For most of my life I have found the topic of race to be uninteresting. The best we could hope for, in terms of black-white relations, is an uneasy peace between the races. A colorblind society was never going to happen because of history and nature. Humans are tribal and familial, thus making a colorblind society an impossibility anywhere on earth. Even if nature got out of the way, history would always be there. That leaves some form of uneasy peace.

The first hundred years post-slavery the peace was kept through separation. In the north that meant physical separation. Whites kept blacks in urban ghettos, away from middle-class whites, usually using working-class white ethnics as a buffer. In the South, a legal separation was the preferred method. Blacks were non-citizens living amongst the white citizens. Once the North decided the South could not keep the peace that way, the South adopted a form of northern separation.

That’s where things have sat since the Civil Rights movement. Blacks are full citizens, but there is a physical, spiritual and cultural separation from whites. Overt racism is bad for keeping the peace so whites make sure they police that on their side of the fence. In cities like Baltimore and Washington, keeping the black ghetto from spilling into tourist areas is the main job of the cops. City leaders, black and white, look the other way and tacitly accept the arrangement. It keeps the peace.

That’s what made race talk so dull for me. There was no good reason to talk about the reality of race relations, as that would violate the unwritten rules. That left the sterile banalities from the Civil Rights Movement drifting around like pot smoke in a late 60’s dorm room. People with nothing to say, but determined to say it, filled the space reserved for discussions about race.

The determination of the American Left to fashion an electoral majority around the hatred of white men has made keeping the peace impossible. Here we are with a black ruler and yet we have race riots. Whether it is true or not, the perception of the American people is that race relations are worse now. That makes ridiculous platitudes about race less tolerable. NRO’s Jonah Goldberg, has this up today.

On Tuesday, the day after it was announced that Officer Darren Wilson would not be charged in the slaying of Michael Brown, President Obama for a second time called for calm. His statement was measured, careful and responsible. He condemned violence and looting while acknowledging the legitimate concerns animating the protestors. He wasn’t all that moving or eloquent, but this might have been one of those times when swinging for the rhetorical fences wasn’t what the moment needed.

One theme he hit repeatedly, and correctly, was that the passions of many protestors are rooted in something very real. The “frustrations that we’ve seen are not just about a particular incident,” Obama said. “They have deep roots in many communities of color who have a sense that our laws are not always being enforced uniformly or fairly.”

The passion of Nazis was rooted in something real too, whatever the hell that is supposed to mean. The Hutu’s slaughter of Tutsis was rooted in something real, hatred of Tutsis. This solipsistic babble is just a passive-aggressive way to agree with one side without accepting the moral consequences. In this case, Goldberg can pretend to sympathize with the blacks, without saying they are right.

There’s no doubt that is true. As John McWhorter writes in Time magazine, “The key element in the Brown–Wilson encounter was not any specific action either man took — it was the preset hostility to the cops that Brown apparently harbored.” Officer Wilson made a legitimate request of Brown. Brown, in turn, saw no legitimacy in it and behaved recklessly.

In a community where cops are feared, resented, or reviled, it’s almost inevitable that bad things will happen when cops try to do their job, even if they do everything by the book. Moreover, to simply say that the resentment of the police is unwarranted does nothing to solve the problem. People forget that for a brief moment in August, the protests turned peaceful and law-abiding when Missouri Highway Patrol Captain Ron Johnson, an African-American from Ferguson with credibility in the neighborhood, was put in charge of policing the protests.

Eventually, thanks in large part to an influx of professional agitators, rabble-rousers, and opportunists — attracted to television cameras like ambulance chasers to a bus accident — the protests got out of hand again. But that moment was instructive.

Now, if you’ve been following the news lately — and by lately, I mean the last several years, or even decades — none of this is particularly shocking. Friction between police departments and minority communities has been part of the national conversation on race (that liberals insist hasn’t been going on) for as long as I can remember. The New York Times has been regularly covering that beat for at least half a century. It’s a major theme of movies and music. It’s a huge profit center for Al Sharpton, who doesn’t lack for influence or microphones.

Before Jonah was born, everyone knew that blacks hated the cops. There’s never been a time in America when the blacks did not hate the cops. Policing has changed a lot over the years and the makeup of police departments has changed too. Even where most cops are black, the blacks hate the cops. Blacks especially hate black cops.

Of course, Jonah never bothers to ask why blacks hate cops or if their hatred is warranted. That leads to uncomfortable revelations about race, which are forbidden by the people he aims to please. Instead he veers off into babbling about the national conversation, elite chattering skulls and so forth. More nonsense wafting about the room for no good reason.

That’s what is making the race discussion interesting. One side is trying to keep the peace by sticking with the threadbare platitudes. The other is trying to stir up war by misrepresenting common everyday events so that blacks riot. You can’t have both of these for very long. Either the Left backs off and finds another way to get the black vote out in force or the race discussion moves from the banal to the painfully serious.

I was talking with someone today who is a part of that class of people we rarely see, but they play a big part in the lives of ordinary people. These are the folks who populate the global international class. They shuttle back and forth between NGO’s, international organizations like the World Bank and their home government. Some go the earthy route and work in various aid organizations that are sort of private and sort of government. Because of their work and travel, they lack the provincial attachments the rest of us find comforting.

I have an old friend who lives in this world. He has had various jobs that defy description, but always involve travel to exotic locales. He has a few degrees and knows how to write grant applications that result in living at an Ivy League campus or foreign outpost. He has a long list of friends and acquaintances spread all over the globe. Whenever I talk to him he is somewhere visiting friends, even in places where the white man is scarce.

This is a different thing from the defense class and global business class. A business guy is posted to assignments by others. His travel and adventure is not about self-actualization. He is sent to the UAE as a project manager for a logistics firm and it is only about doing a job for money. It is not a lot different than being sent to the Wichita office to work as a branch manager. He is just a cog in the machine doing his part for a salary. The guy taking a post for UNESCO in Gambia to teach English at a bush school is about his own thing. Money is not a consideration.

The funny thing I’ve noticed about these folks is they are not just rootless in the physical sense. Emotionally they have very little attachment to people and place. What makes them tick is the adventure and the spiritual high they get from experiencing weird stuff in faraway places. Part of that high is the moving on. They are like memory collectors. Once they got what they want from someone or somewhere, they move on. It’s not cold blooded or sociopathic. They are just not setting down roots so they squeeze everything out of every stop knowing they will be moving on soon.

Anyway, the guy I was chatting with had just returned from Alaska. He had a grant to do something and the grant had run out so he was now starting at a Federal agency. He was on contract from an NGO that I did not recognize. The funny thing about DC these days is the lines between government, NGO, consultancy and private business are close to non-existent. I know someone who has worked at a famous contractor for 15 years, but has been on contract to the same government agency the entire time. He even has an office with his name on it – at the government agency.

The small talk led to a strange question. I said something about the recent election and my new acquaintance asked me if I bothered voting. I said I did and explained why. He listened politely, but it was clear he thought I was being foolishly sentimental. My take away from the exchange was that whether we like it or not, all of us are going to be like my acquaintance. From the point of view of these people, loyalty to a country or government is nonsensical. There’s nothing they can get from pledging loyalty to a country so they have no interest in it. They are not joining the army or terribly worried about which side of the ruling class is currently ascendant, so they don’t bother about it.

This reality is settling on the rest of us, some more than others. For instance, the government types waving the flag around whipping up support for dealing with the provinces does nothing for me. If Obama wants to do something about ISIS, let him fly over there and deal with them. I suspect many Americans have thrown in the towel on the whole democracy project. It’s hard to find anyone enthusiastic for staying in Afghanistan or returning to Iraq.

Now that Obama plans to unilaterally extend citizenship to the world, it will dawn on ordinary Americans (as currently defined) that there’s really nothing of value in American citizenship. After all, if a goatherd on the Eurasian steppe can get all the benefits of citizenship, just by winning the visa lottery, what’s the point in being a citizen of America? More important, why would anyone sacrifice anything for a country that treats its citizens so shabbily?

Of course most people will respond that there’s a difference between the government and the country. Bob Novak used to say, “I love my country, but hate my government.” That sounds good, but there’s no reason to think we will be getting a new government anytime soon. Americans will never revolt and the ruling class will not be deterred. The only logical alternative is to adopt the attitude of my interlocutor. We are men without countries, citizens of nowhere, loyalty to only ourselves.

It appears a civil war is breaking out on the Left. The blacks are mad at the SWPL’s and SJW’s for letting them down. The SWPL’s are mad at the SJW’s for expecting them to practice what they preach. Everyone is mad at the Hispanics for not showing up and playing their part in the narrative. Of course, the war on white people is coming home as the SJW’s attach the robber barons of Silicon Valley for not singing along with the vagina monologue. It looks like it may get very nasty.

An Uber executive’s suggestion that the company should investigate the private lives of journalists has sparked a backlash against the popular car service, offering a potent reminder that tech companies are amassing detailed — and potentially embarrassing — records of users’ communications, Internet traffic and even physical movements.

The controversy stemmed from remarks by Uber Senior Vice President Emil Michael on Friday night as he spoke of his desire to spend $1 million to dig up information on “your personal lives, your families,” referring to journalists who write critically about the company, according to a report published Monday night by Buzzfeed. The same story said a different Uber executive once had examined the private travel records of a Buzzfeed reporter during an e-mail exchange about an article without seeking permission to access the data.

That combination of vindictiveness and willingness to tap into user information provoked outrage Tuesday on social-media sites, spawning the hashtag “#ubergate” on Twitter. Critics recounted a series of Uber privacy missteps, including a 2012 blog post in which a company official analyzed anonymous ridership data in Washington and several other cities in an attempt to determine the frequency of overnight sexual liaisons by customers — which Uber dubbed “Rides of Glory.”

I’ll just note that “outrage on social media” now resembles something like the scene from Life of Brian where Brian meets the People’s Front of Judea.

This week’s incident was the latest reminder about the potential for abuse as intimate information accumulates on the servers of tech companies that have widely varying approaches to user privacy and face few legal barriers in how they use personal data.

“We have never in history been at a point where we were more extortable,” said Chris Hoofnagle, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley who specializes in online privacy. “We have to think about how the service provider itself can be a threat.”

Uber officials have sought to distance themselves from Michael’s comments. Chief executive Travis Kalanick tweeted that they were “terrible,” and Michael issued an apologetic statement calling the remarks “wrong” and expressing regret.

On Tuesday, the company said in a blog post: “Uber has a strict policy prohibiting all employees at every level from accessing a rider or driver’s data. The only exception to this policy is for a limited set of legitimate business purposes.”

I think we begin to see much more of this sort of lunatic on lunatic violence. Powerful people don’t like it when people say bad things about them. For its part, the Left is “all in” on the war on the white people. It has no choice. If they drop that the who thing falls apart and modern liberalism begins to resemble a UFO cult. That means they have to press forward with their war on tech companies who refuse to hire unqualified women and minorities just to make the brochure look good to the Left.

http://youtu.be/tRJlo2WRDbw