Ten

[tk2kewl]

31. I am going to tread lightly here...

Last edited Fri Aug 14, 2015, 11:49 AM - Edit history (1)

The "white supremacist" charge and response each angered a lot of people. Often anger gets expressed as demands for apologies (did anyone do this? I don't know). I myself saw it as an unfair label for Bernie, but it didn't make me angry - it left me puzzled.

It was interesting to see a supposed apology from BlackLivesMatter surface and some people see that as vindicating their anger. It was also interesting to see the apology denied.

I mentioned my father earlier so in for a penny...

My grandfather came to the U.S. on his own as a teenager, with nothing. My father, who was one of five kids, is very liberal in his politics. After retiring he went to law school and put together a second 20 year career as a defense attorney. He likes to be right but not nearly as much as he hates to be wrong. That makes him a good lawyer - but combining that with a stubbornness for emotional self examination and an innate ability to identify flaws that surround him (also good lawyer stuff), he rarely sees himself as wrong, rarely apologizes and when he does know he's wrong he will just back off and wait for things to blow over then act like nothing happened.

I think the label "white supremacist," that is causing all the anger and angst gives us an opportunity to look deeper into what drives the emotion behind reactions from both sides. I have known some white supremacists - I'm pretty sure none of them are on DU. I have seen posts recently talking about the "white supremacist" label, but mostly about why Bernie or his supporters are not that. There was a time, however, when even the most enlightened minds white people had to offer were white supramacists. It's a very loaded topic that has shaken people up.

Regarding your ten issues and the coalition: I am a software developer. My employers are committed to open data. We have been using more and more open source products over the last 10 years and made some small technical contributions back to some of them. We are now beginning the process of open sourcing our own code.

I mention this because I think a coalition is much like an open source software project in a lot of ways. Building coalitions is of course much messier than building software. But like in coalition building, contributors propose changes, enhancements, new features and deprecation of features. It's usually orderly and follows rules that can be written in code and are easily enforceable. For better or for worse, right now at least, the rules of coalition building cannot be programmed into a computer.

If use a rope as a metaphor for an open source project, all of the various contributions by individuals become fibers or strands in the rope, strengthening it.

The open source software project is, for the most part, an emotionless coalition. Sometimes there might be heated disagreements about direction but it's not the same as what happens in politics. One of the great things about software development if its done right is that at any point in time if you need to know why something about the code that is causing a bug is the way it is, you can compare it to snapshots of its form at any point in history.

White supremacy was once the main feature of the open source project called humanity. It has always been a fatal bug in the program that gobbles up resources that could be much better utilized. We just keep rebooting, like with your Windows OS, until it builds up again. If only we could be able to trace back through our own personal and cultural histories as rapidly and precisely as we can our software projects to determine how we should best react. I think it is in this context, not the narrow context of Ms. Johnson, protest that needs to be considered when one considers who ought to feel sorry for what.