No, but I never said anyone should feel guilty. I don’t feel guilty about stuff I didn’t do. I’ve never even said anyone must acknowledge their privilege or must do anything, but denying it is certainly dishonest and being offended that you are asked to do it is petty. It’s understandable that someone at a disadvantage is offended by the privileged denying their privilege. Some people take silence for denial and they have a point.
Would you feel negatively towards a man who insisted that his superior accomplishments were because he is better than you when you know he isn’t?
I just did this exercise and landed on Charleston.
It gets really tough with Florida because the affordable parts are full of some of the worst people imaginable. There are some reasonably affordable places on the west coast but you won’t get any culture, diversity, etc. the Oregon coast, for example, is absolutely gorgeous and very affordable, but remote. If you are raising a family there are no reasonable school options and very few good jobs.
This is probably the perfect example for lapka. Well done. I don’t know what a Bernoulli equation even is so I couldn’t do this example properly.
@zarapochka : We don’t have to feel guilty about our privilege, merely acknowledge it and try to do what we can (even when a bit inconvenient) to try to right it. I, for example, pretty blatantly favor black owned trucking companies. I give them better work (which means better pay) than they deserve if I judged them by my usual standards in a vacuum. This occasionally causes me significant problems as there were often excellent reasons why I shouldn’t have given the people in question the work given that there were better alternatives available who wouldn’t have screwed it up. Living with these situations and leaning on my skillset to fix them instead of just doing the convenient thing and giving it to the better funded and more experienced non-black trucking company allows me to dump something like half a million dollars a year in extra revenue on black owned businesses (this is a very round estimate, the margin of error is probably 250k). I think I’d struggle to live with myself if I didn’t do that tbh.
I don’t feel guilty for what white people have done to other people through American history. Read any segment of history from any place and you find a lot of serious ugliness. Humans are a nasty animal that has the code for doing awful shit baked in on the lizard level. Guilt isn’t what black Americans need from white Americans. They need us to help them up and stop abusing them. They need us to frequent their businesses, treat them like people, and not sell our homes or call the cops when they move into our neighborhoods. They need us to stop oppressing them, and maybe give them slightly favorable treatment for a few decades while they recover from what we just did to them. Not out of guilt, but because we owe it to them. They need us to acknowledge what really happened to them and then act as if we know it. It’s not normal to know something terribly traumatic happened to someone and not tip toe around it and bend over backwards trying to avoid inflicting emotional trauma on them. The burden of doing the tip toeing belongs to white people. It’s literally the least we can do. You’d have the good sense to be careful what you said to Jews about the holocaust, and this is not different.
My dad probably had a personality disorder so I’d take this with a boulder sized grain of salt, but he frequently said that ‘guilt is just the fear of getting caught’. White people who feel guilty about what we did to black people should perhaps actually DO something to alleviate the situation before their fear of retribution actually gets realized. Continuing to perpetuate awful shit while you know it’s wrong is what’s creating that sense of guilt. They will be amazed how quickly they stop feeling guilty after they become anti racists.
What I’m saying is that the reason you don’t feel guilty for your own nation(s) history is that you’ve processed it. You know what they did, and you’ve accepted that. White America needs to get to that point ASAP. That’s what all of this is about over here. The general population of the US hasn’t done any of that work. We see ourselves as the good guys riding in to protect everyone. That woefully inaccurate self image is creating huge problems all over the world I think you’d agree. We’ve bought into that shit here at home to a huge extent, and to accept that it’s all propaganda will take a lot of cognitive dissonance for people.
The Oregon Coast is foggy or rainy like 300 days a year I believe.
They aren’t cheap obviously - but there are some sleepy beach towns south of LAX - like mine, Redondo Beach, Seal Beach, Long Beach, San Clemente, and into San Diego - which in a lot of ways still feel like a ramshackle little beach bum town that hasn’t changed much since the 70s, with plenty of parking and a laid back vibe.
A dumpy house is $1M. I got my 1-bdrm condo for $325k. But the jobs in LA are commensurate in salary. The key is to find a job that isn’t too far from where you live. If you can do that, and you enjoy the amenities of a major city when you want to (best food in the world come at me bro), I feel like these areas are kind of hidden gems. Also perfect weather if you don’t like Florida heat.
I’d kill to live in San Diego, but I don’t see any world where I could afford to buy a house there. I make enough money in Indy to basically live like a middle class king, not sure how hard it would be to get the salary equivalent there.
Best weather and craft beer in the US. $100 flights to vegas and anywhere in MX. Easy access to LA, but not nearly as crowded and polluted.
Everytime I have midwest friends come visit they are instantly talking about moving here. Once their wife sees that they’d spend double for a 2br condo than what their 5BR house costs…they’re out.
Yep. We spent a week there last summer just bouncing around breweries and beaches. Probably my favorite place in the states. Maybe I’ll just never own a house and rent forever there.
I recall reading a story about a person who figured out that living in Las Vegas and flying into San Francisco every day to go to work was cheaper than living in SF. I assume the cost of living in SoCal is not quite as crazy…yet.
Yea, it probably is. So cal could be close. I looked at homes in some of the more rural areas north of SF - not that bad actually. Compareable to so cal.