I agree in principle. I don't see how it could work out in practice, though. If we embargo Libya, it is ineffective because someone else will buy their oil, and effectively the only thing we impact is the economy and the plight of it's citizens, as we have clearly seen with Saddam. This will lead to further claims of racism because the people of the country are being made to suffer.

So, I suppose we could blockage them to really enforce their isolation. But unless we are willing to sink russian and chinese ships trading with them, all we are doing is issuing empty threats. And clearly if we do start sinking those ships, we will start wars and again be called racist.

The only alternative you leave, is to completely ignore their suffering, hope that nobody else intervenes for their own ends, and await the eventual overthrow of the government, which could take hundreds of years. This seems like the least empathetic and most disregarding approach imaginable. Being so afraid to do bad that one refuses to try to do good.

I think the most moral approach would perhaps be the most chauvinist of all. I'm thinking about Japan post WWII. But then I never bought into the post modern nihilistic view.

The UK has done a much better job in handling the situation than the US has, it seems, though it has had more time to do so than the southern US. I don't think they achieved it by implementing systemic racism in the opposite direction, though. And let's be clear, even though we may feel justified in kicking out higher achieving students to replace them with a quota-satisfying minority group, that is systemically racist, the very thing we are trying to abolish. It is a clear example of committing a wrong to hopefully achieve a right. And it will never feel like anything short of racism to the individual student that gets short changed.

So let's say that it works, and black folk begin to integrate more successfully into the encompassing community, and the encompassing communities don't end up resenting them for the racist laws that are helping them to do s . Will we ever be remove these racist rules? Or will we be arguing about an ever small statistical deviation somewhere? Furthermore, all of the people that are unjustly damaged by these new racist rules (ie. Ashley), won't they then be due reparations in the future too? Who would pay those? Where would it end? Would it end?

I just doubt that more racism is the cure for racism.

Good point.

I don't dispute racism exists, and its effects are amplified by power and reach. There is a difference between quality and quantity when it comes to racism. Western racism seems of a low quality, but it generates a high quantity due to pragmatic reasons. Strangely, perhaps, I find this less reprehensible than high quality of racism that is mitigated by distance or political clout. That's definitely a bias I have.

EDIT:
I think the above video and my response to it demonstrate some of the problems in that stance. Akala confidently lists a collection of events that he clearly considers egregious. A subset of those I've addressed in my criticism, to varying extents. If detecting racism in our culture is disagreeing about how effective a foreign navy should be in it's coast guard duties on a foreign shore, perhaps we're disappearing down the rabbit hole. If detecting racism in our culture means finding a sub 1% discrepancy in prison death rates in a small sample size, then it could be we're missing the forest for the trees.
It isn't to say that there aren't still problems in western culture, but we are teaching ourselves to cry wolf constantly, and we know where that leads.

I'm far enough away from these issues to admit that I don't have anything like concrete knowledge on the subject, but I feel like I should mention some of the more obvious counterpoints to some of the things he's said in this video. Otherwise I'd get that dirty echo chamber feeling, and no amount of showering seems to wash that away. Could be I'm just a masochist, though, who enjoys arguing.

I think there's racism in every culture. I think it's often much more subtle than described in the video, often even subconscious. I also think that modern western culture is among the least racist cultures to have ever existed, despite our many complaints.

I guess I'll talk about Libya first. The west (the white people he was talking about) is continuously demonized for supporting tyrants and the like. Yet when they participate in overthrowing a clear example of a extravagant super villain tyrant, they are demonized for that. I'm not saying they didn't have other motives, I'm just saying that it's an example of a tautology. No matter which choice they make they are labeled racist.

Now, when beleaguered folk make a desperate attempt to dangerously cross a sea, well knowing the risks they are incurring, it is again the fault of the Italians for not rescuing then with sufficient alacrity. Yes, many of them are coming from countries the west had a hand in destabilizing. But it would be pretty racist for you to demand that the Italian navy take full moral responsibility for the actions of other western nations, simply because they are white too. Also, if the only number you pay attention to is the number that drown, your bias is showing.

Next the issue of the Commonwealth. It seems absurd to expect the UK to treat former colonies populated by citizens that had moved there the same as former conquests that have since shrugged off the yoke of empire. The justifications for this discrimination would seem to be a combination of racism, cultural chauvinism and sober pragmatism. The latter two factors clearly scale with the gap between the culture of the colony in question and the home country, and probably ought to in some sense.

The incarceration thing is tougher to poke holes in, and clearly a much more touchy subject. Once could argue all sorts of justifications for why more members of ethnic minorities are apprehended, but it's nebulous and smells of bias and chauvinism, at best ending in a chicken vs egg conundrum. But once you're in police custody, I think can agree on demanding a higher level of equality of outcome. So I checked out a charity called Inquest who had compiled pretty comprehensive stats on police custody deaths since 1990. Here's a link: http://www.inquest.org.uk/statistics/bame-deaths-in-police-custody
To summarise, since 1990, ethnic minorities have made up a total of 153 out of 1557 deaths in police custody, or roughly 10%. Given that they currently make up 13% of the population, that seems to be well within an acceptable range of results, so I was confused at first. Then I thought maybe he had misspoken and had meant to say state custody, or inmate deaths. So again I looked for some numbers, and again Inquest had the most comprehensive data, broken down by year and ethnicity etc. Again here's a link: http://www.inquest.org.uk/statistics/deaths-in-prison
It shows 453 out of 3963 prison deaths are suffered by ethnic minorities. This seems almost perfectly in line with the 13% population of said minorities. So again, I'm a bit confused by the point he's making.

All of that said, I think I agree with the sentiment of his presentation, which perhaps confuses me even more.

Thanks for taking the time.
I've grown so sick of identity politics and the use of bad names to disqualify other people from having opinions (I'm sure I've done it myself). I appreciate the measured tone.

Sometimes I find Google hard.

I've only be able to find one pole that actually discusses the underlying reasons for people voting one way or the other, and it used wide categories. It showed that the biggest leave reason was to regain control over immigration policy, and the second most important was to regain control over law-making powers. Those sound like legitimate concerns to me.

I'm guessing their are more polls out there. Maybe you could point me at the ones you're talking about? I watch the related radx post (I could only find the Mark Blyth interview), but it seemed to support my current understanding of the situation.

I don't know what was the right decision. The fear mongering on both sides of the aisle makes it hard to appraise. But I don't get how people can't understand those that voted to leave. It seems like needlessly divisive hyperbole. Welcome to politics, I suppose.

In their shoes I would be concerned with the ongoing erosion of sovereignty over their lives. It seems indisputable that the further removed the decision makers are from the people, the less those people not only feel, and the less those people will actually be in charge. It also seems indisputable that more decisions were being taken by remote decision makers as time went on.

Again, one may have reasons to disagree, but to not understand it seems to say far more about the one failing to understand than anyone else.

War crime laws are an interesting concept. They're ignored when a real war is fought, and pretty much exclusively applied to the losing side alone afterwards. They serve as a tool to demonize and justify military action after the dust has settled, allowing the victors to say that they had just cause in committing all of their own atrocities. I'd be curious (and likely horrified) to see how far the US would go if it actually had to fight a war it had a chance of losing.

I don't know as much about this argument as I'd like, but my gripe with it is that it assumes that there is a more efficient way of modeling reality, with 100% fidelity, than reality itself. It seems a lot to implicitly take onboard. How could you model the exact position of some subatomic particle without involving at least one such subatomic particle?

Not exactly. He's saying that, given his premises, there will be many many more simulated worlds. Therefore you're left without much likelihood your experience is in the real one and not a 'matrix'.

Wait? There's still people posting on Yahoo?

That's the sort of exercise gym I could totally get into!

Could be lots of things that they left out of the clip that support their argument. I don't doubt there is. I'm just saying they're goofs for choosing those clips to portray him. If someone looks at those clips, and doesn't know the backstory, it looks like shoddy. At best it looks poorly done, and at worse it looks deceptive.

He's a bit of a nut for sure, but I'm getting sick of this style of coverage.

He says he wouldn't raise the minimum wage [federally], then he says he thinks it's an issue that should be decided state by state. That doesn't sound like a change in position to me. That just sounds to me like he wants the minimum wage to accommodate local factors.

I don't know much about Trump. I'm not even American. If someone puts together a montage like this to undermine a political figure and the very information they present me with runs against the narrative they're selling, it's shoddy workmanship.

Late addition, but I've seen something relevant recently.

Here's a link to a video that better explains what's up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72UPxDFPKDs

In short, the world cup for women is held one year after the world cup for men. So men have a boom year, then women have a boom year, then they each have a couple so so years. What has happened is that they have compared the earnings in a women's world cup year to give them something to stand on. Obviously this makes it seem like women earn more. They completely ignore the previous year, which shows men vastly out earning women, to a degree far surpassing the difference in wages. Completely dishonest propaganda. The Daily Show has really fallen far since the loss of Mr Stewart.