Like I said, for less than zero..., cause you know good and goddamn well that that white man's ice is colder'n'yourn...,

Cobb opened the lid on the real can of worms underscoring the indisputable power of Murkan consensus reality manufacturing..., and its awesome power to sap black will and possess black minds - hegemonically.

"Stop polishing the alter PT.
Those lambs were sacrificed for less than zero.
The struggle failed, Murka proved its wicked mettle.
The alchemical reagent of change is on lock down.
You gents got no suggestions.
What now?"

You are way off-base, CN. I don't worship at or polish altars. I have a genetic predispostion against rituals of any type. The people who died and sacrificed during the Civil Rights Movement were not lambs and to characterize them as such dishonors their deaths and losses and ennobles their persecutors. This country was changed profoundly as a result of the Civil Rights Movement and, in some valuable ways, so were parts of the world because the Movement served as a catalyst for a world wide rebellion of the young against the strictures and agencies of the past.

Progressive political change is always a process of two steps forward, one step backwards. It never has been and never will be an upward movement of slowly accelerating change as if the engine of history and human events were under the control of an automatic transmission. There will always be periods of progress and then, unfortunately, periods of decline or stasis.

Your request for a single interesting policy proposal is akin to the Republicans demand for the Democrats to present an alternative program to fix an allegedly broken Social Security program. You have yet to demonstrate either the feasibility or efficacy of your own proposal, which is, to be brief, a plan to place black people closer to the Murkanized feeding trough by having them serve in a mercenary army. I suspect that you are confusing controversial with interesting.

I'll trade you my kingdom for a song.

I haven't read Cobb's piece as yet but in any case you are still offering contingent statements about the world as if they were fixed, immutable glacial realities. Asserting that "Murkan consensus reality manufacturing" has the potential to "sap black will and possess black minds" is not quite the same thing as declaring that it has in fact sapped and laid black will and black minds to waste. I have never viewed Murkan culture and society as having the degree of power over black people that you seem to take as a given.

I read Cobb's piece before posting this message. I've shopped at Nordstrom's for many years. Did I miss something? And I've known for longer than that why cereal boxes are the size they are. Did I miss something there? What is is that you were trying to tell me?

Doubtless We shall overcome someday is the lilting refrain.

Sigh...,

Don't get me wrong PT, I got nothing but love for you and P6 - but I'm calling you brothers out on the spaces I percieve lurking in your ideological foundations. Don't grouse about the message - just admit the fact that we got overcome. Straight up simple and plain, tricknologically jacked by John Wayne.

But that's just a round, it's not the game. Time to get up, dust off, and re-engage, but this time with a different analysis of the opposition and an accelerated and improved technique. Which is why my own brand of speculative inquiry tends toward a different angle of engagement. While I don't aim to say things just to be controversial PT, I have been known to incorporate atemi into my rhetorical repertoire in an effort to push a partner's envelope.

We are after all on the same side and engaged in mutual and reciprocal developmental exercises, aren't we?

"We pay for a Nordstrom shirt because the people at Nordstrom dress richly"

I plucked this jewel of consumer thinking from Cobb's site. I don't think he has the slightest inkling of why people like myself buy our clothes at Nordstrom's. Keeping up with the Joneses may be why large numbers of people flock to Nordstrom's but a large number of us shop there because of the quality of the goods and the service we may elect to receive after our purchases.

No, we, or at least some of us didn't get overcomed. Do you recall that line in Gwaltney's book "Drylongoso" where I believe the old black man says that "Toobob will always be toobob."

Cobb was writing about the masters of sensation transference...., vs the masters of muscle,

Brother Bowen deserves to be read a LOT more closely than that.., and in the context of this thread flipping you from cooing about how buttery Nordstrom's is to how Toobobish you thinks you is - certainly underscores that fact.., dopamine hegemony got black folks by the short and curlys jes like errbody else.

Ignore what CN is proposing here.

If you follow the firstlink in his comment above, you'll see he made this statement:

Here were the key takeaways;

1. Black scientists and technologists must assume the mantle of cultural leadership across the diaspora - with full support from black business, political, and celebrity cohorts.

2. We must operate with complete autonomy and accept no editorial or creative interference - which means we have to be completely self-sufficient.

3. In precisely the same unfettered way we repurposed two turntables and a microphone - and in the process introduced open source culture into the noosphere - we must repurpose vastnesses of infrastructure and our dependence on the same.

4. Black youth culture is the most powerful and influential force in world-wide popular culture - it is our privilege and duty to aid, abet, and guide that divine wind into its full modal potential as the fountainhead of an alternative social matrix of substantive competitive cooperation.

His actual point seems to be that acting within a paradigm draws you further and further into that paradigm.

Me, I have the feeling the U.S.ofA. is going to functionally disaggregate...functionally the national citizen (thank you, Lester) will cease to be. One major repercussion of this will be that your rights will be the sum of the rights of all your in-groups, as those in-groups are perceived in the particular (probably) state (though it may seriously be more "fine grained"than that).

If Black folks come to see they should address the issues that affect us as an effective constituency, we need a replacement for the NAACP...more accurately, we need an organization that facilitates  communication to, for and among the Black constiituencies. The NAACP could build that organization on its historical reputation. I'm curious to see if their new prez comes up with something more relevant that the lack of negroes on Friends.

ok, that was wrong PT.

I take back the toobobishness..., please forgive my exuberance.

dopamine hegemony got black folks by the short and curlys jes like errbody else.

Well, yeah. 

His actual point seems to be that acting within a paradigm draws you further and further into that paradigm.

To the point where your paradigm is indistinguishable from the one by which you are subsumed..,

way of life = polity

dopamine hegemony got black folks by the short and curlys jes like errbody else.

Well, yeah.

In no small part that's what all this banging on was about.

"His actual point seems to be that acting within a paradigm draws you further and further into that paradigm."

That is a strong possibility but it is also entirely possible that you could create a measure of disequilibrium within the paradigm and thus act to overthrow it or create a new paradigm. In fact, it could be persuasively argued that only those who have fully assimilated and accepted the tenets or world view of the reigning paradigm would have the best chance of toppling it. For most folks the matrix does not exist as anything separate and apart from their lives. You have to at least be able to see the matrix before you can even begin to contemplate its demise.

As for the National Association for the Advancement of Certain People aka National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, if the new prez thinks that its mission should be to foster communication among black constituencies then that would represent an important turning point in the organization's history and development. Who knows, I might renew my membership just as a means to encourage the process.

"Toobob will always be toobob."

The old man was saying that white folks will always be white folks.

That is a strong possibility but it is also entirely possible that you could create a measure of disequilibrium within the paradigm and thus act to overthrow it or create a new paradigm.

...which would make you "in it but not of it."

As for the National Association for the Advancement of Certain People aka National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, if the new prez thinks that its mission should be to foster communication among black constituencies then that would represent an important turning point in the organization's history and development.

It certainly would. It would be a turning point in our national history as well.

As for the National Association for the Advancement of Certain People aka National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, if the new prez thinks that its mission should be to foster communication among black constituencies then that would represent an important turning point in the organization's history and development.

...it's a nice notion, but the NAACP is an outmoded, top-down type organization ill-suited to the cellular structure of local pockets of anti-hegemonic insurgency requisite to foment stable, *in it, but not of it* ness.

Not only, but there are no consequential technologists in this organization, up-to-and-including the new sales leadership culture prez..., at a grass roots level, it's about as luddite as it's humanly possible to be.

The NAACP could use its reputation to do the job. If it did so, it wouldn't be the NAACP anymore. It would be some new organization that received ownership of all the trademarks.

If I were to (ahem) prejudge Mr. Gordon, I would not expect it. I expect a corporate manager's approach to issues and that's the exact approach by which the participants in the neocon coup convinced themselves their plan for conquering Iraq would work.

I agree. I have no faith in the ability of the NAACP at the national or local level to either articulate or take the lead in fomenting any political insurgency. On the other hand, the folks who join and run the NAACP are people who are, by and large, extremely risk adverse. After civil rights their desire for change quickly runs downhill. They want a seat at the table; they are not going to look to closely at what is being served to them as long as they have a seat.

"If I were to (ahem) prejudge Mr. Gordon, I would not expect it. I expect a corporate manager's approach to issues and that's the exact approach by which the participants in the neocon coup convinced themselves their plan for conquering Iraq would work."

Amen. Mr. Gordon's role is to repair the so-called breach and open a door to the Republicans. This is all part of the so-called pragmatic approach that became a reignant process within the NAACP and other civil rights organizations when they essentially abandoned the notion of grassroots organizing. The NAACP, of course, never adopted or employed the techniques of community organizing although its retelling of its role during the Civil Rights Movement would lead you to believe otherwise. And I not reassured by its efforts to make alliances with various hip-hop moguls and artists.

As I look across the aching expanse of backwardness that is the virtual organization I see a fossilized responsible negro command structure.

This damage is irrepairable...,

She covered the 1954 Florida murder trial of Ruby McCollum with journalist/author and civil rights advocate William Bradford Huie. Her detachment from the wider civil rights movement struggle was demonstrated by Hurston's opposition to the Supreme Court ruling in the Brown v Board of Education case (1954), arguing in a letter to the Orlando Sentinel that desegregation was predicated on black inferiority. The letter caused a furore and proved to be Hurston's last public intervention.

Poor Zora must be spinning in her grave...,

On the other hand, the folks who join and run the NAACP are people who are, by and large, extremely risk adverse.

Then they'd be best served by an organization that reduces the increased risks caused by racism. At minimum, one that enhances their ability to deal with/withstand them. And such an organization would need them, too.

Re: Brown v. Board of Education

"Yellow cat, black cat, as long as it catches mice, it is a good cat."

Deng Xiaoping

The practice of legally sanctioned racial segregation was so deeply woven into the fabric of American society that whatever arguments that had to be marshalled in order to drive a stake in the heart of that beast was a good argument. The points that Zora Neale and Clarence Thomas have raised regarding their objections to the Brown decision pale in comparison to the need to throw over "Jim Crow."

Should Thurgood Marshall et al. have argued that legally enforced racial segregation caused no harm to Negroes? Those among us who confess a hankering for that dead order of things are engaging in romantic delusionism. To claim that the arguments presented to support ending racially based school segregation were flawed (Yes, they were to some extent but all legal arguments are flawed to a degree.) is to imply that the arguments made in favor of racially segregated education were less flawed and more compelling. What exactly would Hurston and Thomas have preferred Marshall et al. to argue?

The points that Zora Neale and Clarence Thomas have raised regarding their objections to the Brown decision pale in comparison to the need to throw over "Jim Crow."

What organic competencies have flourished among blacks since the throwing over of Jim Crow?

What organic competencies have greatly diminished among blacks since the throwing over of Jim Crow?

Other than Nordstrom's servitons showing you dey teef, what data do you have to support your contention that the segregated U.S. was in any way qualitatively more harmful to blacks than the contemporary prison industrial, apartheid social-custom U.S.?

All I want to know is what qualitative or quantitative measure you use to say things are better now for the largest % of black folks than they were in 1957? I'm not arguing for a return to Jim Crow, mind you, but please tell me exactly why black folks shouldn't make paramount efforts to segregate themselves in every possible manner from Murkaness?

btw - the afrofuturist context for this thought is declining energy, shrinking economy, pending global warfare..., and all that these privations entail for the climate of consciousness in Murka.

"Other than Nordstrom's servitons showing you dey teef, what data do you have to support your contention that the segregated U.S. was in any way qualitatively more harmful to blacks than the contemporary prison industrial, apartheid social-custom U.S.?"

What data do you have to support your belief that the prison industrial system is currently more harmful to the majority of black Americans than the system of Jim Crow laws and practices that were in place prior to 1965? There is a vast gulf between what you believe black people should do with regard to segregating themselves from Murkaness and what it is that they actually do. Has this fact escaped your attention and considerable intellectual powers or do you believe that you have some right to compel them to act differently?

The ball is still in Zora Neale's and Justice Thomas's court. If they were dissatisfied with the Court's reasoning and the oral and written arguments that were presented in favor of the position that the Court eventually adopted as its own, then what arguments do you think they should have presented in support of racially segregated school systems.

You are arguing for a return to Jim Crow despite your protests to the contrary. What do you believe was the possible alternative if the Court had sided with the defendants in Brown v Board of Education? Would Zora Neale have been happy because it would have allowed her to remain unchallenged as part of DuBois's Talented Tenth sucking up foundation dollars for anthropology studies of the po'colored people. Did she suspect that the end of legally sanctioned racial segregation would eventually result in some hybridization of the folk and the tales that she collected for her mentors at Columbia University?

What data do you have to support your belief that the prison industrial system is currently more harmful to the majority of black Americans than the system of Jim Crow laws and practices that were in place prior to 1965?

Without recourse to google, the following are top of mind indices which can be statistically fleshed out with some thought to disparate pernicious impact;

HIV-AIDS
Black-on-black violence and criminality
Global propagandization featuring black males as criminally inclined
Thug acculturation (mating preferences of young black women)
70% out-of-wedlock birthrates
Permanent denial of voting and gun ownership privileges to a substantial number of drug-crime felons.

The last thing in the world - of interest to me - is compelling anyone to do differently than they are mechanically disposed to do. The Murkan herd and its responsible negro proles will thin itself quite nicely without any intervention on my part. Suffice it to say, my interest and efforts are directed towards maximizing black autonomy.

Thomas is beneath my consideration, as I have personal familiarity with his views, behaviours, and the circumstances of his elevation. That fool truly does believe white ice is colder and he truly has forgotten where he came from. I have no interest in speculating on alternative historical possibilities, other than to remark that your ad hominem against Zora is uninformed, and for one as historically well informed as you often seem to be, that is a significant blindspot. Zora is misunderstood for exactly the same reason George Schuyler was misunderstood.

Zora understood the limitations of Murkaness FAR better than you seem to, and decades earlier than the integrationist crowd which also fundamentally misread Murkaness did. She represented a singularly rich thread of cultural possibility - active resistance to dopamine hegemony - which had it been successful - may well have led to alternate historical pathways through Murkaness. Zora's niggerati movement was eclipsed by the Great Depression and WWII and so is now moot. It was the attempt by artists and literati to lead by example. That time is clearly past. Now is the time for;

1. Black scientists and technologists must assume the mantle of cultural leadership across the diaspora - with full support from black business, political, and celebrity cohorts.

2. We must operate with complete autonomy and accept no editorial or creative interference - which means we have to be completely self-sufficient.

3. In precisely the same unfettered way we repurposed two turntables and a microphone - and in the process introduced open source culture into the noosphere - we must repurpose vastnesses of infrastructure and our dependence on the same.

4. Black youth culture is the most powerful and influential force in world-wide popular culture - it is our privilege and duty to aid, abet, and guide that divine wind into its full modal potential as the fountainhead of an alternative social matrix of substantive competitive cooperation.

I drank the niggerati kool-aid over fifteen years ago and have subsequently shared in common the same sacred regard for what Zora recognized and had total faith in - the inestimable power of black folk-culture, or as Ishmael Reed called it, jes grew.

The more closely I read you PT, the clearer it becomes that this is a significant point of departure in our respective world views. Tell me something, have you found Cosby's recriminations of poor black folk troubling and disappointing, or are you in agreement for the most part with what he's been saying?

As life has become bereft of community and extended family, as well as contact with nature, the inner reward system lacks many of its historical stimuli. It seems likely that the need for a new dopamine rush will be inversely proportional to the satisfaction received from traditional sources.

Money is inextricably tied to primal desires. The car ad shows you pretty girls with slippery thighs who will come to you as soon as you purchase that big SUV. Every part of town has little stores where you can run in and stuff food into your mouth. When your loneliness calls for a new electronic gadget to cuddle with, you grab the credit card and wander thru the electronic stores touching, fantasizing, eventually purchasing.

Why gadgets? Babies fixate on the first things they see. Your generation was dragged out of the womb into a brightly lit room full of instruments, then dumped into a metal crib while mommy got sewed up. Cars with nice soft cushions and exaggerated curves were almost as good as crawling back into the womb. Now it is the computer that captivates you. It has lots of the advantages of living with someone and fewer peccadilloes.

Shopping is a way to experience ersatz community. The mall and joining a gang are all the community that is available to many teens. Of course, those are very inadequate forms of community, and therefore meet one of the conditions for addiction. Eating pure, boiled down sugar juice, you will find it nearly impossible to get addicted. White sugar is addictive OTOH because it arouses an expectation that it never fully satisfies. An aspect of addiction is compulsively repeating looking for what is missing.

Indian monkeys could serve as a valid model of crazed Murkan consumers and the kneegrows they seduced. In India, the usual way of trapping monkeys is to make a small hole in a hollow gourd, chain the gourd to a tree and fill it with nuts and raisins. The monkey squeezes its hand into the hole and grabs the goodies. The trapper then steps out of his hiding place and the monkey tries to run away. But it will not open its greedy little fist which cannot pass thru the hole in the gourd.

Sound familiar?

The more closely I read you PT, the clearer it becomes that this is a significant point of departure in our respective world views.

Is it necessary to agree with your world view?

Here's a metaphor from my wasted youth. Me and my cousin used to see these two excellent females that lived near each other. About a half-hour drive...I had a job and no car, he had a car, a year's worth of paid up insurance but was between gigs. I bought gas and he drove us to our respective destinations for our respective reasons.

You and your cousin were in agreement about your love for excellent nookie....,

Zora Neale Hurston was born on January 7, 1901 in Eatonville Florida. Eatonville is a community of black people that have enormous respect for themselves and for their ability to govern themselves. Growing up, Zora Neale Hurston experienced separate but equal politics of Eatonville. This experience deeply affected her outlook on racial issues.

Zora Neale Hurston’s father, John Hurston, was a tenant farmer and a Baptist minister, as well as the mayor of Eatonville. His sermons were an important influence on her style of writing, Her mother, Lucy Ann Hurston, encouraged her to do her best and to challenge herself.

Today, she is a heroine to the people of Eatonville. Eatonville remains, today, an all black town which governs itself.

You are still avoiding the issues you previously raised. Your references to the rates of HIV infection etc. among blacks is not any proof that ending legally enforced racial segregation was harmful to black Americans. Are you asserting that none of these deplorable conditions would exist if our children were still forbidden by law and custom from attending public schools with whites?

I am not uninformed regarding Zora Neale's intemperate attacks against the legal efforts to end racially based segregation. There is a certain point, my friend, in political affairs where standing for principle means little other than condemning folks, who you otherwise claim to love, to death and destruction. Zora Neale was part and parcel of the integrationist crowd and the personal reasons for her eventual separation, as opposed to the political reasons offered by her biographers and champions, are as murky and ambiguous as some other aspects of her life.

Nonetheless, I have a great deal of respect and admiration for her and her struggles and accomplishments. I don't agree with her attack on the Brown decision. It was an intemperate and almost willfully self-destructive act on her part. I don't think that George Schuyler is as misunderstood and loathed as much as you might tend to believe. I do think he became increasingly embittered over the years and the further to the right he moved the less that what he wrote and commented on bore any relevance to the lives of the people he most wanted to influence.

I am declining to enlist for either side of the Bill Cosby divide. I feel like that kid in the film "Putney Swope" who on being introduced to Putney says, "Fuck the establishment and fuck the anti-establishment establishment." I think the chief difference between most poor people and me is that they ain't got no money. If they had money then all that stuff about how they speak English or wear their jeans wouldn't mean a thing in American society. Paris Hilton, for example, is simply poor white trash who happens to be an heiress to a real estate fortune. She and her sister, in my opinion, look and act like poor white trash but nobody cares because they have money and they are white. I am not getting in the middle of that debate regarding Cosby's remarks. It is a sideshow event.

You and your cousin were in agreement about your love for excellent nookie....,

And that's about the right level of specificity for social and political coalitions. A tighter alignment is needed for an alliance...

You are still avoiding the issues you previously raised. Your references to the rates of HIV infection etc. among blacks is not any proof that ending legally enforced racial segregation was harmful to black Americans. Are you asserting that none of these deplorable conditions would exist if our children were still forbidden by law and custom from attending public schools with whites?

Without a million black men in the prison industrial, HIV infection rates would be dramatically lower. No ifs ands or buts. Beyond this, however, I'm asserting that 50 additional years of jes grew emergent from heterogeneous black interpersonal communion would have been of inestimable value when compared and contrasted with the utterly fragmented and emasculated diasporan shell that is the afterbirth of the civil rights movement.

The Civil Rights struggle, at its deepest and most profound levels,was never just about acquiring material creature comforts. It was for many of us about transforming and changing America into a nation and society where the buying and selling of products, labor etc. weren't the highest callings.

It failed. The Civil Rights struggle transformed nothing. It merely accelerated Murka's extraction, commodification, assimilation and isolation of members of formerly segregated black America that had performed a guardian role within our community. The Civil Rights struggle did not change Murka, it simply destroyed black America.

Reciprocity time.

I've asked and been stonewalled on several fundamental questions on this thread segment alone;

1. What now? My kingdom for a single interesting policy proposal....,

2. what data do you have to support your contention that the segregated U.S. was in any way qualitatively more harmful to blacks than the contemporary prison industrial, apartheid social-custom U.S.?

3. What organic competencies have flourished among blacks since the throwing over of Jim Crow?

4. What organic competencies have greatly diminished among blacks since the throwing over of Jim Crow?

"It failed. The Civil Rights struggle transformed nothing. It merely accelerated Murka's extraction, commodification, assimilation and isolation of members of formerly segregated black America that had performed a guardian role within our community. The Civil Rights struggle did not change Murka, it simply destroyed black America."

This is a preposterously absurd claim! Do you have any genuine lived experience of what America felt like for the overwhelming majority of black Americans prior to the Civil Rights Movement? Do you realize that black people did not enjoy living under the humiliating boot heel of racially based laws and customs?

I was there, my friend, during those days. The black elite didn't play any guardian role on behalf of the black masses. They might have played the role of gatekeepers - a function many of them still perform - but guardians? I was there. We did our damndest to remove many of them from leadership roles in the 1960s and early 1970s because of their selfish egocentric ineffectiveness. There was no good old days.

The only folks I hear talking about the good old days of racial segregation are nostalgic southern white crackers and college educated blacks of your generation. Not one older black man or woman I ever knew as a child, teenager and young adult ever waxed on about the benefits of racially enforced segregation. You are pining for a dead order of things. Get over it. Those days are dead and buried.

Your questions have been repeatedly answered. Simply because you don't care for the answers doesn't mean that I should be required to answer them again. By the way, you or LS posted one of my policy proposals about housing several months ago at Vision Circle. What organic competencies do you believe have been lost since the throwing over of Jim Crow? I haven't seen any evidence that black people have lost any group competencies or skills that they were in possession of prior to 1965. What has changed, perhaps, is that the venues in which these competencies and skills could be actualized and displayed have diminished but this change is not the result of ending racially based segregation laws.

What is an "organic competency"?

My mother was also a true believer that white folks ice is colder. All those hurty feelings about what she imagined she missed out on in segregated schools, all the while ignoring the facts of her high performing literacy, numeracy, and the carefully cultivated musicality she displayed as a trained concert pianist - product of segregated schools - and loved by generations of folks who listened to her play in churches and halls all across the midwest.

If you mean to tell me that black on black violence and criminality were then what they are now, then you've ventured into the realm of the absurd or into denial so deep that it borders on the same. I leave it to you to offer more compelling causal or correlative factors underscoring these - >degenerate conditions .

When I was a kid, my segregated community felt like heaven on earth. I was three minutes walk from three doctors offices, a dentist, two attorneys, two full service grocery stores, a hardware store, 4 full service service stations, and countless other riches in my fully segregated community. That same community is now a wasteland. These same folks were neighbors, friends, and regular features of a now lost way of life. All of that is now permanently lost to the black community it once comprised.

As a 30 year experiment in forced integration, I've had a belly full of Murkaness. Given that I've got another 30 productive years to go and the well-being of my children to consider, I'm disinclined to blithely accept the status quo as anything worth preserving.

Prom season came and went this year with only two calls from the lonely suburban wasteland for *help* finding suitable black dates/escorts for the children of black professionals living in lily white suburban hells..,

You haven't answered a single one of my questions PT and I'm pretty sure I understand why. While I thought you had some interesting ideas about Detroit several months ago, and a sharp as tacks command of contemporary history, your taste in ice leaves me extremely cold.

What is an "organic competency"?

The ability to make and do things, a trade, craft or occupation that involves anything more substantive than ritually pushing paper, managing relationships, and running your mouth.

all that good old Booker T materiality that bourgiecrats ran from like the plague. when I was 25 years old and being courted for managerial responsibilities, I made a vow to myself then and there that I would never let my technical skills go fallow.., consequently, I've continued to hone these skills to point where I can now be assured of journeyman work anywhere in the world where UNIX, IOS, and NT Kernal Hive are spoken. I'm also a damn good gunsmith.

"You haven't answered a single one of my questions PT and I'm pretty sure I understand why. While I thought you had some interesting ideas about Detroit several months ago, and a sharp as tacks command of contemporary history, your taste in ice leaves me extremely cold."

Your penchant for petty personal insults doesn't exactly leave me feeling warmly disposed toward you either. The losses you describe in the community where you grew up weren't the result of integration or the Supreme Court finding for the plantiffs in Brown or a Murkan plot (they aren't that smart and we aren't that stupid as a people). I feel sorry for you. For all your writing and talking about community you couldn't even conduct yourself in a relatively civil manner toward me over matters that I don't regard as make or break issues with friends, colleagues or even acquaintances. I think you have a venomous attitude toward people who don't always agree with you and you hide it behind a torrent of words. What shines through to me is your animosity and arrogance. You need to give up white people. I suspect that if you were given a chance to call the shots in an all black community that you would put people to death for getting a parking ticket.

We're even, right?

And yeah, Craig, you need to turn it down. 

What is an "organic competency"?

The ability to make and do things, a trade, craft or occupation that involves anything more substantive than ritually pushing paper, managing relationships, and running your mouth.

Launching Ark B...

So you're asking what is the Black  community's economic niche. Because if you're asking about "organic competencies" on the individual level, the answer is all of them.

On the collective level, our niches are "civil servant," and "cannon fodder." 

For all your writing and talking about community you couldn't even conduct yourself in a relatively civil manner toward me over matters that I don't regard as make or break issues with friends, colleagues or even acquaintances. I think you have a venomous attitude toward people who don't always agree with you and you hide it behind a torrent of words. What shines through to me is your animosity and arrogance.

I'm unconventional. This "pressing of corns" is the only way to cause another to manifest what he or she most closely identifies with - through this attenuated medium.

I would have no need for this in person, and I promise not to do it to you here anymore.

BTW - the only thing that can possibly shine through at this far remove is the picture you have constructed from these words, a mental representation of what you suppose me to be. The vice is of course versa. (:

This "pressing of corns" is the only way to cause another to manifest what he or she most closely identifies with - through this attenuated medium.

Not true. 

Plus, it WILL make one manefest what they feel is the way to respond to someone that presses their corns. It does it every time.

Adds resistance. Sets you over apart from people that would otherwise work with you.

On the whole, an abominable technique  

it WILL make one manefest what they feel

in response to what they imagine, period.

Work is impossible in that condition.

it WILL make one manefest what they feel

in response to what they imagine, period.

Did you, or did you not intentionally step on they corns?

I'm unconventional. This "pressing of corns" is the only way to cause another to manifest what he or she most closely identifies with - through this attenuated medium.

Never mind.

That is not imaginary. That is what they will respond to because they are only considering what you say. What you DO manifests objectively.

And objectively, you offend intentionally sometimes.

Don't ever expect people not to act offended when you do that. 

How many rounds of pure human evasion does it take to get to a single profitable answer to a simple question?

1. 2. 3. CRUNCH!!!

You know how I expect people to act..,

How many rounds of pure human evasion does it take to get to a single profitable answer to a simple question?

Depends on the human. You may never get it.

Now. Need I bring forth the denial of evasions technique? Or will pointing out how denying your obvious intent is beneath you suffice?

You know how I expect people to act..,

Do they act that way?

As I said, stepping on corns is an abominable technique...and as Rev. Al would say, it doesn't even work. 

...unless you're just flexing, of course.

"The ball is still in Zora Neale's and Justice Thomas's court. If they were dissatisfied with the Court's reasoning and the oral and written arguments that were presented in favor of the position that the Court eventually adopted as its own, then what arguments do you think they should have presented in support of racially segregated school systems?"

"You are still avoiding the issues you previously raised. Your references to the rates of HIV infection etc. among blacks is not any proof that ending legally enforced racial segregation was harmful to black Americans. Are you asserting that none of these deplorable conditions would exist if our children were still forbidden by law and custom from attending public schools with whites?"

"What data do you have to support your belief that the prison industrial system is currently more harmful to the majority of black Americans than the system of Jim Crow laws and practices that were in place prior to 1965?"

"This "pressing of corns" is the only way to cause another to manifest what he or she most closely identifies with - through this attenuated medium."

Your promise to refrain from insulting me in the future means absolutely nothing to me. It is presumptuous in the extreme for you to assert that you have some right or duty to intentionally insult me or anyone else for that matter on the grounds that you are trying to reveal "what he or she most closely identifies with..." This attitude reveals a lack of respect and regard for the opinions and beliefs of others, which is essential to establishing any community.

There really is no acceptable excuse for the degree of personal invective and lack of common courtesy and respect that you have displayed toward me on more than one occasion. You have, for example, been no more diligent about answering my questions than you have alleged about me regarding your questions. My questions at least were based entirely on the subject under discussion. Your questions, in my opinion, were simply digressions and manifestations of what I believe is a great deal of passive-aggressive behavior.

Since you have shown no signs that you intend to treat me in a civil fashion whenever we disagree you have left me with no choice but to refrain from communicating with you at all for any reason whatsoever. As far as I am concerned you have stepped way over an ethical line with me. Our communication, such as it was, is finished for now and for the foreseeable future.

So you're asking what is the Black community's economic niche.

The black community's economic niche is self-evident. The challenge is to establish a durable foundation of psychological, cultural, and political self-determination around the same. It is clear that that can only occur in a local Work context.

Radical self-determination begins with the individual psyche. One by himself can do tremendous things. A group of conscious egoists Working on themselves, on one another, and for the benefit of the Work...? Like a powerplant.

Everything else is merely conversation.

How many rounds of pure human evasion does it take
to get to a single profitable answer to a simple question?

Depends on the human. You may never get it.

A dissolute addict will invariably and heroically rationalize his degenerate state. I'm not Rev. Al-anon, that's not my job.

You know how I expect people to act..,

Do they act that way?

You can set your watch by an addict, sleeper, machine. The chance encounter with genuine subjectivity is easily worth that.

P6 - you know how this goes. Aside from the obvious embargo on corn pressing, tell me what would you do to make it otherwise? Where is the profit in going round in circles? Provoking thought, manufacturing uncertainty, for the benefit of those who prefer to sleep, does that even deter bedsores?

Your questions, in my opinion, were simply digressions and manifestations of what I believe is a great deal of passive-aggressive behavior.

passivity? moi?

Since you have shown no signs that you intend to treat me in a civil fashion whenever we disagree you have left me with no choice but to refrain from communicating with you at all for any reason whatsoever.

what you feel, and what you say - are at cross-purposes. in order to be honest with me, you must at least be honest with yourself.

cnulan, I'm a bit attracted to your notion of all black neighborhoods.  Not because I want black people gone from where I am, but because I associate the concept with the large Chinese family organizations I observe in California.  These families support each other, share investment pools, start businesses, hire each other's kids and then friends.  They wouldn't hire me, not to work in their enterprise.  But they do make excellent members of society and of the economy.

So that's a model of voluntary discrimination which works.  No one has to join.  If anything, it's slightly extra-legal, certainly not enforced by law.

What works is a community, which is similar to what you suggest existed in bygone eras and is missing today.  There's nothing requiring that community to be segregated or integrated, but something must bind it together in a way which yields authority and makes resources available to those who need them.  It's a bit socialist in that way.  Membes are expected to give of their time, talents, and money to advance other members.  It need not be perfect, and all communities are rejected by some percentage of people born into them.

Does that perspective work at all for you? 

DW, there are no all or even predominantly Chinese neighborhoods in Oakland or the East Bay. Many of the Chinese that you see, for example, in Oakland's Chinatown don't live there and have never lived there. The same is true in San Francisco. African Americans are going to have to figure out how to create economic, investment and employment opportunities that reflect their contemporary needs and relationships both within and outside of the black community. One of my oldest and closest friends has a daughter who is a dentist. Her practice is thriving and most of her clients are black. Her office, however, is located in the Embarcadero Center in downtown San Francisco, not in a black neighborhood like Bay View Hunters Point, Fillmore or West Oakland.

DW, there are no all or even predominantly Chinese neighborhoods in Oakland or the East Bay.

Agreed, PT.  The communities I understand are not geographic.  They're like you suggest later.  But they definitely are communities.