be a good thing if the type of left wing critiques to which I think you're referring return to the academy. Not being familiar with most of them in their academic context it's hard for me to judge their merit but I don't think the sort of smug question begging style in which they arise on social media is doing the left any favors. I know Freddie de Boer has written at length about that issue.

Generally though I think you're right, that the pace of outrage turnover will eventually neuter most of the harm most of the time. This is purely anecdotal but if I recall correctly my Facebook feed was in full outrage mode about the Lord's Resistance Army for weeks whereas more recent outrages barely seem to make it for 72 hours if that.

I was thinking more in terms of satire about late capitalist society but yes, replace the aliens with lizard people, and They Live would be David Icke's theories made cinema.

They Live is a sadly under appreciated film. Given the political message I'm shocked there aren't undergrad seminars dedicated to it.

@will-truman I have similar issues with Vox. The Klein/Yglesias/Vox perspective has cloaked itself in the language of technocracy to the point that it's convinced itself that it doesn't have values or make certain types of value judgments about what is and isn't good policy. It's not exactly the "View From Nowhere" but I think it suffers from a number of the same shortcomings.

The (probably unsatisfying) answer is that it would depend on the case law and any relevant statutes in the jurisdiction as well as the given facts of a particular case. Generally speaking voluntary intoxication in itself will not render a contract voidable but there might be a point at which a person is so intoxicated that they lack capacity to contract. Again, I'd imagine different jurisdictions take different approaches to where they draw that line and whether or not there are other caveats.

I don't see your point. In your scenario the individual consuming alcohol is still making the choice to consume alcohol. There's no coercion. The person is chosing to consume alcohol by accepting drinks and can cease drinking at any time. What that individual consents to do with lowered inhibitions is that persons own responsibility. Whether or not a person was encouraged by others or by the context of a social situation to become intoxicated isn't relevant to whether or not consent was given in a particular sexual encounter. To suggest otherwise is to deny an individual's agency in their own conduct.

If a person is incapacitated then it's a different story because that person is incapable of consent but I don't think thats what you're arguing. Provided a person is capable of consent, that person can make their own choices about what they do or don't consent to, including when intoxicated. When there is consent to sexual activity, even if such consent is provided while intoxicated, that is not rape under the law, nor should it be.

As jr stated, I'm not sure there's any good evidence to support that assertion though I'm certainly open to considering it if there is. That said, on a more fundamental level, I don't understand how, absent force or a threat of force, one person is capable of "get[ting]" another person drunk (drugging someone without their knowledge is, of course something different). These are adults we're talking about, not children. Are we really at a point where we think a person can sign a contract or join the military, but can't decline a beer or a shot?

I doubt college now is much different from when I was there, which was less than 10 years ago. There was a lot of binge drinking and ill-advised decision making, including regarding sex, that resulted. However, intoxication is not the same thing as being incapacitated. Intoxicated people are still capable of consent even if they aren't so happy about what it is they consented to, be it shooting bottle rockets from their bare hands or having sex with someone they wished they hadn't.

As for the idea that a person's opinion on a political blog is somehow causing people not to report horrible crimes committed against them, well... count me as unconvinced.

I don't think your comparison is sound. Changing the law so that a wife may deny her husband consent to sexual activity is premised on the argument that a woman retains autonomy over her body when she is married. It's an important change signifying that a wife is not her husband's property, as she, to varying degrees, would have been understood to be in the past.

The arguments coming from college campuses, as far as I can tell, seem to be that if a woman regrets her consent after the fact, the conduct of her sexual partner may, subject to the discretion of a federal compliance bureaucrat, be rape, and/or that women cannot consent due to being overwhelmed by social forces of inequality. These arguments are premised on the idea that women are not capable of or sufficiently competent to consent to sexual activity (quite Victorian if you ask me). In practice this approach is in utter conflict with the idea that women are equal to men, that the accused are entitled to the presumption of innocence and due process, and even with the concept of mens rea. I think Laura Kipnis said it best, when she called them "intellectually embarrassing."

This is why I still struggle a bit with condemning Cosby without reservation. I'm not going to argue his innocence (or his guilt) but what he said in that deposition is not nearly as definitive as many people seem to believe. Voluntary intoxication in itself does not make a person incapable of consent.

From what I gather from college campuses, we are in the process, at least socially, of defining down 'rape' to include conduct that I don't think rises to rape under the law. I can understand why this revelation might change peoples image of Cosby as a squeaky clean paragon of morality but that's not the same thing as being a rapist.

This view will probably not be popular but i think that if there's anything we should have learned about rape accusations over the last year or so it's that until they've been subject to appropriate scrutiny the presumption of innocence should prevail. It doesn't mean that rape never happens or that all credible accusations shouldn't be investigated with the utmost seriousness but until then they remain just accusations.

There are I think a number of issues where that type of wholesale rejection makes sense, it's just that it doesn't have to do with the merits of a particular policy or argument but rather arises from a lack of trust between the two sides. Obvious examples would be abortion and gun control. It's tough to give any ground if you think that your opponent is going to leverage any concessions that you might be able to accept (or even agree with) into future changes that you wouldn't.

Well I do agree on the scorecard point (that was the intent of my original comment but I can see how it looked like I was saying the opposite).

I'm not sure if I agree on the shaft theory though (can we call it that?). Two examples come to mind. The first is the debate over the size and shape of the welfare state, with most Democrats fighting to maintain the status quo and, at least a vocal portion of Republicans, arguing for substantially shrinking it or tearing it down altogether. There also wasn't anything conservative, in the colloquial sense of the term, about the George W. Bush administration and executive power.

I don't really disagree with any of this. I'd never argue that there aren't plenty of stupid libertarians out there or stupid libertarian ideas. Indeed there are a number of issues on which I find libertarian thought frustratingly myopic. However, I do also get annoyed by liberals/progressives/Democrats who smugly see themselves as enlightened on all things regarding race but seem to have a blind spot for the state pushing people around as long as it's their guy(s) pulling the trigger, or at least their guys nominally in charge of the guy(s) pulling the trigger.

There are of course conservatives who are similarly hypocritical. However, I like you have a strong preference for urban living so I don't run into as many of those types to debate. That's more of a family gathering thing for me.

I think this is wrongheaded for a couple reasons. First, you've made the assumption that we can generalize about what minorities want and that all of them want the same things. Yes, we could probably look at some polls and get a sense of what the majority of a given minority group want from a policy perspective but these groups are comprised of individuals with their own beliefs and needs. I would submit that the view you just expressed is patronizing, and while it sounds a lot nicer, it isn't much different than conservatives blaming problems in minority communities on some type of generalized cultural or moral failing shared by the group. After all, they're all the same, right? Are we just erasing individuals who don't meet a certain stereotype from existence?

Second, it implies that when we give members of minority groups the reigns of state power that they are then not capable of implementing policy that is disproportionately bad for their own group. The war on drugs (mainly crack cocaine) was strongly endorsed by black politicians who ran DC in the 1980's to disastrous results for the predominantly black citizenry. Hell, even now black people are well represented in the government in Baltimore, including on its police force (take a look at the officers accused in the Freddy Grey murder). Are the black individuals whose lives and families are being ruined by state power taking some type of solace in solidarity with their local political class? I'm white so I can't really say, but I somehow doubt it.

Like it or not libertarians (at least in theory) are on the right side of these issues when it comes to the protection of minority rights in a manner that your average Democrat in office is not. The better argument against most forms of libertarianism is that it fails to acknowledge that extreme inequality and entrenched poverty can be just as destructive to individual liberty as an arbitrary and violent state apparatus. This is an argument I happen to agree with.

As a side note, there was some libertarian push-back on Paul's view on the Civil Rights Act. An example if you're interested:

http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/why-rand-paul-is-right-wrong