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anamericangirl · 4 years

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Okay, @beachflowerr you brought up a lot of things and it’s too hard for me to do this all in replies on the post, but I think they deserve a response.

I’m not “pulling you into any philosophy” that you didn’t say. The very concept of the privilege that you say I have is skin color, is it not? You told me I was putting myself in a picture I was not a part of and if I was not black, this did not affect me. Those were your words. That means I have the wrong skin color to be affected by this and to be a part of the picture and doesn’t the “privilege” you say I have affect the way I see and understand things? Isn’t this what people call white privilege? And doesn’t the very name imply that I have inherent privileges based on my race and that it has an effect on what I can and can’t understand? That is telling me I have the wrong skin color to understand certain things. That is all based on what you said. I’m not putting words in your mouth or pulling you into any philosophy that you yourself did not project.

And sorry but the fact that you’re white doesn’t mean anything here. I don’t care what color skin you have you can discriminate against anyone. Even other white people. And just to be clear, I never claimed you were discriminating against me because I don’t think you were. But saying “I'm also white so I'm not discriminating against you” doesn’t prove anything. It doesn’t matter what color you are.

But yes, please, let’s continue on American history.

Thanks for the links but I am familiar with the slave trade. However, slavery goes back way before the 15th century. Slavery was literally going on all over the world and had been a thing for hundreds of years before America even existed and it certainly was not unique to African-Americans. Perhaps you are not aware of this but the very root of the word “slave” is slav, which is a reference to the slavic people who were the primary slaves during the Middle Ages and they were white people.

Also, you are not correct that people from Africa were stolen by Europeans. The Africans who were slaves in America were actually enslaved by other Africans and then sold to the European slave trade. Another interesting fact for you is that most of the slaves in this slave trade did not even go to America, they went to South America. So it’s weird that America is the only racist country because of slavery even though less than 10% of the slaves came here and one ever shames Brazil for racism because of slavery.

But yeah, let’s focus on America because that’s where this issue is. So you might not know this, but not only black people were slaves in America. There where white slaves as well as black slave owners. In fact, at the height of slavery in this country 28% of free black people owned slaves while 1.4% of white people did, yet for some reason only the black slaves matter and only the white slave owners. People in this country like to ignore the fact that there where white slaves and black slave owners (a higher percentage even than white slave owners) for some reason. :)

Slavery did last here for a while but it officially ended in 1865 and that was a long time ago. People like to pretend that all the problems in this country are because of slavery and we, as white people, still have to pay for this evil even though there is still slavery going on in Africa today. Slavery was a bad thing and it happened. But it’s over now. No one alive today in this country was a slave or owned any slaves and it’s not responsible for what we see happening today.

And let’s be glad those three amendments were added. I don’t get why it matters to you that it was three amendments and not one. Does it surprise you that completely shifting your culture and changing public perception of something that has been seen as normal and has been engrained in your culture for 100+ years doesn’t happen overnight? Is it a negative thing to you that, as a country, we worked and made changes until all people, regardless of skin color, were seen and treated as equals even if it took more than one amendment to get the job done? That seems like a positive thing to me.

I realize in our country that black people have had a harder time gaining equality, but you are looking at this as a black v. white issue and that is not at all what it was. It was a democrat v. republican issue. If you look back through history at all these racist policies that we have had, every single one, from slavery to segregation, can be traced back to the democrats. Republicans fought since their formation for the freedom and equality of black people. One of the main reasons the republican party was formed was opposition to slavery. So it’s really not fair of you to just act like white people were oppressors and black people were oppressed. That’s a really shallow representation of what the actual issues were.

You’re also misrepresenting redlining here. You’re acting like because a lot of black communities were subject to redlining because of their condition the reason is because they were black communities. And that’s not accurate. You’re just making an assumption.

And yeah, I’ve heard of micro aggressions and I think it’s one of the dumbest ideas that has ever been presented. Micro aggressions aren’t real. African-Americans don’t commit more crimes because of micro aggressions, they commit more crimes because they choose to. You are literally trying to remove all personal responsibility here. But for whatever reason you want to think they commit more crimes, that accounts for the higher incarceration rate so it’s not alarming at all and it’s not racism. It’s expected that those that commit more crimes are more likely to be in jail.

I agree, people can make subconscious race based judgments, but to just assume this accounts for all racial disparities is quite naive. There can be a lot of other reasons for these disparities, jumping right to racism is pretty extreme. Most people, whatever you would like to believe, aren’t racist and aren’t making subconscious race based judgments. Besides, most subconscious race based judgements would have to be rather small and it wouldn’t have a really profound effect on anything. To be infecting the entire criminal justice system, they would have to be pretty conscious judgements. I think there’s a lot you don’t understand about the justice system and that’s ok. But it’s not okay to just call it racist because you don’t understand it and because you, personally, can’t think of any other reasons disparities exist. I looked at that page you linked from the NAACP but you should know that website has a pretty strong political bias and I don’t consider them credible. But it didn’t say African Americans get higher sentences for the same crimes. But even if it did, there are a lot of different factors that are considered at a sentencing so assuming that the difference is just racism is ignorant.

And I'm sorry, but your transition to police brutality is incredibly weak and makes absolutely no sense. Numerical inequality does not prove racism so you thinking it proves racial injustice and inequality just means you don’t really understand what racism is.

You are also, it seems, oblivious to how white people can be treated by police. Police brutality is not unique to black people. A lot of white people have been victims of police brutality. They just don’t make headlines and don’t get protests because no one cares. More white people are shot by the police every single year than black people. Here are some for you to look at since you, apparently, think it doesn’t happen.

https://www.dallasnews.com/news/investigations/2019/07/31/you-re-gonna-kill-me-dallas-police-body-cam-footage-reveals-the-final-minutes-of-tony-timpa-s-life/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Daniel_Shaver

There’s a couple to get you started. I know why the protests and riots are happening, but I disagree with what they are saying and I don’t think the reason they are protesting is valid or is something that is happening today. I think all the protesters, like you, are either misinformed or uniformed. There is absolutely no evidence that this killing was racial in nature. You and everyone else who buys into that idea are just saying that because George Floyd was black and Derek Chauvin was white. That’s it. That’s all you’ve got. You guys are the ones focused on race and you literally can’t see anything else. So everything is about race to you.

I’m perfectly aware of the history. In fact, based on the way you went through it, I think I know more about the history than you do. I also, unlike you, am aware of the changes that our country has gone through and people can’t blame the history of slavery for everything bad that happens to black people.

You don’t seem like you know this so let me explain something to you: literally every race on the planet has, at one time or another, been treated very poorly by other races. Every single demographic has been through oppression of some sort. Why can every race get over their oppression to the point where it doesn’t have this lifelong mitigating effect on all future generations except for black people? Why is their bad history the most important? What you are doing is ignoring all of history except for the parts you want to acknowledge because they fit your narrative.

I have America in my username not because I’m unaware of the history we have, but because I am aware of it. We have a big history. We have a lot of bad things in our history as well as a lot of really great things. I’m very proud of this country. I'm proud that the people in our history saw slavery for the evil that it was and stopped it. I’m proud that the people in our history saw segregation for the evil that it was and stopped it. I’m proud that the people in our history fought until black people were recognized as fully equal human beings in every single aspect under the law. Though you mentioned things that happened in history, you have failed to explain why this instance of police brutality is racist and how the history makes everyone racist today.

White privilege is not a thing. And with your little explanation of white privilege you have proved that you were, in fact, telling me I have the wrong skin color to be able to understand certain things :) I appreciate you being concerned about my ignorance, but I would suggest you be more concerned about yours :) your idea of white privilege doesn’t make any sense. A white person is not the least likely to be ostracized or oppressed. You just made that up :) I get what people say white privilege, but I don’t accept that it exists and you have failed to prove that it does. You’ve made one of the weaker cases against it that I’ve seen. White people aren’t oppressed in America and black people aren’t oppressed in America. No one is oppressed in America. And there is no white privilege and there is no evidence that this was racism. I stand by what I originally said because you didn’t make a single valid point against any of it. I suggest you become more familiar with all aspects of our history, not just the parts that fit what you want to be true. To be honest, even the parts you are aware of you don’t really know that much about.

Stop letting people make you feel like your skin color matters. It doesn’t. Your skin color doesn’t give you special privileges and you are capable of understanding this issue. Just like everyone else, you can see facts. Don’t believe people who tell you that your skin color means there are just some things you can’t understand. It’s racist for people to say or think that. The very concept of white privilege is inherently racist so don’t buy into that crap.

#racism #white privilege #george floyd

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jaeminlore · 4 years

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i've been meaning to get this off my chest and i'm assuming you live in the u.s. so you can provide more insight on this. the way the u.s. has been treating covid-19 has really been stressing me out. first, we have the government's response to it and having trump's administration handle the briefings instead of, idk, actual health officials??? and even when the government responded, either the response was too late (travel ban) or it's not strict enough (social distancing + mask wearing). ++

second, so many regulations that have to do with covid-19 became a political thing?? like trump is whining about how people are attacking him for his response to covid & saying it has to do with their bias (not saying this isn't the case for some people) and completely disregarding the fact that so many people have died and are STILL dying. and testing. why is testing so bad? either there aren't enough kits, it's too expensive, the results are unreliable, the results are being manipulated. then we have citizens. in places like florida and los angeles, people are still throwing parties and going out and about like everything is okay. it really confuses me. the country i live is no where near the amount of cases the us has (in percentages of course) and things are still slowly being reopened to ensure that cases don't spike. partly, it's the government's fault for not being as serious about these things as they should be. here, if you go out into a public area without a mask you're fined a hefty amount and can even be jailed. once again, our cases are nothing like the states. and people are travelling between states?? without getting tested?? without isolating themselves?? something as simple as wearing a mask isn't being taken the way it should be. it is a health and safety precaution. it is NOT a fashion statement. it is NOT a political stance. it is not anything of that sort. it's meant to protect others, as well as yourself. on top of that, government officials are PUSHING for the reopening of schools. once again, they took something that concerns health and safety and turned it into a political thing. children, who if you tell them not to trade lunch items with their friends but still do it anyways, are supposed to follow all these regulations that supposedly will be put in place? really? it's like you want the country to die. honestly. sorry for going on for so long. the way the states is treating pandemic has been getting on my nerves for the longest time ever. stop making everything political, don't reopen schools, wear a fucking mask (and don't be rude to the people who try to enforce this), social distance, avoid unnecessary travelling (get tested & isolate yourself if you do), remain socially distanced, DON'T throw parties, don't attend them either. things as simple as these, which people are PROTESTING not to do, are really going to determine the u.s.'s future and that's so sad.

first of all i’m in the southeastern states so my state is DEFINITELY doing worse than others. COVID-19 has become nothing but a political opinion to the point where it’s literally something (at least around here) you just don’t talk about. even my mom doesn’t believe that covid is real because that’s what trump is getting people to believe. i’ve had arguements with my mom about wearing masks. because of this many government officials have left the choice of wearing a mask/getting tested up to the citizens themselves

another thing you have to understand is the economic state of america. we got one stimulus check in the beginning that barely paid a month’s rent,,, we have people who can’t afford to take off work because they have to provide for their families, unemployment is backed up,, landlords refuse to back up,,, we’re also in the middle of a movement,, where we need to be on the streets to protest for blm,,, people just don’t have the money to stay home and away from work and they don’t have the money to keep their kids home from school, even if the government did allow it. i’m not saying citizens aren’t a HUGE part of the problem but i need you to know how much a lot of us can’t afford to stop working. we just can’t. we wear masks and stuff but we can’t stay home and quarantine. no one is taking care of us financially. again, this is my state so idk if some states are getting finiancial compensation or not. mine definitely isn’t, and barely anyone has the luxury of working at home.

we’re low on equipment,,, some equipment is being held from us or sold for way more than we have,, everyones mask is the wrong fabric/no filters because people don’t know how to get them. we didn’t get a shelter in place order until like april,,, so it was AFTER a lot of cases came to my town. nothing was done precautiosly.

trust me, we americans KNOW how sucky the situation is. we KNOW our country is in shambles,,, the government isn’t helping us at all,, and it’s kind of every man for himself

#if you think it frustrated you just be thankful you dont live here #dl

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theliberaltony · 5 years

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Sen. Elizabeth Warren is running close with Joe Biden among white voters, according to national polls. Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, (and sometimes Warren and Sen. Bernie Sanders) leads the former vice president in recent surveys of overwhelmingly white Iowa. But Biden still leads in national polls, largely because he has a substantial lead among African Americans.That support is keeping him at the top of the polls and is crucial to his path to the Democratic presidential nomination.

However, an important portion of the black community is very much not behind Biden: the black left. The question is how much that will matter electorally. There are important characteristics of the black left — the way it is structured and the way it exercises political power — that could make it difficult for its members to stop Biden from winning the nomination. And the black left may not try that hard to stop him anyway.

There is no official “black left.” What I’m describing here is a bloc of people who have gained power and prominence since the 2014 protests in Ferguson, Missouri, that turned Black Lives Matter into one of the most important civil rights movements of the past decade. This bloc is distinct from what I would describe as the black establishment, which includes powerful black institutions and people: longtime civil rights activists and ministers like Jesse Jackson Sr. and Al Sharpton; veteran members of the Congressional Black Caucus; groups like the National Urban League and the NAACP; and President Obama and his close allies.1

The black left includes:

The activists and groups who either were involved in protesting the 2012 killing of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin, went to Ferguson two years later or subsequently organized in opposition to police practices that they felt were discriminatory against black people.

Black leaders of prominent liberal groups, such as Maurice Mitchell of the Working Families Party.

Left-leaning black academics and intellectuals who have big followings, such as authors Ta-Nehisi Coates and Roxane Gay and regular MSNBC contributor and Princeton University professor Eddie Glaude.

New generation civil rights organizations such as Color of Change and Dream Defenders.

More liberal black elected officials, such as Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison and Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota.

Not everyone in the black left actively opposes Biden. (Nor does all of the black establishment support him.) But opposition is fairly widespread. For instance, Leslie Mac, the digital organizer for a group of progressive black women and gender non-conforming individuals called Black Womxn For, told me that in an informal survey the group conducted of about 500 people in their activists’ circles, not a single person favored Biden. (Black Womxn For has endorsed Warren.)

The beef the black left has with Biden isn’t much different from the concerns that white liberal activists have about the former vice president: Namely, that he’s too centrist and establishment.

“Joe Biden shouldn’t be president,” Coates said in an interview on “Democracy Now!” back in July, noting that Biden “wanted more people sentenced to the death penalty, wanted more jails,” in earlier stages of his career.

What’s different for the black left — as opposed to the white left — is that its views are very deeply in tension with the broader black Democratic electorate, at least so far. Forty-three percent of black voters favor Biden, according to polling from The Economist/YouGov. That’s roughly 30 points more than anyone else. We don’t have a lot of polls breaking down black voters into smaller subgroups, but Morning Consult polling suggests Biden is leading even among blacks with college degrees.

Another candidate, like Warren, might catch up among black voters — or Biden might fall back. But no matter what happens, it’s worth asking why opposition to Biden on the black left hasn’t had more of an effect among rank-and-file black voters. And there are a couple of reasonable answers.

First, the black left has an unorthodox structure that might limit its electoral influence. The national office of Black Lives Matter can’t throw its weight behind Warren, Sanders or anyone else — there is no Black Lives Matter, at least in the sense of a formal organization with a board, a president and a physical headquarters. Instead, there is an informal Black Lives Matter Global Network, which has at least 15 U.S. Black Lives Matter chapters in cities around the country, plus one in Toronto. Key figures associated with the creation of the phrase Black Lives Matter and the Ferguson protests work at an array of different progressive organizations that focus on racial issues, rather than one single place. There is also a coalition of dozens of civil rights organizations, such as Dream Defenders, called The Movement for Black Lives.

More than five years after the protests in Ferguson, there is an active debate about whether this decentralized structure is the best approach to challenging policing practices and broader racial inequality in America. (It’s not totally clear if this structure was the intention of the activists, if it happened organically or if it’s something in between.)

This loose organizational structure is also largely untested in electoral politics. In 2016, the Black Lives Matter movement was in its infancy. During the Democratic primary, the activists criticized both Hillary Clinton and Sanders. The two candidates and their campaigns tried to appease the activists while also seeming a bit confused about what exactly Black Lives Matter was and who was leading it. Clinton overwhelmingly won the black vote, but she wasn’t as strongly opposed by the black left as Biden is now.

The black left has played a big role in helping to elect reform-minded local prosecutors in the years since the Ferguson protests, so I don’t want to suggest that it has no electoral power. And in theory, the black left is well-represented in spaces where some black voters are (social media, for example). Being the candidate backed by black figures with large Twitter followings should be helpful to a candidate.

“The church doesn’t have the power and influence it used to,” Aimee Allison, founder of She the People, a San Francisco-based group created in 2018 that is focused on motivating liberal women of color, told me. (Allison’s group has not endorsed a candidate but Allison herself expressed wariness about Biden during my interview with her). “There are new and powerful people and networks that are being activated,” she added.

Maybe. But if I were a candidate running for president in 2020, I might prefer the tried-and-true networks that Biden is relying on, which are similar to those that helped Clinton win the black vote by more than 50 percentage points in 2016. If you are a Democratic presidential candidate aiming to win older black voters, in particular, there are clear, long-standing institutions to tap into (black churches) and political figures to court (Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina). Why is Biden currently leading with black voters? That’s a complicated question with a complicated answer (here are 2,000 words on the topic), but I think one factor is that he has spent decades in these black establishment spaces.

Beyond its structure, the black left might also struggle to wield electoral influence for a second reason: It’s not unified behind a single Democratic candidate, in part because it is somewhat wary of politicians in general.

Warren, Sanders, Buttigieg, Sen. Cory Booker, Sen. Kamala Harris and former Cabinet secretary Julián Castro have all courted organizations on the black left, including making personal appeals (such as by appearing on their podcasts and at events they sponsor) but also by adopting some of their language and positions (for example, embracing the idea that reparations for black Americans should be studied). Biden hasn’t done as much of this — and it’s unlikely that his positions and rhetoric would have appealed to the black left anyway.

But the approach to Biden’s candidacy has varied widely among various individuals and organizations within the black left. Some have endorsed other candidates (Gay, Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and the Working Families Party are with Warren; Ellison and Omar with Sanders; the progressive black women’s group Higher Heights for America with Harris).

The decision by Working Families, a major force in liberal politics that backed Sanders in 2016, to endorse Warren angered Sanders’s supporters. But in explaining that move, Mitchell emphasized that taking a more cautious posture in this primary wasn’t smart.

“You don’t defeat the moderate wing of Democrats through thought pieces or pithy tweets, you defeat their politics through organizing,” Mitchell told The New York Times.

But others in the black left haven’t gone that far. Some influential black liberal voices, such as Coates, are more commentators and writers than political figures — they give their opinions but aren’t in roles that would necessarily put them in position to organize people for or against a candidate. Another bloc of black left figures told me that they and others in the movement like several of the candidates (usually some combination of Castro, Harris, Sanders and Warren) and are now waiting for the field to narrow.

On criminal justice and policing issues, “Julián Castro has been the most outspoken of any of the candidates,” said Samuel Sinyangwe, a co-founder of Campaign Zero, a policy-focused group that seeks to reduce the number of civilians killed by police. When I pressed him to choose among the candidates at the top of the polls, Sinyangwe praised Warren, but emphasized, “It’s early.”

Still another bloc says the field overall is flawed, and it’s not worth singling out Biden as worse than the more liberal candidates. For example, at a recent conference, the leaders of the group ADOS (American Descendants of Slavery) said they will not endorse a Democratic candidate, arguing that none of the party’s leading contenders are sufficiently committed to pushing for reparations. That posture echoes early statements from some Black Lives Matter activists, many of whom were wary of the more cautious racial stands of basically all politicians, including Democrats and then-President Barack Obama. That’s both because the black left thinks the party is too centrist but also because it is in some ways an anti-establishment, anti-party movement. In its endorsement of Warren, Black Womxn For basically criticized the entire Democratic Party, writing, “the two-party system, elites within the Democratic establishment, and even the primary process itself continue to fall short of what is required to fully engage and honor the power” of black female voters.

“People were like, ‘you’ve sold out,’” said Chanelle Helm, a leader of the Black Lives Matter group in Louisville, Kentucky, describing the reaction after Helm and other black female activists attended a private meeting with Warren earlier this year. Helm is supporting the Massachusetts senator, who she said “speaks for the mamas in the margins.”

A kind of anti-politicians posture has the potential to result in a divided or disengaged black left, which could help Biden. In fact, in some ways that posture has probably already helped him. The surveys of the Democratic race are essentially an early contest of their own, as this year’s polls determine who makes the debate stage and who receives the accompanying money and attention. Candidates with low poll numbers drop out (Kirsten Gillibrand) or struggle to raise money (Booker, Castro). Biden has held a huge lead among older black voters throughout 2019, while a bunch of candidates, including Biden, are splitting the younger vote. The Democratic race would look worse for Biden if the younger black vote was more consolidated.

I don’t know where black voters will land overall, nor do I know what role the black left will ultimately play in 2020 primary. But what��s clear is that many in the black left don’t want Biden to be the Democratic nominee, and yet may not mobilize to stop him or may not be organized enough to stop him, even if they wanted to.

At the same time, a Biden primary win would not be catastrophic for their movement, these activists say. They note that the former Delaware senator has embraced many of the black left’s ideas for changing the criminal justice system, such as abolishing the death penalty.

“In many cases, he is fighting the policies he enacted,” said Sinyangwe. “I don’t think it’s an indictment of the movement if Biden wins. It isn’t dependent on a single candidate winning.”

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Perry Bacon Jr.

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killian-whump · 6 years

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Okay, since you need some whumpy asks: what's your take on whump in westerns? Since this maaaay be significant, what kind of whump do you think we have to look forward to, or at least fantasize about? I'm betting there's lots of rope. And possibly whips.

Okay, lemme talk to you guys about WESTERNS because they’re actually super duper important in the history of whump!

Waaaaaaay back in the days before whump, people who appreciated men in peril used to enjoy what they called ‘get’ books and films. It was short for “Get ‘im!” which was frequently what the bad guys would shout before they all took off after the protagonist for some good ol’ fashioned whumpin’.

‘Get’ books were often pulp fiction novels - hard-boiled PI stories, westerns, science fiction or adventure tales in exotic places. ‘Get’ movies and shows, however, were most often westerns. That’s why, if you check out a site like RoperMike’s Guys in Trouble, you’ll find a lot of the earlier content contains a high percentage of westerns.

In fact, tying guys up is more or less a trope in westerns. Somebody, somewhere, usually does get tied up in those things. I think it’s partly due to the convenience of rope - every cowboy seemed to have some on him, so why not use it? There’s also the lawlessness of the era, with everybody being their own judge, jury and executioner. And, of course, there’s something to be said for the fact that once they got away with it and people enjoyed it… Well, they’re gonna keep right on doing it as often as possible ;)

So! Westerns have a loooong and glorious history as being full of what we now call WHUMP! As for the kinds of whump… You’re right about the rope! Westerns always have a lot of rope bondage and rope whump. Lots of tying people up, hangings, forcing people to keep pace walking behind a horse, tying people to railroad tracks, tying people to stakes and abandoning them to the elements… all kinds of primitive bondage and whump scenarios to enjoy. There’s also a lot of cleave gags and over the mouth gags in westerns, too. Bandanas, like rope, were everywhere in the west - and cowboys liked to use ‘em!

Old school westerns often relied on the bondage alone as the “height” of the peril a cowboy would face. Back in those days, violence wasn’t depicted as graphically - or as often - as it is these days. Whips were around, yes… but there’s also a lot of horse and cow related whump. Like rope, branding irons were as common as mud - and many a tied up cowboy was threatened with one! There was also the common punishment of being dragged behind a running horse. And, of course, there were plenty of hangings and gunshot wounds.

Older westerns would also employ all sorts of “Indian Savage” stereotypes that provided a lot of more barbaric whump tropes, like scalpings, ritualistic torture, skinning, or other “inhumane” violence. You’re not going to see this done the same way in modern westerns, of course, but older westerns were more interested in the shock value of painting Native Americans as savage monsters than in presenting a realistic portrayal of a proud people defending their land from interlopers. Obviously, that wouldn’t pass muster today.

So what CAN we hope for if Colin’s in a western? Well… I gotta be honest with ya. If he’s in a Dolly Parton TV film about one of her songs… probably not a lot XD I mean, most of her songs are about love and loss and relationships and not, you know, cowboys tying each other up and playing with red hot pokers. I mean, I reeeeeally don’t have high hopes if that’s the western Colin’s in ;)

Still, you never know! I mean, where there’s a western, there’s rope - and where there’s rope, there’s a chance someone will get tied up in it. We could also get some cute quasi-bondage, like maybe the heroine lassoing herself a stud. We could also get some hot outlaw action with some old timey shackles or a jail cell. We’re also guaranteed some hot, dusty atmosphere - which makes for hot, dusty actors. Mmmmmmmm, dirty Colin. And, of course, swagger. Cowboy boots. Southern drawl. Butt double. LOOOOOOORD HAVE MERCY.

So the whumpcast for this isn’t looking so great at the moment, but the weather forecast is calling for a HOT, HOT, HOT time ahead, anyway ;)

#whump meta #heartstrings #whumpcast #wyntereyez #kw ask box

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bountyofbeads · 6 years

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/opinions/2019/01/23/two-years-trump-has-been-undermining-american-democracy-heres-damage-report/?utm_term=.6de802fa04c7&__twitter_impression=true

"Can U.S. democracy survive when between 35 and 45 percent of the population cheers a president who behaves like an autocrat?"

For two years, Trump has been undermining American democracy. Here’s a damage report.

By Brian Klaas | Published January 23, 2019 at 8:11 Am | Washington Post | Posted January 23, 2019 |

Can U.S. democracy survive when between 35 and 45 percent of the population cheers a president who behaves like an autocrat?

When Donald Trump took office two years ago, I and many others began sounding the alarm — not out of partisan worry but out of concern for democracy. Trump, we argued, was an existential threat to the republic. For the first time in American history, the president of the United States was an authoritarian-minded demagogue who viewed checks and balances as outdated nuisances rather than sacred principles.

I even wrote a book explaining how Trump was behaving like a “lite” version of the thin-skinned authoritarian leaders I have interviewed and studied in Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe. I called Trump a wannabe despot. In return, some Trump fans called me an alarmist — a person suffering, perhaps, from “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” Others acknowledged that Trump had autocratic tendencies but argued that he had become such a weak and unpopular president that those impulses were meaningless.

Now, two years later, should we still be alarmed? Or was I an alarmist?

The United States is still a democracy. The Constitution and its checks and balances still exist. And even though Trump swoons at even the mention of a foreign dictator or despot, he is not one himself. Yet Trump has done immeasurable damage to U.S. democracy. That damage can be broken down into three categories: damage to institutions; damage to norms; and normalization of authoritarian tactics within the Republican Party.

First, Trump has chipped away at the institutional pillars of democracy. On a near-daily basis, Trump tries to undercut rule of law to advance political goals or to save his own skin. He’s called for the jailing of political opponents while pardoning political allies. He has fired investigators because there was an investigation into him. He forced an attorney general out because he wouldn’t sabotage an independent investigation. All these actions implicitly undermine the rule of law — the ultimate basis of any democracy. Trump has gotten away with it, so far.

Trump has also relentlessly attacked the free press, another pillar that allows democracies to stand above authoritarian regimes. He has echoed the worst dictators in history, calling journalists the "enemy of the people.” Trump defended Saudi Arabia’s government after it murdered Jamal Khashoggi, then went on to endorse beating up journalists. Days later, a die-hard MAGA disciple sent pipe bombs to Trump’s favorite media targets. All presidents loathe the press; Trump is the first who has publicly condoned acts of violence against journalists.

Trump has even tried to undercut the integrity of elections, both by spreading lies about voter fraud to sow doubt in the system itself and by doing nothing to deter foreign attacks aimed at disrupting U.S. elections.

Second, Trump has taken a buzz saw to democratic norms, the soft guardrails of democracy. Democratic norms — the unwritten guidelines of political behavior — give meaning to democratic institutions. Without the norms, the institutions might as well just be ink on parchment. Trump has violated countless ethics norms while simultaneously introducing a level of nepotism and cronyism more befitting of Uzbekistan than the United States. It’s hard to decide which screams “banana republic” more: the president’s unqualified daughter helping to pick the next World Bank president, or putting Eric Trump’s wedding planner in charge of all federal housing in New York and New Jersey?

Third, and most important, Trump has injected authoritarianism into the bloodstream of the Republican Party. Polls have shown that a majority of Republicans now agree that the press is an “enemy of the people” rather than “an important part of democracy.” Less than half of Republicans now have a favorable view of the FBI, a drop of 16 percentage points since Trump took office. And 74 percent of Republicans wrongly believe Trump’s lies that voter fraud is widespread, rather than the truth. (It’s vanishingly rare.) Even when Trump leaves office, those destructive views will linger.

That’s why the most chilling part of the president explicitly praising a congressman for violently assaulting a reporter wasn’t the depraved comment — it was the crowd. The thought of violence against journalists — who they saw as the “enemy” — sent the red-hat-wearing mob into a frenzy. They cheered and whooped and clapped with glee.

American democracy has decayed during Trump’s time in office, even though his deficit of discipline and surplus of scandals have weakened him considerably. But the biggest tests are yet to come: How much more damage will Trump do if he faces impeachment or indictments? Can the pillars of democracy be salvaged if the new normal involves 40 percent of the country yelling their approval every time a politician hits them with a sledgehammer? And will the next Republican nominee be a slicker and savvier demagogue who can capitalize on the groundwork laid by Trump? I don’t know the answers. But as someone who has studied how democracy dies across the globe, I remain deeply worried about Trump’s America.

#donald trump #u.s. news #politics #trump administration #republican politics #president donald trump #trump #trump scandals #republican party #politics and government #united states #white house #must reads #national security #robert mueller #trumpshutdown

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bitcofun · 2 years

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Source: AdobeStock/ Minerva Studio A confidential user is continuing to send out percentages of ethereum (ETH) from a Tornado Cash wallet to the general public addresses of popular figures, varying from stars to crypto CEOs, most likely as a method to demonstration versus the United States Treasury's choice to sanction the blending service. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has actually openly confessed that he utilized Tornado Cash in the past, and for great causes. One day after the United States Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control ( OFAC) enforced sanctions on crypto mixer Tornado Cash for its supposed function in cash laundering operations, a confidential user, or a group of users, began sending out ETH 0.1 deals from the mixer to popular figures. Some of the more significant figures consist of American tv host Jimmy Fallon, crypto exchange Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, basketball star Shaquille O'Neal, Mark Zuckerberg's sibling Randi Zuckerberg, and a series of other widely known celebs such as Logan Paul and Beeple Etherscan deals even more program that nearly all significant crypto exchanges, consisting of Binance, FTX, Kraken, OKX, Bitfinex, Gate.io, and Gemini, have actually gotten percentages of ETH from Tornado Cash. Even the Ethereum Foundation's treasury and the authorities Ukrainian crypto contribution accounts have actually been consisted of. As part of the sanctions, all Americans, along with US-based business, are disallowed from connecting with Tornado Cash. A failure to comply might lead to charges of USD 50,000 to USD 10,000,000 in fines and 10 to 30 years jail time." U.S. individuals and individuals otherwise based on OFAC jurisdiction, consisting of companies that assist in or take part in online commerce or procedure deals utilizing digital currency, are accountable for making sure that they do not take part in unapproved deals restricted by OFAC sanctions, such as negotiations with obstructed individuals or home, or participating in restricted trade or investment-related deals," the Treasury's site checks out. Notably, given that the invoice of tokens from Tornado Cash is not willful and comes with no anticipation or engagement, it appears not likely that it might be thought about an infraction of the sanctions. Its effects still stay uncertain. Meanwhile, Buterin has actually signed up with the cult of users slamming the sanctions versus Tornado Cash, stating that the personal privacy tool might likewise be utilized for excellent causes. In specific, the Ethereum mastermind stated he utilized the mixer to contribute to Ukrainian causes while securing the receivers. "I'll out myself as somebody who has actually utilized TC to contribute to this specific cause," he composed. In a follow-up tweet, the Russian-born developer stated he did not utilize the blending service to secure himself. Meanwhile, US-based blockchain analysis business Chainalysis argued that, given that ending up being active in August 2019, Tornado Cash has actually gotten over USD 7.6 bn worth of ETH, "a substantial part of which have actually originated from illegal or high-risk sources." Per their report, " Half of those funds originated from DeFi procedures, however 18% originated from approved entities (nearly totally, we need to keep in mind, prior to those entities were approved), while simply under 11% were funds taken from other cryptocurrency services and procedures." Source: Chainalysis Despite the protest, numerous significant crypto entities have actually done something about it to abide by the Treasury's sanctions. For one, Circle, the company of the USDC stablecoin, has frozen over USDC 4m connected to 81 addresses approved by the OFAC. Web3 advancement platforms Alchemy and Infura have apparently likewise blacklisted the approved Tornado Cash addresses, while configuring depository vault GitHub has actually gotten rid of the source code for Tornado Cash while suspending the account of its creator Roman Semenov.

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keywestlou · 3 years

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STEVE BANNON.....MODERN DAY CON MAN

I watched Steve Bannon’s most recent podcast. That and everything he has done and is doing lead to the conclusion Bannon is a con man. Perhaps the best.

The portion of the podcast I watched had to do with Bannon sharing the percentages of Americans who believe Biden is not President. Bannon claims 48 percent of Americans don’t believe Biden was legally elected.

Which leads me to the subpoena served on Bannon to appear before the January 6 Congressional Committee.

Bannon said he was not going to appear and kept his word. He failed to appear. He claims he will not appear till a court rules on Trump’s claim of Executive Privilege and his (Bannon’s) decision following the court’s.

The last few words of Bannon’s declination is his “escape clause” if the court rules Trump lacks Executive Privilege. It provides Bannon with the opportunity to further delay his appearance.

The Committee will vote Tuesday to officially begin the process to hold Bannon in criminal contempt. Assuming he Committee approves, then the issue goes before the full House. Assuming the House approves, the matter is then referred to the U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C. to handle.

The U.S. Attorney works under the Department of Justice. The matter will automatically be referred to Justice for its approval. Which means Attorney General Merrick Garland will make the final decision.

The path to the Attorney General is not as a practical matter the final one initially.

Justice has various approval levels within its operation. Each must be involved. All t’s crossed and i’s dotted.

More consumption of time.

In the end, Garland could decide there are not grounds for a criminal prosecution.

It could happen. Recall several months ago, I wrote a blog questioning Garland’s nomination for Attorney General. A judge of more than 20 years might be incapable of making a prosecutorial decision. Judging is one thing. Prosecution, another. Each involves a different belief system and thought process approach.

Time will tell. And that is what is bothering me. Time! The insurrection occurred on January 6. It is now October, 9 months later. How much longer will it take?

Respectfully, the Committee is moving its ass too slowly.

The Committee could have proceeded to issue a civil contempt rather than a criminal one. Such would have short cut the process and could still have ended up with Bannon in jail.

Most would agree the court system is antiquated and requires updating. The same with both Houses of Congress. The rules in each Chamber contribute to excessive delay.

Enjoy your Sunday!

STEVE BANNON…..MODERN DAY CON MAN was originally published on Key West Lou

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marcjampole · 6 years

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Will Catholics follow Pope Francis and clamor against the death penalty? And will the Church now campaign against state execution like it has against abortion?

By making the opposition to capital punishment part of church law, Pope Francis cited a moral reason to oppose the death penalty: because “it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.” Of course, morality is the first victim when people feel threatened. Fear stokes a certain American blood-thirstiness that made a majority of Americans approve the mass incarceration laws of the 1990s and the Bush II torture regime. Fear-induced bloodthirstiness has swayed large numbers of Americans to support the current administration’s mean-hearted treatment of immigrants and refugees.

Pew studies show that currently 54% of all Americans and 53% of Catholics favor the state killing people convicted of certain crimes. Only 39% of all Americans and 42% of Catholics oppose the death penalty. Will the Pope’s announcement change minds? Past experience suggest the answer is, “not many,” unless the Catholic Church engages in an aggressive campaign to promote the new position. Even that might not work, considering how many rightwing politicians depend on fear-mongering about crime, drugs, immigrants and terrorism to get elected.

Catholics in westernized nations, like their Jewish and Muslim cousins, find it an easy matter to reject religious teachings when it’s convenient for them to do so. A year ago, the Gutmacher Institute reported that 98% of all Catholic women will use birth control methods banned by the Church sometime in their lives. Another Gutmacher study showed that about 24% of all women who have abortions are Catholic. An older Gutmacher survey found that about 2.2% of Catholic women have an abortion each year, compared to 1.8% of Protestant women. About eight years ago, the National Center for Health Statistics reported that 61% of all American women will live in a sexual relationship with someone without the benefit of marriage sometime in their life; based on how Catholics compare to others when it comes to capital punishment, birth control and abortion, we can safely assume that the percentage among Catholics who cohabitate is about the same as the overall population. Thus, Catholics are used to using a “just say no” approach to the teachings of their religion.

We can only hope that the Catholic Church throws at least as many resources behind advocating against capital punishment as it has to oppose a woman’s right to control her own body.

Morality is just one of several reasons to oppose capital punishment. Here are some of the others:

· It doesn’t work as a deterrent. The preponderance of the evidence from the studies done on the deterrent effect of capital punishment show that the fear of being executed does not stop murders. And it turns out that, as with a lot of research supporting rightwing positions, many studies claiming to show that capital punishment does deter people from taking the lives of others have severe methodological and mathematical errors. One researcher reran the numbers used in a survey supposedly proving that capital punishment works as a deterrent and found that it actually increased the murder rate!

· Capital punishment is irrevocable: Juries make mistakes all the time. When the mistake is uncovered, the wrongly convicted person usually eventually gets out of jail. But society can’t reverse an execution.

· Our adversarial legal system makes executing someone an expensive process. Executing an inmate on death row costs much more than sending an inmate to prison for life without the possibility of parole. Those sentenced to death are guaranteed by the Constitution to a very long, thorough and expensive judicial process before taking the needle. It costs states millions of dollars for each execution.

· It is unfair, or at least will remain unfair as long as racism and poverty exist. The racial bias to capital verdicts in the United States has existed since record-keeping of such matters began. Wealthy people can afford expensive attorneys, whereas poor people often have to settle for overworked public defenders. The unfairness of capital verdicts reflects and magnifies the unequal treatment of minorities and the poor throughout the judicial system.

· Virtually all other countries have abolished the death penalty: About 140 nations worldwide, including the vast majority of countries in Western Europe and the Americas, have abandoned capital punishment. The United States remains in the bad company of Iraq, Iran, China and other human rights abusers as countries still engaging in state execution. In the 21st century global village, capital punishment may have become “cruel and unusual punishment” and therefore inherently unconstitutional.

· It demeans society. Capital punishment reduces society to the level of the murderer. As a society, we are supposed to be better than our worst elements. Sparing the killer’s life makes us more human and more humane than the killer, and increases the value that our society puts on human life. Sparing the killer is an affirmation of our social contract to live in peace. Sparing the killer tells him or her, and the world, that when we say that human life is holy we mean it.

Of course, what the Pope is saying supersedes all these reasons. Even if capital punishment served as a deterrent, it would still be immoral. Even if it were no longer expensive for society or biased against racial minorities and the poor, it would still be immoral. Even if every country in the world allowed state executions, it would still be immoral.

#popefrancis #abortion #catholic #church

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patriotsnet · 3 years

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What Have Republicans Done For Blacks

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/what-have-republicans-done-for-blacks/

What Have Republicans Done For Blacks

Yes We Wrote And Signed The Violent Control And Law Enforement Act In 1994

ESPN host: Black people should vote for GOP

Essentially creating the prison industrial complex we have today. Joe Biden wrote the bill in the Senate, and a Democrat from Texas wrote it for the house, Jack Brooks. This bill included some good things, like the Violence against Women Act, but it eliminated education for inmates, added 60 new death penalty statutes, codified a three strikes policy, and put millions of more people in jail.

Why Republicans Do Better Than Democrats For Black Americans

Over the past month, our country has taken extra time to honor the many contributions of heroic black Americans who, through their patriotism and perseverance over the years have triumphed over injustice and enriched every aspect of our lives. But while the commemoration of Black History Month might be winding down, Republicans will continue our efforts to engage with black voters and communities of color across the country.

We are taking the old aphorism of you will not win votes you do not ask for to heart. Under the strong leadership of President TrumpDonald TrumpUN meeting with US, France canceled over scheduling issueTrump sues NYT, Mary Trump over story on tax historyMcConnell, Shelby offer government funding bill without debt ceilingMORE, our party is fighting for every single vote just like he fights for all Americans with his policies. Just this week, the Republican National Committee has opened more than a dozen new Trump Victory Committee field offices within the heart of historically Democratic and predominantly black neighborhoods.

Spread across seven key battleground states all over the country, in such cities from Cleveland to Charlotte and Milwaukee to Miami, the new field offices will help the Republican Party outreach in these communities and build on the growing support that this president now has among many black Americans by highlighting how his policies are uplifting the black community and making a positive difference in the lives of all Americans.

Younger And Older Republicans Diverge

On both perceptions of discrimination and favorability measures, Americans views seem to be shaped more by partisanship than age, race or gender. So, Republicans men and women generally see discrimination in similar ways and view the same groups favorably or unfavorably. So do black and white Democrats. A helpful illustration of the partisan dynamics is that a greater share of Democratic men than Republican women thought that women in the U.S. face high levels of discrimination.

But there is a big GOP split on age. Republicans under the age of 45 were more likely to say that they saw high levels of discrimination than those over 45. And that cuts across the traditional divisions younger Republicans saw more discrimination than older Republicans against blacks and against whites . In the wake of Floyds death, a clear majority of Republicans under 45 thought there was a lot of discrimination in America against black people. The over-45 GOP cohort did not share that view.8

Older Republicans were much more likely than younger Republicans to say that they had negative views of undocumented immigrants and Muslims.9

More of the younger Republicans see discrimination

Percentage of respondents who said each group experiences a great deal or a lot of discrimination, by age category

Group

Survey conducted from May 28 to June 3.

Also Check: What Is Donald Trump A Republican Or Democrat

Brainwashed Blacks Racist White Republicans Are Primary Enemies Of Black People

Were in the midst of a horrific pandemic and a toxic political season that seems to have uncovered old racial wounds. One problem in particular is Black people who are brainwashed into misusing facts to trick other Blacks to believe that todays Republican Party is more favorable. I beg to differ.

Once upon a time, Black lives really mattered to white slaveholders regardless of political party. Nowadays, we Black people must absolutely align ourselves with those who clearly demonstrate that our lives, our votes and our issues matter. To do otherwise would be akin to being enslaved again.

The article written by Mr. Tyrone Jones a few weeks ago necessitated this very serious response. Young blacks need to know the real facts as they pertain to the current time much more so than the past. That is the goal of my response . Thank you for giving me the opportunity to set the record straight.

Political Opinions Versus Honest Facts

A recent opinion article entitled Young Blacks need the facts exposed how some brainwashed Black people try to cleverly brainwash other Black people for political gain. The article tries to glorify the Republican Party and demonize the Democratic Party.

Nevertheless, when it comes to looking out for the best interest of Black people, the history of both political parties is questionable. Overall, it is a well-established fact that Black people have no permanent enemies and no permanent friends; just permanent interests.

John E. Jones

What Is Happening To The Republicans

In becoming the party of Trump, the G.O.P. confronts the kind of existential crisis that has destroyed American parties in;the past.

Save this story for later.

Content

But, for all the anxiety among Republican leaders, Goldwater prevailed, securing the nomination at the Partys convention, in San Francisco. In his speech to the delegates, he made no pretense of his ideological intent. Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, he said. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. Goldwaters crusade failed in November of 1964, when the incumbent, Lyndon Johnson, who had become President a year earlier, after Kennedys assassination, won in a landslide: four hundred and eighty-six to fifty-two votes in the Electoral College. Nevertheless, Goldwaters ascent was a harbinger of the future shape of the Republican Party. He represented an emerging nexus between white conservatives in the West and in the South, where five states voted for him over Johnson.

Shopping

agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which find a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions.

Read Also: Did Trump Say Republicans Are Stupid

Us Election : Why Trump Gained Support Among Minorities

Despite his election defeat, President Donald Trump can boast a success that has intrigued pollsters – he was more popular with ethnic minority voters than in 2016.

Some might find this surprising given that his critics so accused him of racism and Islamophobia. Trump denies the charges and has accused Democrats of taking African Americans voters for granted.

The Republican president gained six percentage points among black men, and five percentage points among Hispanic women. It means some voters changed their minds, after either not voting or voting for another candidate in 2016.

But it tells us something about Trump’s unique appeal.

“I was definitely more liberal growing up – my grandmother was big in the civil rights movement here in Texas during the 60s, and I grew up with that ideology.”

Mateo Mokarzel, 40, is a graduate student from Houston, Texas and is of mixed heritage, Mexican and Lebanese. He didn’t vote in 2016, and he isn’t loyal to either major party – but this time around he decided to cast his vote for the Republicans.

“The first time Trump ran I really wasn’t convinced. I just thought, here’s this celebrity talk-show host guy that wants to run for president, I didn’t take him seriously – so I was not a Trump supporter the first time he ran. To be honest, I thought he was a ringer for Hillary, so I just wasn’t interested,” he tells BBC News.

But Mokarzel says his upbringing in Texas influenced his view of both political parties.

No Trump Didnt Win The Largest Share Of Non

President George W. Bush.

At his;post-election press conference, President Trump said of his presidential campaign, I won the largest share of non-white voters of any Republican in 60 years. While Trump did improve on his performance with minorities in 2020 vs. 2016, according to exit polls, the previous Republican presidentGeorge W. Bushdid significantly better in 2004.

Don’t Miss: How Many States Are Controlled By Republicans

What Republicans Have Done For Blacks And Women A Quick History Lesson

Are looking for a quick roundupof all the things Republicans have done for Blacks and Women? How about something that also includes a look at all the things Democrats;have done to blacks and women?

How about what Democrats have done to prevent them from having the same rights and liberties as the rest of us?

Carol Swain from the James Madison Society at Princeton University and a;former Vanderbilt Professor of Political Science has what you need. It is a quick synopsis of how the Republican Party was responsible for every advancement for minorities and women in U.S. historyand remains the champion of equality to this day.

This is good stuff. Useful ammunition when confronted by ignorant Democrats who call you a racist bigot. Make time to watch or listen.

What Its Like To Be A Black Republican In 2020

GOP lawmaker has message for Congressional Black Caucus shutting him out

by Corey D. Fields, author of Black Elephants in the Room: The Unexpected Politics of African American Republicans

The 2020 Republican National Convention featured a diverse line-up of speakers, including many Black speakers who trumpeted the Republican Party and its presidential nominee Donald Trump. Unsurprisingly, these speakers received a mixed response. Some questioned whether this outreach would be effective with black voters. Others thought the efforts were thinly veiled attempts to convince white voters that the party wasnt racist. Either way, the convention was yet another reflection of how the face of Black conservatives has shifted under the Trump administration. Diamond and Silk have replaced Mia Love. Sheriff David Clarke is more relevant than General Colin Powell. Candace Owens has supplanted Condoleezza Rice. Internet celebrities have taken the place of the legislators, military leaders, and judges who used to stand in as the face of Black Republicans.

The selection of these speakers and the response to them reflects many of the themes I found in my own research on Black Republicans for my book, Black Elephants in the Room. In particular, two related phenomena frequently mentioned by the people I studied help make sense of the reaction to this years convention speakers: the sellout critique and the skeptical embrace.

This, of course, only heightens the intensity of the sellout critique.

Recommended Reading: Democrat And Republican Switch Platforms

Nah Southern Strategy Is More Recent And Is Part Of The Reason Its Ok For Benedict Donald

… to say what he’s been saying in the M$M’s eyes seeing the gop has been saying a lighter version of it for since RayGun .

Here’s what I’ve read.Don’t know if it’s right or wrong.Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation because he and his generals thought this would spark a massive slave rebellion.From Lincoln’s Speech, Sept. 18, 1858. “While I was at the hotel to-day, an elderly gentleman called upon me to know whether I was really in favor of producing a perfect equality between the negroes and white people. While I had not proposed to myself on this occasion to say much on that subject, yet as the question was asked me I thought I would occupy perhaps five minutes in saying something in regard to it. I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the black and white races — that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making VOTERS or jurors of negroes, NOR OF QUALIFYING THEM HOLD OFFICE, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any of her man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”

After The Civil War Democrats Continued To Fight Against Equality For Blacks

For 100 years the democrats staged a rear guard action seeking to keep blacks subservient and doing their bidding.

They passed laws to limit black peoples ability to vote, to sit on the front of the bus, to own land, to rent apartments, to go to the same schools and many other things.

If anyone owes black people reparations it is these democrats.

Given this history of democrats it is stunning that the Democratic Party continues to exist. Shouldnt it be disbanded? We are tearing down statues, removing names of historically racist people and institutions so why not destroy the Democratic Party? It is slavery and was the principal advocate of slavery. They also were heavily involved in passing racist laws, hanging blacks and many republicans who opposed the democrats.

Why would anyone want to be part of a party that was historically so critical and central to the whole effort to enslave and repress blacks?

People have a tendency not to be partisan and to label this as white Americans that did this but it was the Democrats. Republicans were the ones fighting it. If not for those republicans the black people in America would never have been freed or gotten voting rights or many other things that had to be fought. Many white republicans were killed by democrats even after the end of the civil war who were called sympathizers.

Again, why doesnt this basic fact that is indisputable matter?

Those blacks who could vote between 1860 and 1969 voted for republicans.

You May Like: How Many States Are Controlled By Republicans

What Happened In 1969

The war in Vietnam came to a head. The democrats under Kennedy had gotten us into the war and then after Kennedy was killed President Johnson continued and grew our presence in Vietnam.

Peoples opposition to the war became the focus of the democrat party and the emotional democrats became the protagonists for eliminating the policies that kept blacks in the back of the bus as well as free love and marijuana.

I was young at the time and this is the Democratic Party i remember which were opposed to real things. There was a war in vietnam. People were dying. There was segregation.

Republicans didnt resist outlawing segregation. The resistance was focused on the remaining segregationists in the Democratic Party. Strom Thurmond a democrat from the south fillibustered the passage of the civil rights act.

In 1968 the democrats held a national convention. This convention devolved into riots and was the watershed for racism and the Democratic Party. The racists were ejected from the Democratic Party ostensibly.

Democrats today claim that in 1969 what happened is that the racists in the Democratic Party moved to the Republican Party.

There is no evidence of this. Storm Thurmond, Robert Byrd never switched parties. Robert Byrd a former KKK leader stayed a democrat until he retired from the senate in 2010. Biden called Byrd a mentor.

Biden was one of the most outspoken opponents of busing.

None of that is true.

If you arent a democrat then they dont want you in the identity group.

Numerous Republicans Outperformed Trump With Hispanics & Asians

Now, lets turn to Hispanics and Asians. As you can see below, both Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush bested Trumps share of the Latino vote in 2016 and 2020 .;

George H.W. Bush won the Asian vote in 1992, 55%31%.

FREOPP.org

Trumps performance with Asians in 2020, at 32%, is actually the third-worst ever recorded, only ahead of his own showing in 2016 and Mitt Romneys in 2012 . Indeed, George H.W. Bush actually won the Asian vote in 1992,;55-31, as did Bob Dole in 1996 . The Bush-Dole margins might have been higher, had Ross Perot not ran as an independent in 1992 and 1996.

You May Like: How Many States Are Controlled By Republicans

Rick Woodoctober 01 2015

John: I noticed that too, and I agree. So Kelvin’s argument in that respect isn’t persuasive. But Sherri is on to something, isn’t she? And I have a feeling Kelvin starts from the same point. White men in this country enjoy privileges we didn’t earn. We’re not giving them back or turning them down, and no one is asking for that. But a little empathy towards others is in order. On the empathy scale, I’d say Democrats beat Republicans, hence blacks and women do tend to be and vote Democratic. A good question is why that empathy difference among while make Democrats and white male Republicans exist. There are certainly more white males in the Republican Party, but that doesn’t explain why.

Bob Livesayoctober 04 2015

Simple. Districts are broken down by population. Democratric districts in and around big cities are over whelmingly Dems. They skew the vote total big time in favor of Democrats. Republican districts are bigger in area size but do not have an overwhelimingly Rep vote. So you get a skewed imbalance on vote total but not districts. My advise is have the Dems move to rural area. Oh, I forgot they then would vote Republican.

Read Also: Can The Democrats Stop Trump

Political Parties And A Complicated History With Race

Black people who could vote tended to support the Republican Party from the 1860s to about the mid-1930s. There were push-and-pull aspects to this. Republicans pledged to protect voting rights.;African Americans viewed the party as the only vessel for their goals: Frederick Douglass said, The Republican Party is the ship; all else is the sea.

And the sea was perilous. The Democratic Party for most of the 19th century was a white supremacist organization that gave no welcome to Black Americans. A conservative group of politicians known as the Bourbons controlled Southern Democratic parties. For instance, well into the 20th century, the official name of Alabamas dominant organization was the Democratic and Conservative Party of Alabama.

Fact check:U.S. didn’t reject an earlier version of Statue of Liberty that honored slaves

The Bourbons called their Republican opponents radicals, whether they warranted the label or not, Masur said.

The Democrats were often called conservative and embraced that label, she said. Many of them were conservative in the sense that they wanted things to be like they were in the past, especially as far as race was concerned.

In consequence of this intolerance, colored men are forced to vote for the candidate of the Republican Party, however objectionable to them some of these candidates may be, unless they are prevented from doing so by violence and intimidation, he said.

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conservativefreepress · 4 years

Text

New Post has been published on Conservative Free Press

New Post has been published on http://www.conservativefreepress.com/donald-trump/don-jr-my-father-taught-republicans-they-dont-need-to-roll-over-and-die/

Don Jr.: My Father “Taught Republicans They Don’t Need to Roll Over and Die”

In an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity on the day after his father’s impeachment acquittal, Donald Trump Jr. said that the former president will remain fully committed to the agenda that won him a record number of votes in November.

“He is going to keep pushing that America First agenda, fighting for the American worker,” said Don Jr. “He’s going to be pushing for candidates who will do that, not the random establishment guys. And we’re going to continue doing to conservatism what my father has done, which is bring it from the dead back into real life with people who love this country and who are willing to go to bat for her.”

The former president’s son said that weak Republicans are the reason that Democrats feel empowered to engage in farcical politics like the impeachment trial.

“Republican leadership will do nothing … because that’s what they do best. Nothing,” he said. “Imagine any prosecutor in America was caught manufacturing evidence against a witness. That would be a jail-able offense. Democrats are used to being able to get away with it and, more importantly, they’re used to Republicans who don’t have the guts to actually ever push back.”

Don Jr. noted that when Republicans really fight back against Democrats, the members of the latter party go “full crazy.”

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“He’s taught conservatives and Republicans that they don’t need to be steamrolled, that they can push back,” he said of his father. “They don’t just have to roll over and die because the other side would like them to. That’s the difference between Donald Trump and Republican leadership for the last few decades which has done nothing but cede ground to the radical left.”

While liberals are trying their best to peddle the narrative that January 6th “killed off” the MAGA movement for good, the reality is that nothing could be further from the truth.

From Politico:

Our flash POLITICO/Morning Consult poll conducted in the days following the Senate trial shows that despite the impeachment managers’ gripping presentation and video laying out Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 rampage, the GOP remains the undisputed party of Trump.

Republican voters got over any misgivings they had about Trump’s role on Jan. 6 very quickly. Fifty-nine percent of Republican voters said they want Trump to play a major role in their party going forward. That’s up 18 percentage points from a Morning Consult poll conducted on Jan. 7, and an increase of 9 points from a follow-up poll on Jan. 25, before the impeachment trial began.

Just like last time, the Democratic Party’s overreach has come back to slap them right in the face. But perhaps more so than Nancy Pelosi, there are seven Republican senators who ought to look very carefully at this poll and make some alternative decisions about their respective political futures.

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theliberaltony · 6 years

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

George W. Bush was president when I first started covering national politics. He had come into office with barely any support from black voters. He won re-election with almost as little. But Bush still paid some heed to the interests of black Americans. When then-Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott praised the pro-segregation 1948 presidential campaign of Strom Thurmond, for example, Bush slammed Lott, helping lead to his removal as majority leader. Bush also appointed Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, two African-Americans whose views on racial issues were not particularly conservative, to top posts in the administration.

It’s not as though the Bush administration pushed a lot of legislation that African-Americans were excited about, and at times, it even seemed actively apathetic about the black community. But at least the president and his party didn’t seem to have an openly antagonistic relationship with black Americans.

That’s no longer true.

The Republican Party has struggled to get significant support from black voters for decades. What’s different now is that many GOP officials seem to have stopped trying to speak to them, no longer paying even minimal lip service to their concerns. Changes in both parties’ bases of support have shifted the incentives for elected Republicans, and you can see that in their rhetoric.

There’s President Trump, of course. To take just a few examples: He rudely dismissed questions from White House reporter April Ryan, of the American Urban Radio Networks, and two other black female reporters last month. (Bush and Ryan were quite friendly, by contrast.) On the campaign trail, Trump strongly defended Mississippi Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, who made a joke about public hangings and has a long record of embracing symbols and figures of the Confederacy. The sole black person in Trump’s cabinet, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, has views on racial issues that are quite conservative and unlikely to help the president appeal to black voters.

“What Trump has done is say the quiet parts out loud, without doing much of anything substantial to counter accusations of promoting racial intolerance,” said Ted Johnson, an expert on black voting behavior who works at the Brennan Center for Justice. “And in doing so, he gives license to other Republicans to be unabashed in their racialized appeals.”

Indeed, it’s not just Trump. Georgia’s former Secretary of State, Brian Kemp, who will become the state’s governor in January, aggressively investigated groups trying to register black voters. Trump’s outgoing chief of staff John Kelly praised Confederate General Robert E. Lee last year, and said the Civil War was caused by a “lack of compromise.”. Senate Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell pushed hard — and almost successfully — for the chamber to confirm Trump nominee Thomas Farr to a federal judgeship. Farr had been a key defender of a North Carolina voting law that a federal court declared illegal because it was designed to limit the votes of blacks with “surgical precision.”

The Farr nomination led to a public scolding of the GOP by one of its own, South Carolina’s Tim Scott, the only black Republican in the Senate. Scott, who is no moderate,1 effectively blocked Farr’s nomination and blasted his party for even considering him.

“We should stop bringing candidates with questionable track records on race before the full Senate for a vote,” Scott wrote in a letter to the editor that was published in the Wall Street Journal last week.

I don’t want to overstate my case. I’m talking about a somewhat subtle shift that’s hard to measure in a concrete way. The pre-Trump Republican Party often ignored black interests — and was downright racist at times. And the Republican Party in the Trump era has taken a few steps to appeal to blacks, most notably its work with some African-American leaders on a criminal-justice reform bill that would reduce jail sentences for some convicted of drug crimes, a group that is disproportionately black. There are also high-profile Republicans, most notably Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul and Scott, who are trying to build ties with African-American voters.

But more broadly, I would argue that Republicans are making fewer attempts to appeal to black voters and being more openly anti-black at times than a decade ago. And there are clear reasons that explain such a shift.

Let me start with the Republican Party. Bush was very unpopular by the time his presidency ended. After he returned to Texas, conservatives basically disowned his political style and approach Then, during Barack Obama’s presidency, a more anti-establishment wing of the Republican Party, which was more conservative and more openly hostile to black interests, gained strength. Laws that disproportionately affected blacks and made it harder for them to vote were adopted in GOP-controlled states across the country. What’s more, the false claims that Obama was a Muslim or was not born in the U.S. gained political currency on the right. Eventually, of course, a promoter of these “birther” claims, Trump, won the Republican nomination and then the presidency.

And the GOP has found some political success in both 2016 and 2018 by largely eschewing black outreach. Trump, according to the 2016 exit polls, lost to Hillary Clinton among black voters by 81 percentage points, worse than Bush did in 2004 against John Kerry.2 But Trump’s 39-point advantage among whites without college degrees was much larger than Bush’s 23-point margin with that voting bloc. A number of scholars have found whites without college degrees, in particular, have negative attitudes about racial minorities. And what’s more, those attitudes were a key factor in pushing some to back Trump after previously supporting Obama.

I talked to a few Republican strategists about the party’s relationship with blacks. They declined to speak with their names attached, wary of criticizing the sitting Republican president. But they suggested that Trump, as the leading Republican in the country, was pushing the party in a bad direction on racial issues that other GOP officials struggle to resist, in part because GOP voters have embraced Trump’s approach.

“Trump is just very tone-deaf when it comes to racial issues,” said one party strategist. “That inflames his opponents. And that opposition makes Trump’s base even more defensive of him.”

“If I were a GOP strategist I wouldn’t be able to see any issues where I might pick off at least some black voters,” said Lee Drutman, a political scientist at the think tank New America who has written about how the partisan divide in America is increasingly racial. “I’d also see that Trump pulled in a lot of racially conservative whites and think that if there’s nothing I can do to win over black voters, I might as well try to energize racially conservative whites, and try to make somewhat racially conservative whites feel more outraged about political correctness so they don’t vote for Democrats.”

As Drutman said, it’s hard to see how the GOP might win over African-American constituents. The Democrats have shifted since the Bush presidency to become even more aligned with black voters, making GOP appeals to black voters increasingly futile. The Democrats aren’t just the party of black voters, they are now the party that promotes black presidential candidates and black candidates for Congress and governor, even in fairly conservative parts of the country. The Democratic Party included Black Lives Matter activists at the party’s national convention in 2016. Plus, white Democratic voters increasingly embrace liberal ideas on racial issues.

Again, let me not overstate this. There are plenty of liberal African-Americans who say that the Democratic Party often ignores or downplays racism in America. But this past election cycle, Democrats in Georgia nominated a black female candidate for governor — Stacey Abrams, who supported the the removal of the carvings of three Confederate leaders on Georgia’s Stone Mountain and had once participated in the burning of the Georgia state flag, back when the flag’s design intentionally resembled the Confederate battle flag. Both Oprah Winfrey and President Obama, perhaps the two most famous black people in the country, campaigned for her enthusiastically. And liberal donors across the country embraced the cause of electing who would have been the first black female governor in U.S. history.

Meanwhile, Kemp’s record of investigating groups trying to increase black voting was problematic. But I’m not surprised that he did not spend a lot of time in black areas of Atlanta trying to get votes for his gubernatorial campaign. Running against a person with Abrams’s biography, political support and views, he was unlikely to get much black support — and perhaps more importantly, he could win without it.

So we may now be in a downward spiral, where Republicans have almost no reason to appeal to black voters and therefore aren’t. This is probably bad for Republican politicians (some of them don’t want the party to be in constant tension with African-Americans), but it may be bad for blacks as well — they have become even more tied to one party and are totally shut out of power if it loses.

What could change this? Maybe the 2018 election results.

Republicans really struggled in the suburbs in November. Who lives in suburbs? An increasing number of minorities, but also voters with more liberal views on cultural issues, supporting abortion rights and gay marriage, for example. So a less anti-black GOP would likely have more appeal in the suburbs.

“I know diehard Democrats who voted for Hogan but never would have cast that vote had they seen Hogan as bigoted,” said David Lublin, a government professor at American University who has written extensively on the intersections of politics and race. Maryland Republican Gov. Larry Hogan easily won his re-election bid in traditionally liberal Maryland, in part by avoiding the racial controversies that dogged other Republicans who ran against black candidates.

So you could make a good argument that Republicans should try harder to appeal to black voters — even if it’s just for electoral reasons. But I don’t expect much to change in the short term. Trump is the dominant figure in the Republican Party, so I expect GOP officials to mirror his approach of either largely ignoring or actively irritating black people — even if that posture makes it harder for the GOP to win votes in the suburbs. Meanwhile, the Democrats have a decent chance of nominating a black person for president or vice-president in 2020 — and even a Democratic ticket without any black candidates is likely to embrace liberal stances on racial issues. It’s really hard to see these dynamics shifting with Trump in office — but I’m not sure they will shift even after he is gone.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Perry Bacon Jr.

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sinrau · 4 years

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(CNN) Ever since the coronavirus began its deadly march through the US, Donald Trump has been accused of lacking the empathy presidents typically draw on to lead and soothe a nation in crisis.

This week the question of presidential compassion was a consistent storyline.

You could pick your lyrics: Was the President like the Tin Man from the “Wizard of Oz,” plaintively singing, “If I only had a heart.” Or was he suffering from, as the 80s hit song put it, “a total eclipse of the heart”?

We saw a President who slammed the Supreme Court for blocking his effort to subject 650,000 Dreamers to deportation. He also bemoaned the court’s historic ruling Monday that LGBTQ people can’t be fired because of their sexuality. His former national security adviser John Bolton claimed in a book excerpt that Trump had encouraged China’s leader to set up concentration camps for the Uyghur minority. He plowed ahead with a non-socially distanced rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, even as coronavirus cases mounted.

Yes, some rallygoers could get sick, Trump told the Wall Street Journal, but “it’s a very small percentage.”

In a private meeting with the families of Black victims, though, Trump was “very compassionate,” according to the mother of Ahmaud Arbery, who was shot to death while jogging in Georgia. But in his public remarks, the President made law-and-order his primary message.

“Trump went on the attack against his political rivals and doubled down on his hard-line, ‘law and order’ stance, a political calculation solidified by his use of the words ‘safety and security’ and his statement that Americans ‘demand law and order,'” wrote Issac Bailey. “His effort to address growing national suffering and protest over police brutality was, at best, a thinly veiled excuse to defend law enforcement and signal to white voters where he stands.”

A chilling view of the private Trump emerged from the Bolton book. It painted a credible “portrait of the most amoral, autocratic and unprepared man to ever serve as president of the United States,” wrote John Avlon. “This is not a partisan attack by activists from the opposition party. This is the first-person view of the President’s former national security adviser, bolstered by contemporaneous notes, a standard which is admissible in court. It is a damning portrait of a president untethered to anything resembling morals, who cannot separate his self-interest from the national interest and doesn’t even care to try.”

Jen Psaki viewed the book through the lens of the upcoming election: “All of the observations, accusations and specific anecdotes are about one person — Donald Trump — and whether he is fit to lead the country and the lasting damage he would inflict if given four more years.”

In fact, the revelations show Bolton as complicit, in Elie Honig‘s view: “John Bolton has offered the nation a staggering profile in cowardice…Bolton directly witnessed not one but multiple acts that could have been cited in the impeachment of President Donald Trump. But Bolton did nothing about it while he held a powerful post in the Trump administration. And he stayed quiet and took cover when Congress and the nation pleaded with him to speak out during the impeachment process.”

Writing about China policy, Bolton gave this devastating description: “The Trump presidency is not grounded in philosophy, grand strategy or policy. It is grounded in Trump.” As if to prove that such a verdict applies more broadly, on Friday night Attorney General William Barr ousted Geoffrey Berman, US Attorney for the Southern District of NY which has been investigating and prosecuting Trump’s associates. “The news of Berman’s ouster is one more piece of evidence that Trump is the anti-law-and-order President, despite his claims to the contrary. Trump touts law and order when it suits him, but attacks the courts and erodes our judicial system when it comes to his agenda and actions,” wrote Julian Zelizer.

One critic described Bolton’s book as a slog. “It toggles between two discordant registers: exceedingly tedious and slightly unhinged,” wrote Jennifer Szalai in the New York Times. “Still, it’s maybe a fitting combination for a lavishly bewhiskered figure whose wonkishness and warmongering can make him seem like an unlikely hybrid of Ned Flanders and Yosemite Sam.”

Another book Trump may be dreading is due out in July from the President’s niece, Mary L. Trump, who is a psychologist. Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio wrote that the book promises to shed light on the President’s fraught relationships with his father and elder brother, Fred Trump Jr., who was Mary Trump’s father. “Three and a half years into the Trump era, endless words have been spent illustrating the chaotic and cruel personality that can, to cite just one example, schedule a huge ego-gratifying rally in the middle of a deadly pandemic caused by a viciously contagious virus,” noted D’Antonio.

A rally fizzles

Given that cases of Covid-19 have been rising sharply in Tulsa County, wrote infectious disease expert and Oklahoma native Dr. Kent Sepkowitz in advance of Trump’s Saturday rally there, “from a strict public health perspective, the selection of Tulsa is a terrible decision.”

Trump’s first rally since the pandemic began was “supposed to trumpet his return to greatness — and the country’s return to normalcy,” wrote Frida Ghitis. But it “instead brought embarrassing scenes of empty bleachers, a dismantled stage and a familiar speech unsuccessfully trying to reignite public fears…The speech was typically self-centered, with a bizarre more than ten-minute long riff on his ultra-slow descent from the West Point ramp, and absolutely no words of compassion for the nearly 120,000 people in this country who have died during the pandemic.”

Days of freedom

Friday was Juneteenth, the holiday celebrating the end of slavery in the US. Another historic day of freedom came on October 1, 1962, when James Meredith became the first African American student to enroll at the University of Mississippi. He had to sue for his right to an education there, and it took the courts, hundreds of federal marshals and thousands of troops to overcome rioting and protect Meredith.

“The gates of higher education in the United States were opened for all Americans,” Meredith wrote. “This victory for me and for the US Constitution shattered the system of state-sponsored white supremacy in Mississippi…”

“When I see people across America — and around the world — peacefully marching for racial justice and honoring the memory of George Floyd and other martyrs like Medgar Evers…I am filled with both joy and hope. White supremacy may be the most evil beast that’s ever stalked the halls of history, and today it may finally be mortally wounded.”

Some companies and some states marked Juneteenth as a holiday, but it should be observed nationally, wrote Peniel Joseph. It “would spur not only conversation about the origins of our current racial and political conflicts, but would also prompt vitally necessary education about white supremacy and its manifestations in policies and political actions that are anti-Black, anti-democratic and anti-human,” wrote Joseph.

Rayshard Brooks’ own words

Months before he was shot to death by Atlanta police, Rayshard Brooks took part in an interview for a research project. A video of that February interview aired on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 show Wednesday, and in it, Brooks described the lasting burden of being on probation: “I just feel like some of the system could, you know, look at us as individuals. We do have lives, you know, just a mistake we made, and you know, not just do us as if we are animals.”

Van Jones noted that for people on probation “any contact with a police officer — for any reason — means an almost certain return to the horrors of a jail cell. It is safe to assume that Brooks did not want to go back to jail over sleeping in his car or failing a sobriety test, lose everything he had and be forced to start his life over again.”

“In other words, we do not know why the Atlanta police officer chose to shoot a man who was running away from him. But we can guess why that man chose to run, in the first place. Brooks didn’t want to lose his liberty. Instead, he wound up losing his life.”

Melvin Carter, the first African American mayor of St. Paul, Minnesota, is the son of a police officer who served his city for 28 years. But even with that background, he doesn’t think the answer to public safety is solely a matter of spending billions on police and prisons. “Our country’s enforcement-heavy approach to safety isn’t designed to address the root causes of crime, but the symptoms,” he wrote. “Instead of equipping us all with tools to guard our own future security, it further alienates those on the outer edges of society and impedes funding for critical social infrastructure like schools and housing.”

A former mayor, Mitch Landrieu of New Orleans, wrote that the US Justice Department was investigating his city’s police department when he took office. A consent decree which is still ongoing has resulted in a dramatic improvement in how residents view the police, but there’s more work to be done, Landrieu wrote. “We must go further. We can no longer ask police to handle the failures of our social and educational systems.”

Anne Milgram, the former New Jersey Attorney General, worked on the reinvention of policing in what was once America’s most dangerous city, Camden. “We had a police department that had no idea of what it was doing or whether it could do better. It lurched wildly from 911 call to 911 call, sometimes taking hours to respond to calls of serious violence. It failed to solve serious crimes…that plagued the city, and yet hundreds of arrests were being made for low-level crimes, driven most often by drug and alcohol addiction, mental illness, poverty and homelessness.” New leadership, new systems and ultimately a new police department made a difference — the city is “the safest that it has been in more than 50 years” and the police department is a model for others, Milgram wrote.

Supreme surprises

When Donald Trump ran for President, he promised to appoint conservative justices to the federal courts — and he’s been true to his word, naming Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court and scores of others for lower courts.

But it was Gorsuch who wrote the majority opinion this week upholding civil rights for LGBTQ Americans, rejecting the Trump administration’s position in declaring that the anti-discrimination provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act protect gay and transgender people. “It’s surprising that it’s taken this long,” wrote John D. Sutter. “Until this week in the United States of America, many LGBTQ workers lacked these simple legal protections.

“In over half the states in America, you could be fired for being gay. Until now.”

Then on Thursday, Chief Justice John Roberts, appointed by George W. Bush, sided with the court’s four liberals in blocking the Trump administration’s effort to kill the Obama-era DACA program, which shields young people who had been brought to the United States as children from deportation. DACA “was life-changing for hundreds of thousands of people — Americans in all but the paperwork — who were now free to work, go to school, seek promotions and continue their academic careers without fear of being detained and sent back to countries they barely knew,” wrote Raul A. Reyes. The decision was “a win for Dreamers, for the American ideal of welcoming immigrants — and for the independence of the high court.”

Happy Father’s Day

Mother’s Day this year came as most Americans were still locked down, and a lot of the holiday get-togethers were virtual. Today is Father’s Day and the advice from Kent Sepkowitz is consistent with what he recommended for the earlier holiday: get together with your father on Zoom, Facetime or whatever platform you prefer. America’s “approach to reopening — which has been unscientific and uncoordinated — has failed miserably. Rather than cautiously peeling back the various Covid-19 containment safeguards, most states have supported an ‘everybody-back-in-the-pool’ return, as if we were all teens partying during Spring Break.”

“Besides, let’s be honest — Father’s Day is no Mother’s Day, “wrote Sepkowitz, noting that total US spending on Mother’s Day gifts is more than 50% higher. “As a dad myself, this junior varsity status is fine by me. This year in particular, I want nothing to do with celebrating a holiday in the middle of a poorly managed pandemic.”

For more on Father’s Day:

Marcus Mabry: A Father’s Day message to all dads

Arick Wierson: George Floyd was my wake-up call

After Aunt Jemima

The debate over systemic racism touched off by the killing of George Floyd rippled into many parts of America. Consumer-facing companies reacted, with Quaker Oats announcing that it would end the 131-year-old Aunt Jemima brand, noted Elliot Williams.

As a Black child, it was upsetting for him to discover that the light-pink Crayola crayon was labeled “flesh” colored. “I put it back in the bin, pulled out ‘burnt sienna’ or ‘raw umber’ and continued whatever (probably “Star Wars” themed) self-portrait I was working on… By implying that the only color called ‘flesh’ looked like white skin, Crayola decided who was ‘normal.’ Everyone else had to work around that.” (The “flesh” color was phased out in 1962, replaced by “peach.”)

“In the midst of a national debate on life-and-death matters around racism and public safety, fussing about the logo on instant rice may seem trivial,” Williams wrote. “It’s not. The images our society chooses to elevate are reflective of who we are, and more importantly, whose voices — and yes, even lives — matter.”

Now that Aunt Jemima has been retired, wrote Crystal Echo Hawk, what should be next? She argued that the many uses of Native American images and symbolism in sports must end. “Professional sports have the power to influence and inspire people of all ages. In this unprecedented moment of solidarity, t hey have the opportunity to take a strong stand and show — not just say — that racism will not be tolerated.”

Covid-19 is still here

America’s top two elected officials did their best this week to argue that Covid-19 is going away, despite clear signs to the contrary. “Other countries whose governments addressed the crisis forthrightly have managed to wrestle down the curve, and now they are carefully, safely reopening,” wrote Frida Ghitis. “In the US, the curve is trending up, not down, even if Vice President Mike Pence deceptively declared in an op-ed this week, ‘We are winning the fight against the invisible enemy,’ unctuously declaring that the good news is ‘a testament to the leadership of President Trump.'”

As Ghitis noted, “On Monday, during a roundtable discussion on senior citizens, Trump said ‘If you don’t test, you don’t have any cases,’ a belief reminiscent of a baby thinking you disappear if he covers his eyes. To state the obvious, if we stopped testing, people would continue to become infected and die.”

Don’t miss:

Kamala Harris: The fight continues to protect Americans’ health care from Trump.

Theodore J. Boutrous Jr.: Trump’s tweet exploits and defames toddlers

Vicky Ward: Telling the truth makes a huge difference

David Gergen and Caroline Cohen: The next Greatest Generation

Merrill Brown: Federal government abdicates duty to inform public on coronavirus

Claire McMullen, Yael Schacher and Ariana Sawyer: Trump’s cold-blooded move to shut out desperate asylum seekers

Jeff Yang: It turns out your favorite movie is racist. What now?

Nayyera Haq: Why Stacey Abrams deserves applause

AND…

At last, summer

A summer like no other begins this weekend. In the first of a new series of weekly columns for CNN Opinion, biologist Erin Bromage wrote, “Our choices over the coming months will determine the trajectory of this pandemic. If we continue to pursue activities that pose a high risk for infection, such as large indoor gatherings, then we will hear the roar of that second wave sooner than later.”

“If we take a more measured approach, by improving hand hygiene, limiting daily interactions with other people, maintaining physical distance and increasing face mask use when we can’t maintain the distance, then businesses can operate safely, people can return to work and the activities our children are missing can resume.”

But even in the midst of the pandemic, Bromage wrote that he’s looking forward to some traditional summer activities: “my first meal at a restaurant (dining outdoors), visiting with more than one or two households at a time, and spending time at the beach. These interactions will be a little different than last summer.

“We will have to keep personal risks and risk mitigation measures in mind, but these adjustments are well worth the payoff of getting to enjoy some of my family’s usual summertime activities.”

Donald Trump’s heartless week #web #website #copied #to read# #highlight #link #news #read #blog #wordpress post# #posts #breaking news# #Sinrau #Nothiah #Sinrau29

#IFTTT #WordPress

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dukeofriven · 7 years

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Wait, I don't pay any attention to the Harry Potter EU, but are the American Wizards that awful?

All wizards are awful. The wizarding community is isolationist, xenophobic, and cruel - with or without Voldemort, with or without Grindewald. At best they are patronizingly indifferent, with the same supercilious air that let the rest of the UK brutalize Africa and Asia for several centuries. At best the tone around Muggles is always ‘poor, helpless dears who don’t have magic like we do.’ I find this most striking in the fields of healing and food scarcity - the amount that wizards withhold from the rest of the world is astounding, all in the name of preserving their own way of life. It is driven home in the first book when Hagrid tells Harry that wizards hide their magic from muggles because if they didn’t then muggles would always be asking wizards to use magic to help them solve their problems - and in seven books, two spin-off guides, nine movies thus-far, and one utterly gonzo play nobody ever says ‘But Hagrid, we literally do nothing other than solve all of our problems with magic.” In Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, the Wizards of the Discworld are very powerful indeed - and they almost never do anything with magic, because they know that the most important lesson about magic is when not to use it. Yes you could solve all your problems by expending vast amounts of power, but if you do that once you’re going to have to do it every time, and where does that end? It is understood that constant displays of power - that total reliance on magic - has led to some of the worst, most-destructive periods in their world’s history. In Diane Duane’s incredible, underrated, deserves-to-be-Harry-Potter-far-more-than-Harry-Potter series Young Wizards, those with magic are servants of life, servants of the universe, servants of all. In exchange for unimaginable power they take an oath to use it the service of others:In Life’s name and for Life’s sake,I assert that I will employ the Art which is its gift in Life’s service alone, rejecting all other usages. I will guard growth and ease pain. I will fight to preserve what grows and lives well in its own way; and I will change no object or creature unless its growth and life, or that of the system of which it is part, are threatened. To these ends, in the practice of my Art, I will put aside fear for courage, and death for life, when it is right to do so —till Universe’s end.Such respect for wizardry - a respect for the sobering responsibility of magic, recurs again and again in fiction. Tolkien’s Istari are cast down when they use magic for their own ends. Ursula Le Guin’s wizards of Earthsea are, like Diane Duane’s, servants of the people. Robert Jordan’s Aes Sedai were once an entire class of people devoted to the benefits of others.The Harry Potter Wizarding World uses magic solely for its own benefit - and in ways that are downright quotidian. “Magic makes [[coffee]] perfect every time” Ron Weasley exclaims at one point in book seven - appalled that savage muggles must live in a world where perfection is not instantly at one fingertips. Like every libertarian fantasy come to life magic is for your own use, and your own benefit, and the laws that surround it almost always protect nothing other than wizardly privilege. Those muggles who find themselves with magic are either swiftly absorbed into wizarding culture or persecuted to death, depending on the time. The books never cover what happens to muggle wizards who reject being inducted into a community they never wanted to join, but w all know what happens - a muggle who wanted to go public with magic is arrested and jailed, or memory wiped, and so on. Magic Is Might. Magic Makes Right.There’s a line from a wizarding history book about the Salem witch trials that notes that wizards were never in any danger from the burning because they jsut used a spell that made the fire tickle. It notes that they laughed and pretend to scream.People died in those trials. Wizards’ neighbours were were burned alive - accused of wizardry - and the wizarding world treats it as funny historical trivia. No, don’t worry students - the wizards were all fine! Nobody who mattered died. The wizarding world’s response to the Salem trials was to do nothing. Their response is always protect themselves first regardless of circumstance - the wizarding world is without charity, and is without compassion for those outside its clique.There’s a rebuttal you could make that it’s not like we muggles are all that great on the charity front - wealthy nations could solve world hunger in a day if they chose to, and that’s true. But I’d counter that counter with a point that plenty of people in wealthy countries do try. It’s often not the elite but the downtrodden who do their best to change an unfair system. Poor people give a higher percentage of their income to charity than the wealthy do. Plenty of people protest against the status quo, and demand change for how globalism is bing applied so unevenly.But the wizarding world is monolithic - Hermione, a muggle, never talks of muggle rights. Ron Weasley, allegedly ‘poor,’ never shows solidarity with the destitute. The one goddamn person in the whole serious who seems to care about Muggles - Arthur Weasley - is a buffoon who treats his fellow human beings like aliens. (He also doesn’t study very hard - it’s supposed to be funny when he asks Harry about mundane muggle shit but dude, there’s nothing stopping you from walking to a muggle library and picking up a muggle encyclopedia. What’s an electric plug? Oh look, an entire fourteen pages on electricity. There’s fifty public libraries in Devon and, in the time this book takes place, over five hundred in London where Mr. Weasley worked. I think his befuddlement is supposed to be charming, but as a muggle it’s frankly offensive - he’s the wizarding world equivalent of a weeaboo who thinks he knows Japan because he can tell you every plot point in Bleach but if you ask him about the Diet he’ll tell you he isn’t on one. ARTHUR WEASLEY IS A CULTURE TOURIST AND IT”S OFFENSIVE.Most works of fiction argue that great power brings with it great responsibility, but that isn’t true of Harry Potter. I’ve said this before but it bears repeating: the series single biggest moral failing is that Voldemort’s philosophy is never disproven. He believes Magic Is Might, and Magic Makes Right, He’s correct - forget whatever bafflegab Dumbledore drones on about Harry’s bravery and courage, or the importance of love. Turn on the news, flip to Syria, read about dead children, and your response shouldn’t be ‘well Syrian mothers don’t love their children as much as Lilly Potter did” because it’ nonsense. Lilly Potter loved her son - and also could use magic and had as pell. The series argues that Voldemort underestimated love - but while that’s true, it also disingenuous. He didn’t know there was a goddamn super-crazy-powerful-spell that could use love. I think if he’d known before-hand he’d have been a lot more cautious. I underestimate the power of laughter as a literally fatal weapon, for example, but if it turns out that you can power a cannon with it I’m sure as heck going to reconsider that stance. It’s sounds poetic and meaningful to say that HArry was saved by love - but he was really saved by a spell. The closest the series comes to making good on it power of love is when Narcissa lies about Harry’s death to Voldemort - out of a love for her son - but if some other random Death had done the deed love wouldn’t have meant squat. (That scene always feels so contrived. I love in TLJ when Kylo Ren has his army fire repeatedly on a hated enemy - and he keeps them firing and firing and firing and firing until he’s damn-sure he’s got a corpse on his hand. I think Voldy really should have just been dumping spells on Harry’s prone body - really give into his rage.)For Harry to beat Voldemort, he would have had to prove that Voldemort that he was wrong - that there is a force more powerful than magic. But there isn’t. All the mothers’ love in the world didn’t stop one of the Creevy’s from dying, or one of the Weasleys, and so on. Add magic, though, and shit suddenly love is more than jsut an abstract concept - but what makes it so is magic. Voldemort claim that magic makes wizard’s superior to muggles - and nothing ever proves him wrong. (I don’t want to get into here because this is too long already, but Squibs and social ostracism also feed into that - if you’re a squib, you’re equally inferior. Nobody ever says “Filch is a squib, no wonder he despises the privilege class he has to look over all the time and that all his years here have made him very bitter’ but god damn.)The Second Wizarding War is about a war between two belief systems - not good and evil, but violence and the status quo. Voldemort believes that magic is powerful and that it gives its users the right to rule over the rest of the world. Dumbledor, the Order of the Phoenix, and everyone else who fights for returning the Wizarding World to the status quo believe that magic is powerful and that its gives it users the right to ignore the rest of the world. If you’re a farm child and you got your arm caught in a combine harvester and you lost it, the wizarding world wouldn’t care. It doesn’t matter that, unlike most other fiction, magic doesn’t seem to have any sort of equivalent exchange most of the time - magic doesn’t seem to cost wizards anything other than the few seconds it takes to cast a spell. Wizards can regrow the bones of an arm - probably the whole arm - but do they share it? No. They don’t even capitalize on it - selling it, demanding trade for it. They hide away completely, helping no-on ever.So when I say American Wizards would be Trump supporters if they were paying attention, I don’t say it because I believe that American Wizards canonically denounce Muslims or are big supporters of sexual harassment. I say it because what Trump stands for is what they stand for - isolationism, selfishness, self-absorption, a cutting off of the world and helping only your own. A morality system that treats altruism as morally indefensible. There’s a Bioshock AU out there where Rapture was populated entirely by Potter wizards - is a wizard’s not entitled to the sweat of his brow?Harry Potter is a wizarding hero, but is he everyone’s hero? Is his support for the Wizarding World’s status quo much more laudable that support for Voldemort - or is it a case of lesser evil, of choosing the uncaring over the actively aggressive? Why are wizards any better than Jeff Bezos, say - unimaginably powerful, utterly self-serving. ‘Muggles would want wizards to use magic to make their lives better’ - why is that a bad thing? Why is magic only for the benefit of those born into magical privilege?In conclusion, Arthur Weasley needs to check his privileged wizardboo ass and not treat my magic-less culture like its goddamn quaint and charming.

#Harry Potter #arthur weasley #voldemort #potterverse #argus filch #magic #squib #j.k. rowling #trump #america #bioshock #weeaboo

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vote-for-eggman · 7 years

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I would just like to ask, what is your reasoning for disagreeing with the death penalty? -Axis Anon

Reasons why the death penalty exists:

-Crime, usually of murder, grand theft, and/or sexual abuse/violence is committed.-Said criminal is deemed unsafe to go back into society. -To protect others.

Forced death is cruel. That should be all I should say. Killing an American citizen? Uhhhhhhh can I get a fucking uhhhhhh it’s right there in the text mofo.

PAST that.

The reason why the criminal is deemed unsafe is because they extend no remorse for their actions and/or their actions were/are a part of a pattern. For instance, woman stabs husband in heart for him cheating on her. She probably won’t stab someone again. She’d be jailed.

Where I’m going with this is this, people who make this a pattern are mentally unstable. Mentally ill. Child molesters, for instance.

I also have an, admittedly incredibly idealistic, humanitarian point of view. I believe everyone can and deserves a chance to redeem themselves.

There are people who are sent to death who are innocent. No percentage is too small when we, our country, is willing to put an innocent one of our own to death. One is enough to raise extreme caution for me. It happens, however rarely. It’s repulsive to excuse these mistakes.

“I don’t want my tax dollars going to-”

Shut up, you have to pay for dumb shit all the time under our noses. Men who have done worse are alive than others sent to death. Your tax dollars go to them, too, people who have done worse but not put on death row. You want to privatize prisons? Because we’ve seen how LOVELY that works.

I really hate sentences that start with that, too.

Death is a final solution to a temporary problem. The problem isn’t the crime so much as mental instability. Among other issues.

I do not like our government sponsoring death in general. I hate war. I especially hate death amongst our citizens. It’s inhumane.

I understand my point of view is naïve. I don’t argue against that fact. But I won’t change my point of view just because y'all want to snip off leaves instead of ripping out the roots.

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pbpress · 5 years

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By Katie Langlitz

It was a regular weekday school night. Mom was on the couch, watching whatever reality TV show or true crime documentary that had her attention at the moment, waiting for dinner to finish, and I was pacing the kitchen tiles, without much intent, my attention bouncing from her show, to my phone, back to her show. This particular program followed the lives of rich Southern millenials—and the scandals that come with a precious family legacy to preserve. As the cast idled around their mansion’s halls, the camera panned over a portrait of a man, most likely some ancestor of theirs. It held my attention. I had seen it before. I knew I had, but I didn’t have time to deliberate.

My mom switches the program, flickering through until she lands on a news channel. She lingers for a moment.

“Hey, have you heard about this?” My mother waves the remote at the screen: a water crisis in Flint, Michigan. Apparently, children throughout the city were suffering from mysterious illnesses and rashes, possibly linked to untreated tap water. No, I hadn’t.

The portrait forgotten, moments later I was on my laptop, beginning my descent into the tragedy in Flint:

In April of 2014, Flint switched from water purchased from Detroit to water pumped through the Flint River that runs through the city to save money while officials waited for a new pipeline from Lake Huron. Law-mandated chemicals controlling lead erosion had not been added to Flint’s pipes when the city switched to Flint River water, causing lead to break off, traveling through pipes into families’ homes. The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, as it was called at the time, told Flint officials that anti-corrosives were unnecessary, and a decision on whether the water was safe to drink could wait for another year. In essence Flint residents could drink possibly unsafe water for a whole year before officials were even willing to evaluate the situation. The result: in addition to disease-causing bacteria and carcinogens, which can cause cancer, Flint’s drinking water was flooded with lead. Brown, filmy water smelling like sewer and mysterious rashes breaking out on children’s skin soon brought Flint residents to town hall meetings with grievance.

Lead is an irreversible neurotoxin; no amount of it is safe. There is a lead-crime hypothesis that argues lead exposure triggers impulsivity, social aggression and even attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in children and thus causes delinquency and violent crime. Despite data collected by a concerned, local pediatrician revealing children in Flint were experiencing high levels of blood lead, authorities didn’t act. They accused her of fabricating reports to create baseless hysteria. It was not until outside researchers from Virginia Tech. conducted intensive research on the city’s water that the state admitted there was a problem, over a year later. In early 2016 the then Governor of Michigan, Rick Snyder, announced 87 cases of Legionnaires Disease, a type of pneumonia caused by bacteria, and 10 deaths linked to the water crisis in Flint.

I was stunned. This violation of human rights in Flint and the lethargy of government officials—it was comic book level villainy. How did something like this happen, in America, with something as essential to life as water? That seemed to be what everyone was asking. The EPA, United States Environmental Protection Agency, blames state officials for not following protocol mandating anti-corrosives, and the state blames the EPA for not enforcing federal policy. While politicians continue to point fingers at each other, a larger crisis sits at the center of the Flint water tragedy: racial bias, which is really a euphemism for systematic racism.

Wait. Before anyone rolls their eyes and pulls up their blinders, some historical context: Flint shadows the place it used to be. It used to bustle with a wealthy, urban core, booming with motor industries, but like many other Midwestern cities, was ravaged by abandonment. During the 1960’s General Motors, which was worshiped like religion by locals, relocated, and the city suffered subsequent economic depressions. Today, the population is lower than it has ever been since the 1920’s. Flint is also 57% black, 4% Latino and only 37% white. 40% of residents live below the poverty line, and although Flint is not quite as segregated as other cities like Detroit or Chicago, the black and Latino population suffer this poverty disproportionately. To compare, the United States is 77% white, 13% black and 18% Hispanic or Latino, and only 12% live in poverty, according to censuses from 2018.

Now this crisis doesn’t seem so mysterious; the reason why I’d never heard of it isn’t as elusive. The NAACP, or National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, spoke on this issue. The NAACP is the civil rights organization that championed black empowerment throughout the 1900’s, accredited for winning the 1954 Supreme Court Case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka that ruled racial segregation “inherently unequal” and overturned previous decisions disenfranchising blacks after the Civil War. According to a CNN article, in 2016 the NAACP said of Flint, “Would more have been done, and at a much faster pace, if nearly 40 percent of Flint residents were not living below the poverty line? The answer is unequivocally yes.” We all know it, too. If the same lead-laced water threatened a predominantly white, above the poverty line—not even upper class—community, there wouldn’t have even been a crisis. The issue would have been resolved before it reached the home of children, before it would kill innocent residents and sicken dozens more.

The injustice seen in Flint is occurring everywhere, everyday across America in less televised but just as obscene ways. Look at death row statistics. Account for variables like the number of victims, murder brutality, and we’re still more likely to convict someone for murdering a white person than a black person. Young black, American males are at same risk for gun homicide as nations with the highest murder rates in the world. Blacks with a college degree are more likely to be unemployed than similarly educated whites. When they are employed, blacks with a college degree are more likely than their whites to be underemployed for their skill level. Then, inflating these issues, Congress has decreased anti-discrimination agency funding over the years, such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which was established under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, one of the iconic civil rights bills Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. got passed through his nonviolent protests. According to the US Census Bureau, “none of the 10 states with the highest percentage of Black residents provide these agencies with annual funding of more than 70 cents per resident per year… In some states… more taxpayer dollars are spent on the governor’s salary than on protecting millions of residents from employment discrimination.”

After bingeing articles and documentaries on Flint, I felt slimy. The violation of human rights in that city was perpetuated by racism. Not the kind of racism we can see or hear; no N-words or confederate flags caused this. (Though, ironically, Confederate flags are popular home decor amongst white residents of Flint.) Systematic racism—the implicit and unconscious bias to value some people’s live more than others—did. It’s a filthy realization to come to, full of shame and guilt, and we do all we can to blunt it. Accepting systematic racism’s mere existence would admit our role—however small—in tragedies like Flint. That’s why we’re defensive when we hear people talk of ideas like “systematic racism.” Most of us pride ourselves on not being racist, on being better than our misguided ancestors so discovering we could be part of a system that perpetuates racism, being told we’re morally in the wrong, of course we want to deny it.

And we do. Even with disasters like Flint, we drown the guilt and hide behind those perky success stories, the ones you see on daytime talk shows and on college pamphlets, but they only dilute the truth. Just because a youth choir from Detroit makes it to 2nd place on a national talent show doesn’t help the thousands—47%—of children who live in poverty in that same city, but it does sedate our conscience. These stories tell us black poverty isn’t that bad: look at this one going to college, that one recovering from addiction.

It’s the epitome of cognitive dissonance—the uncomfortable feeling when conflicting beliefs or behaviors collide. In this case we are confronted with two realities of America: the one that upholds our founding fathers’ ideas of freedom and equality and the other that perpetuates injustice and hardship. In true cognitive dissonant fashion we alter one of these realities to fit the other. We ignore racial injustice—and deny ourselves a truly equal nation. It’s ironic; to preserve the idea we have of America, we stop it from ever becoming that.

However, the fact that TV programs exist solely to perpetuate these fairy tales of black empowerment reveal that this problem isn’t our fault. Not entirely, anyways: “groups tend to be more immoral than individuals”—Martin Luther King Jr. writes in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”—, and this is a system, schemed with intent. A system that encourages us to stay apathetic about racial injustice, that allows children to die from lead poisoning in the 21st century. That’s the tricky thing about systematic racism: it’s perpetuated by apathy, by inaction. That’s why it seems elusive. Unlike with racism we can see or hear, we don’t know who to blame. When someone slips the N-word or chuckles out a derogatory joke, we know who to point fingers at. With systematic racism because it is not an individual person or isolated event, we have no one to attack. It’s a system, and who do we blame for that?

That’s when I remembered the portrait from my mother’s reality TV show, the one about the wealthy Southerners. John C. Calhoun. If we ever charged someone with systematic racism, it’d be him. He was our 7th Vice President, second to the infamously tyrannical and racist Andrew Jackson. Amidst rising momentum for abolitionism in antebellum America, Calhoun performed his infamous “positive good” speech. Rejecting the previous justification for slavery as a “necessary evil,” Calhoun defended his “peculiar institution” as a morally righteous crusade rehabilitating the devolved black race. For example, he wrote, “in the course of a few generations it [the black race] has grown up under the fostering care of our institutions… to its present comparative civilized condition.” To Calhoun slavery, thus, was an honorable institution founded on good will and charity that Southerners should defend against the treasonous Northerners with pride and dignity.

He is the embodiment of systematic racism—and shows us why apathy is so dangerous. Calhoun’s descendants, the kids on that TV show, didn’t seem like racists. Privileged, sure, but not inherently evil people. No one was waving Confederate flags or marching for white pride, yet their very existence preserves the legacy—the wealth accumulated, the hierarchy instituted—of slavery. Emancipating blacks, establishing legal equality, founding empowerment agencies, although great feats, didn’t eradicate centuries of racism. It didn’t dethrone the Southern oligarch. A little slap on the wrist, a few elections diverted, and Calhoun’s fortune was allowed to survive—no, to thrive. His still-wealthy lineage are proof that there are people in this 21st century that, despite not being racist, benefit from slavery. If that sounds harsh, that’s because it is. They didn’t chose their ancestors, sure, but they also don’t seem too ashamed of it either. The man’s portrait is displayed in their home on national television for everyone to see. Not to mention that they actually kept the family name, “Calhoun,” despite its connotations; ask anyone who’s studied American history what they think of when they hear “Calhoun,” they’re going to tell you one of two things: states rights, slavery or both. Thus, his ancestors are ignoring the filthy implications of their family name. Either that, or they’re blatant, white supremacy level racists, which not too many people are nowadays. They stay ignorant and apathetic, and it’s apathy that protects the legacy of slavery, not racism. Well, not overt, N-word, confederate flag racism—rather, systematic racism.

Despite how nonexistent it may seem in our everyday lives, how elusive it makes itself, because this is a system, it doesn’t matter where you live; you exist as part of it, and within this system, like all systems, there are two forces: the force that drives and the force that resists—the engine and the friction—, and because of the nature of systematic racism, simple apathy and inaction qualify as driving forces. By not being an active counter force, you surrender your choice to be anything but the driving force spurring this institution of injustice forward.

Your ancestors probably didn’t single-handedly marshal the defense for slavery. You’re probably not an active member of the Aryan Brotherhood, but just because you don’t have an obvious connection to slavery, doesn’t mean you get a moral freebie. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote a letter to a group of 8 clergymen who contested that the battle against racial injustice should be fought solely in the courts, not the streets, denouncing King’s nonviolent protest. To this King was compelled to write his famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” Throughout the letter King necessitates direct action as a means to racial justice. Paralleling fundamental beliefs our founding fathers built this nation on, King writes, “One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws… “An unjust law is no law at all.”” In the context of systematic racism, we are not necessarily talking about statues, however, this same principle applies. We—as in, the ordinary people living in this country—must, with a diligent moral compass, sift through the status quo to determine what is just and what is unjust. Once we find injustice, we have a moral obligation to resist it—actively. However, we cannot resist a system without first knowing it exists; admitting our role in systematic racism is uncomfortable at best, but that’s okay. To quote King again, “constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth,” which he says his protests aim to create, “will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.” We need tension in our conscience to realize, sometimes, what is right and what is not. To confront a situation as it is, not as we wish it to be—even if it’s a little uncomfortable.

In the 21st century to be this active counter force which King calls for doesn’t necessarily mean you’re launching the NAACP 2.0. It can begin by owning up to our cognitive dissonance, by accepting systematic racism as it is, by educating ourselves, by not being silent and by no longer staying apathetic.

#Katie Langlitz #opinion #culture

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