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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 5 months ago

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By: Charles Gasparino

Published: Jul 6, 2024

There is a raging debate in corporate America on the future of DEI, aka Diversity Equity and Inclusion, because it is literally destroying businesses that go there.

And yet the American public may soon be subjected to DEI writ large in the next president of the United States, if Kamala Harris finds her way to the top of the Democratic ticket while Joe Biden wilts away as the party’s presidential nominee after his horrific debate performance.

Yes, maybe the most irrepressibly fatuous politician in America may become the leader of the free world because the Democratic Party is unable to break its DEI stranglehold.

Harris is already being hailed as the president-in-waiting as her boss Sleepy Joe — despite his defiant TV vow to George Stephanopoulos Friday night to stay in the race — increasingly faces reality that his chances of besting Trump are slim.

Calls that he should step down are mounting, paving the way for his VP to land at the top of the ticket.

Even if does stay and achieves the near impossible by pulling out a victory, you can bet he won’t survive four years.

Harris becomes the nation’s first DEI president by default.

For the American people it would be such an unfair and odd coronation.

Remember, she’s part of an administration that gave us inflation, world chaos and an open border that literally invites terrorists to enter the country and kill people.

She has spent nearly four years as Biden’s No. 2 flubbing every assignment given to her, including the border mess.

That’s on top of her manifest unlikability; her word salad whenever she tries to sound smart; her cackle when she laughs; her vaulting ambition.

She once suggested during a 2020 primary debate that her current boss was a racist for being against federally mandated busing.

But Biden’s busing stench wasn’t nasty enough to stop her from jumping at the chance to serve as his VP when DEI came calling.

Following the 2020 death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police, the pressure on Biden to pick a woman of color as his running mate was intense.

(And he boxed himself in by publicly saying his running mate would be a woman.)

Harris checked all the boxes: Her father, an academic with a Ph.D., is from Jamaica; her late mother, a biologist, was Indian.

VP Harris was a California state attorney general and a US senator.

Weak record

Yet if you delved, you would see a weak record of accomplishment, and weird personal tics (that aforementioned laugh), and an intense desire for power.

First Lady Jill Biden is said to have hated her but as one Dem operative told me before Joe Biden made her his VP: “She’s black and that is all that matters.”

DEI, of course, is a construct first embraced by academia, the lefty political class and then business that posits the world needs to be observed in terms of those historically oppressed (people of color and of diverse gender classifications) at the expense of the oppressor (namely white people and particularly white men).

Jobs, image making, TV programming must be seen through this warped view of reality.

It’s a topic I cover in my upcoming book “Go Woke, Go Broke,” illustrating how DEI had been ingrained in the corporate culture before the American people began to revolt.

Examples are endless.

Among them, Disney’s DEI mandates pushed so-called “queerness” into cartoons; trans women found their way into beer commercials; and there was a white-male hiring freeze at many corporations until relatively recently.

It’s fair to say the high-water mark of DEI was after Floyd’s death and continued for three years.

Now, corporate America is backtracking feverishly because while Americans respect the desire for diversity, they hate DEI’s purely idiotic demands where the offspring of rich South Americans get jobs over a white coal miner’s daughter.

It’s also patently illegal; the SCOTUS ruling outlawing affirmative action for college admissions is a precedent that lots of businesses want to avoid.

And they are, or at least starting to.

Consider the giant retailer Target.

In 2023, CEO Brian Cornell said, “The things we’ve done from a DE and I standpoint, it’s adding value, it’s helping us drive sales, it’s building greater engagement with both our teams and our guests.”

That was his rationalization for a massive Pride Month merchandising display in his stores — complete with mannequins wearing so-called tuck-friendly bathing suits, books about trans children being sold next to rainbow-colored onesies.

Then came the customer backlash from those who didn’t appreciate being indoctrinated when they shop.

In 2024, Cornell reduced Target’s Pride displays enough that no one really noticed.

So much for DEI adding value.

Some Dems I speak to caution me it’s not all DEI giving Harris the edge to replace Biden.

She is, after all, the VP. If she’s on a new ticket, it gets to keep money raised already, not start from scratch.

OK, but I can’t imagine money will be an issue.

One possible nominee, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, is a billionaire.

The Dem money machine on Wall Street and Silicon Valley is formidable.

Yet the country might just be stuck with Harris as president if Sleepy Joe wins and stumbles his way to resignation while in his second term, or if Biden drops out in the coming days and she becomes the nominee.

All because DEI is the Democratic Party’s touchstone, no matter how much evidence amasses that it’s a failed ideology.

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#Charles Gasparino #Kamala Harris #diversity hire #DEI hire #The Daily Show #diversity equity and inclusion #diversity #equity #inclusion #DEI president #religion is a mental illness

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russilton · 5 months ago

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"George is never going to be asked to apologise for those fans is he?"

You HAVE to be joking…………. Those few George fans who don't like Lewis are one of the most marginal groups with no online presence, and you never see such a level of nastiness and hate from them, while TeamLH are the biggest and most aggressive fanbase in the sport. Big enough to bully Mercedes into making apology posts for nothing.

And the fact Lewis faced abuse does not excuse him of making remarks that fuel the conspiracy theories and homophobic comments against George, his TEAMMATE. But I'm not surprised you're once again making excuses for him. Lewis knows, George knows, and everybody knows what's been going on because it's impossible to miss. Lewis never respected George and he continues to show that. You'd be better off following the opposite of those you mentioned. Quit pretending you care about George, and just rep Lewis.

“Shitty George fans are a marginal fan base you never hear from” bullshit, proven by the fact you’re still here. You are so pathologically obsessed with making yourself angry to prove a point you FOLLOW me, and you’re going to choke on your own tongue.

I love George, his fans actions are not his fault— but you know who I’ve received the most inter fan abuse from? It’s George’s.

Lewis fans who disagree with me don’t give a shit what I think and they move on, it’s the George Fans who have come back to my inbox, misgendered me, called me slurs, told me I need to take my gay little hands elsewhere and that George would never support the causes I did. More than once I’ve been told that these people are glad George will never care about those issues and they’re glad he didn’t go woke. Go back and look at the past wanky anons I’ve had I can count the amount of bad Lewis ones on one hand (becuse they just block me like adults) vs George fans desperate to make themselves seem better than it

People who call themselves george fans who are just “Lewis critical” will openly parrot racist adjacent dog whistles here without blinking. I once watched one of the biggest George blogs on this website say they were glad Lewis was leaving and some brand were leaving with him because George would bring “classy” brands back to Merc instead. The subtext there was anything but fucking subtle and it’s directly out of the playbooks of white pundits who said that any things Lewis did off the track were “unprofessional”

Your high horse is a fuckin Shetland pony dude, and you’re ankle high in horse shit trying to pretend it’s not there. Don’t try to piss on my boots and tell me no one you know can pee, George is as responsible for his fans shit behaviour as Lewis is for his, and the odds of him being asked about it are slim to none

One groups shitty behaviour may be louder but it doesn’t mean you aren’t shouting worse shit behind them.

#asks #anonymous #wank/ rants

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semi-imaginary-place · 10 months ago

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Tolkien's Legendarium in the Modern World

It has been over 100 years since Tolkien first began his work on Middle Earth with the first draft verses of Luthien and Beren's story and the world has changed much in that time. Tolkien never published most of Legendarium until the end of his life he continued to draft and redraft its stories, and this begets the question of what Tolkien would have wished a completed Legendarium to look like and what I would have liked the Legendarium to be.

I personally disagree with most of Professor Tolkien's political opinions. While I do not think he was ever mean spirited, to the grave he carried with him many old fashioned ideas that while not quite bigoted in themselves, underpinned a lot of bigoted talking points. For example after people wrote to him about the troubling implications of his Dwarves on the Jewish people, Tolkien in response changed his depiction and mythology about Dwarves, he genuinely tried to do better. However what he never corrected was the view was that there were inherent differences between the different kinds of people of the world. Giving minorities a positive stereotype is not necessarily a good thing (hardworking, good with money, etc.). It feeds into the model minority myth that pits minorities against each other and acts as a rallying point for white supremacists that X minority is a threat to the white race.

The more racist parts of the Legendarium however are not the Dwarves but the descriptions of the Lesser Men, the Men of Darkness. There exists this hierarchy of the types of Men with the enlightened and European-like High Men such as the Dúnedain at the top, followed by the Middle Men or Men of Twilight like the Rohirrim or most of the other European-like Men, and at the bottom are the Men of Darkness those groups of men who fell under the control of Sauron (note how the European men were wise/strong enough to fight off Evil but the other types weren't) like the Haradrim, the Hill-men and others who are described with racist language that was also used to describe Middle Eastern peoples, African peoples, and really anyone Europeans considered a savage. Yikes, let's just scrub that, it would be impossible to rid the Legendarium of the eurocentrism but I would at least remove the most racist parts. Nor would I want to remove all of the Eurocentrism, Tolkien after all was directly inspired by European literature and epics, that is the literary ancestry of the Legendarium and I would not discredit it.

It is not bad for works to include racism or other sensitive topics, I would instead turn the Eurocentrism present in the Legendarium into a commentary on the ignorance of Middle Earth on the rest of Arda and the woes of a limited perspective. This idea was present in some drafts, that the entirety of the Legendarium was a story told to a human sailor that had washed up on the shores of Tol Eressëa and thus what the audience sees is actually a story within a story, thus making all the biases of the Legendarium the biases of that in universe storyteller. Of what Tolkien ever drafted, most of it is Noldorian history or history recorded by those associated with the Noldor. We barely hear mention of the Elves that refused the Great Journey presumably because the Noldor did not care for the histories of those people, placing themselves (Eldar and Calaquendi) above the Avari. Even the words used to describe groups of Elves are primarily Noldorian (or High Elvish) or Sindarian (normal Elvish) and the Sindar were greatly influenced by Thingol who saw the light of the Trees and Melian who was a Maia. Much of the Lord of the Rings is told from the perspective of Middle Earth (Gondor, Elrond, Hobbits), instead of completely eliminating the racism I would tone it down and make it more clear that the racism present if a product of the in story authors and their perspectives. Another option though I am not as fond of it and it would be harder to do is to lean into the bigotry, confirm that it is baked into the universe and thus lean more heavily into the tragedy that all the character's live in a universe there racism and a lack of free will are inherent parts of the fabric or reality and inescapable (more on this later).

There are many social issues I could talk about here, but for me what is most blatantly chaffing is the Catholicism. Tolkien's Legendarium is a Catholic work. Professor Tolkien himself was devotedly Catholic and traditionally Catholic, and that undercurrent of Catholicism permeates every aspect of the Legendarium. The Catholicism shows up everywhere from the mythos have a one true god that is a all powerful, all knowing, and benevolent creator, to how weird the Legendarium is about divorce (like a divorce had the butterfly effect causing most of the First Age's problems), discussions of morality and free will are very much made with Catholic theology in mind, the Catholic focus on purity, marriage is a sacred act between two soulmates destined for each other, sex is what makes a marriage real, and divorce is evil. It would be impossible to remove all the Catholicism and have the Legendarium to still be recognizable. As someone who recognizes the sheer amount of cultural destruction Christianity has wrought upon this world, if I were to rewrite the Legendarium, to create its ideal form, I would tone down the Catholic-ness of it though not entirely eliminate it, the question is how.

In the Legendarium, alignment with Eru Ilúvatar's will equates good and to turn away is to be evil. Melkor, Sauron, and Saruman are all examples of this, all three started out wanted to do good, to improve the lives of the people of Arda. For example in the beginning of the universe Melkor wasn't out for destruction and suffering, no what he wanted was freedom of will and choice, individuality. It was in defying Ilúvatar that he was corrupted because Ilúvatar's will is good and to rebel against it is to do evil, good and fix are fixed universal constants in Arda. I personally am fascinated by the inherent existentialist themes present in the Legendarium's cosmology. If there is a fixed path before each person and to stray from it means to become cosmologically evil, what is the moral thing to do? The relationship between creator and created, Elves and Dwarves were designed for a purpose what does it mean to fulfill that purpose or nature? Ilúvatar's Theme as first envisioned was never realized, Arda was created marred, suffering and discomfort are inherent aspects to existence on Arda. Similar themes can be found in other existentialist series such as the NieR games. Elves in Arda are bound to it, they cannot escape their fates even in death, their very essences are tied to the fate of Arda. It is curious then that humans are the sole beings that can escape Illuvatar's will and the fate of Arda, the have what Morgoth sorely coveted, the freedom to individually choose how to live their lives, The Gift of Man. I would keep this aspect even if it does still reek of Catholicism.

This brings us to one of the pivotal events of the First Age, The Finwë Divorce Saga. Tolkien himself wrote that he did not intend the Legendarium to be a Catholic allegory mostly because he hated allegories, but the man was so deeply Catholic that it just permeated everything he created. One could view The War of the Jewels as a cautionary tale of how divorce is evil and will only cause trouble to everyone even if Tolkien did not intend that specific reading, his views on marriage and divorce still leaked through. But Feanor and his family drama is such a keystone to the events of the First Age that the entirety of that era cannot exist without him. What I would do then in a rewrite is shift the narrative blame away from Finwe and Miriel and over to the Valar. The problems that followed were primarily because of the Valar mishandling the situation, not that Miriel and Finwe wanted a divorce. Hints of this interpretation already exist in The Silmarillion and HOME so its not that I would be creating something new so much as shifting emphasis.

This would also necessitate making the Elves less Catholic as Elf culture is very Catholic. Because Elven spirits (fea) are tied to the fate of Arda they are immortal so long as the world exists, unlike humans when Elves die their spirits do not leave the world, so their loved ones and partners are not truly gone. To each elf, they have one true soulmate and thus their marriages are eternal, until the end of existence. I would just get rid of this or at least tone it down, remove some of the mysticism or marriage being a literal magic bond. For one I feel what the Elves do takes away the true joy and uniqueness of each romantic relationship, that it is something people chose, that people chose each other and they could have chosen differently. I think Tolkien wanted to highlight the unchanging eternal nature of his Elves, because to support divorce would mean acknowledging that people and feelings change (just like his marriage, yes I said it, in their later years John and Edith lived lives that little to do with each other even if they shared a house). There is something to believing that because each soul is inherently and immutably good, every single person can be saved no matter how far they fall because its impossible for that base nature to change. I do not believe that, but even if it were true (which would fit the cosmology as discussed above), that does not discount all the "surface" level changes a person can undergo. Take Maedhros one of my favorite characters for example, even if he had an unchanging immortal soul or whatever Catholics are calling it these days, his behavior changed. Maedhros had all the set up of a classical hero (eldest son of a storied and prestigious lineage, skilled at both pen and sword, a diplomat, a leader, loyal, determined), and his story is about him failing to become that hero and just becoming worse over time to where by the end he's killing innocents and people fighting against the great Evil, and he commits the ultimate sin of killing himself (also suicide being a sin is very Catholic).

Others have discussed the problems with depictions of women in the Legendarium but to cover a couple major points, the Legendarium just lacks women there are barely any female characters, and of the women present it's like they are only allowed to act within the bounds of traditional European femininity. Take for example Luthien who is probably the single most powerful non-Maia in the series (well she is half but she's counted among the elves), and yet her power in the story manifests solely through traditionally feminine domains like weaving. This on its own would not be a problem, women are allowed to like feminine things and Luthien has a lot of agency within her story, the problem is that there are so few women in the Legendarium and they are all like this, what powers they have always coming from the feminine sphere.

And of course because the Legendarium is a Catholic work the concept of purity is tied to morality and applied to women. Through reading many different drafts and letters Galadrieal can likely be suspected of being one of Tolkien's favorites. Her role in the Swearing of the Oath and First Kinslaying at Alqualondë vary drastically between drafts. In earlier drafts she sided with Feanor and the Noldor and though she did not swear the Oath of Feanor and thus doom herself, in these earlier drafts she is counted among the leaders of the Noldor revolt and like them is exiled from Aman. In other drafts she alternately does not participate in the attack on Alqualondë or even fights with her mother's brethren the Teleri against Feanor's forces, in some she crosses the Ice with Fingolfin's forces and in a particular draft she has nothing to do with the Exile of the Noldor and comes to Middle Earth by her own boat for her own means the timing just so happens to coincidentally line up. Generally in later drafts Tolkien bends over backwards to make exceptions for Galadrial so that she commits less sins and remains pure, he removes her rebellion against the divine and associations with the Exiled Noldor and thus retcons the most interesting aspect of her character in order to keep her unstained. This is one of two time where I have a strong preference for earlier drafts of the Legendarium (the other is draft epilogue where The Lord of the Rings ends with Sam looking back before closing the door as he hears the whisper of Aman on the wind). Those later drafts do a massive disservice to her character. Galadriel's whole character arc is that she starts off a headstrong, prideful, rebellious princess who want a kingdom of her own because she wants the power to rule over other people and through the devastation of the First and Second Ages she mellows out to become one of the wisest people in Middle Earth who would look power in the face and say no, who rules to serve and protect the people in her kingdom. Galadriel is so much more if Tolkien allows her to make mistakes when she was younger, to carry the guilt of what she enabled and allowed or perhaps participated in and have that weight shape her for the better. Then her actions in Middle Earth become not about how she was always good and pure, they become about redemption and taking the marred and the ugly and making something worthwhile out of it.

Éowyn the one character who noticeably steps beyond the boundaries for women, gets shoved back into traditional femininity at the end of her story, choosing to leave the battlefield to tend hearth and home. Now this likely was not intentional on Professor Tolkien's part. What he intended was a continuation of his anti-war stance seen throughout his works. World War I was brutal and massive shock to the world, recent innovations in technology made killing easier and faster, so while not the bloodiest conflict in history it was an abrupt wake up to the traditional modes of war. Soldiers went out and were slaughtered, most of Tolkien's tight-knit friend-group died in that war. On the battlefield Tolkien found no glory or honor, all he saw were the horrors of war, the human cost and the purposeless suffering inflicted. His anti-war stance can been seen most clearly outside the Legendarium in The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son which is a dialectic between an veteran soldier and a new soldier. Within The Lord of the Rings we see this is how Sam in the true hero of this story, in how hobbits value peace and good food over war or politics, in how the best men like Aragorn and Faramir are peaceful and would rather choose the pen over the sword. We see this most strongly in "The Scouring of the Shire" which arguably is the most thematically poignant part of The Lord of the Rings, because the a person's story does not end with the battle, sometimes war never ends for some people, and yet there are things worth fighting for in this world. War is terrible, but sometimes we have to fight to protect the simple good things in the world and it is not some destined hero that will save us but ordinary people rising to the occasion together. However it is incredibly conspicuous that the only major female character shown on the battlefield was the one forced to carry this narrative of putting down her sword to take care of a household. There are dozens of men in this story that fight in the War of the Ring and we do not see any of them retiring from fighting and choosing domesticity. It would have been so powerful if Tolkien chosen her brother the war chief Eomer to carry this message, imagine if it were him who came from a warrior culture and becomes warrior-king who chose to put down his sword and forswear fighting. So yes I would have rewritten Eowyn's ending, let malewife Faramir have his kickass girlboss wife. Let Eowyn's arc be her fielding herself out of despair and a desire to prove herself, and her character development learning that she is more powerful than she thought and that she will continue to wield the sword in service of Rohan, her people, and in service of peace.

Now I have typed some 3000 words about what I would change and why so let me end on some of the things I would keep the same for I love the Legendarium dearly and I would preserve far more than I would change. I would keep the hope and love that is written into these stories. I would keep that there is beauty in this world, there is good in friends and family. I would keep the awe and wonder for the natural world, that mountains and forests and streams can be their own characters. I would keep the sense of magic, not in the sense of spellcasting and sword and sorcery style magic, but that wonder and joy for the world that makes everything magical. I would keep that life is a journey and all you have to do is take the first step out your front door. I would keep the believably that this is just an untold forgotten history and like it there are still many mysteries in the world. I would keep the wide scale of continents and forces beyond us moving to their own stories. Tolkien crafted the Legendarium out of love, from that first poem about the woman he was in love with, to his love of philology stories and creation, Arda was made with love. In the Legendarium is deep love of the world, the natural world and the people that inhabit it, in here is hope too that no matter what evils plague the world there is still good there too in the hearts of the most ordinary person.

#tolkien #lotr #jrr tolkien #lord of the rings #silmarillion #the hobbit #middle earth #eowyn #galadriel #Last time fundamentalist christian tradwife tumblr found me so im gonna say:#christianity is a force of western colonialism imperialism bigotry and hate #It has been globally one of the biggest drivers of genocide ever #also TRANS RIGHTS terfs get out

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cosmicretreat · 17 days ago

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Over on Reddit, there’s a lot of discussion about the breakdown of voter demographics, and every time someone realizes Gen Z males went harder than expected for trump, some Zoomer redpiller swoops in whining about “I got tired of being called a cis white male (derogatory) so I decided to do the most racist, sexist thing possible and alter the course of history for the next hundred years in the worst way possible FOR THE LULZ!”

It’s Comicsgate again, but with political power. It’s a generation of selfish stupid nihilist incels who were raised by manosphere YouTube nazis who kept telling them chicks won’t fuck them because of the 19th Amendment. And now these broccoli-haired bros are all over social media giggling about how they’re “embracing absurdity” because there’s no future and patting themselves on the back about “restoring the rightful order.” Because they couldn’t get dates and figured there must be some grand reasoning behind it. Really it’s just that they’re spewing PUA nonsense and thinking they’re owed submission. They cannot WAIT to take away your rights.

I studied history and sociology in college. People like me saw this coming for decades. The parallels to the period between WWI and WWII were uncanny. The road here was paved with people telling us to stop overreacting. And the Roganification of America steadily continued. Kimmel will have a lot to say even though The Man Show played a crucial role in getting us here. Almost thirty years ago I complained about the return of frat bro “boys will be boys” sexism. I called it Maxim Culture. People told me to calm down. And now a generation of incels raised by Maxim Culture losers into believing Me Too was a personal attack on their future are guffawing about how scared everyone else is. They think they’re going to be kings of the new world and not sent to die in trump’s wars.

They were raised badly. The Bush-Cheney years really dismantled education and crippled the power of teachers. When I was a teacher you could see the impossible limitations we were up against. It’s only gotten worse. Trump’s failure on Covid led to a lot of kids getting an irreparable gap where they were isolated and brainwashed by abusive algorithms that delivered them divisive rage bait. The richest country in the world can’t raise their own kids because wealth is concentrated in the hands of a very few.

We let this happen, but we didn’t know it was happening because we’ve been stuck on a hamster wheel of just trying to survive for most of my adult life. Now progress is in danger, peril seems inevitable, and prosperity seems like an impossible dream. The sheer force of apathy and the lack of urgency in dealing with even a single problem in America has led me to a pretty cynical mindset. I don’t think I’ll live very long through the coming destruction of what safety net we still have. Thank god I live in one of the few blue areas left.

Please love each other the best you can, and for fuck’s sake support each other. Stop mocking each other’s values and concerns and try listening. Be caring even when it’s hard to do because it’s going to be one of the best ways to fight the encroaching darkness. But also, maybe stop giving people the benefit of the doubt when they’re spewing fascism for years and years. We were not overreacting. We’re still not. You can’t just wait for this to blow over. Speak truth to power, shame the devils and eat the fucking rich.

Also, don't feel bad about cutting anyone out of your life who supported trump or any of his cronies. Don't feel bad about cutting out anyone who didn't take this seriously and didn't vote. You have no obligation to interact in your personal life with people who make you feel bullied and dehumanized. You're not being selfish, you're trying to survive.

#me

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kellodrawsalot · 4 months ago

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Since I've been looking to some of those anonymous things, at least those links they're not wrong and I think I should address this so people could be aware of this as well About those people RandomFox and him and his insane Friends If they're even friends I'm not scared of them I know how to deal with them Especially their cult leader.

RandomFox Isn't insane human being Like where to begin.

He's sexist, Extremely racist Talking bad about black people Has said the N-word many times Racist to Spanish people Literally said he was gunned down all Mexican people and said there are all just much brownies I'm not joking Literally talks about he will kill anyone in the Sonic the hedgehog fanbase supporting IDW He talked about he's not in hedge and he would never shoot anyone Or kill anyone because it's common sense. Yeah, but when he makes tweets about that on his Twitter and Tumblr It sounds very hypocritical Especially his hate boner for Ian Flynn Which is super creepy and disturbing Stalking him everyday horror on his tweet when he blocks him I'm making fake accusations about him when he can just actually talk to him like a normal person, including the other idw writers Again, he actually has sent death threats to him, literally wants to kill him, considering he does have guns Like I said, he even talked about. He would kill someone if they were black And he would get away with it because he is white.

He literally once the gate keeps Sonic the hedgehog Peab told him why not just read something else or enjoy what you enjoy, including with his friends, but no trying to be civil with him is impossible, including his friends It doesn't matter what you say to him. What if your intentions are good or not. He will mock you argue with you and fight you And laugh at you or screenshot your tweet for his friends to make fun of you To him, you're just a dumb Poo poo head and he's the smart one. He's literally the real life creep so.

Oh I almost forgot he's transphobic He talks about he's not transphobic one time Guilty Gear Video Bridget When the character was trans Saying that he's not transfer big or uncomfortable with them, but he has said a lot of transfer big things to actual transpeople and characters, whatever the reflection or real life.

https://x.com/literallyme_bad/status/1804544377274179628?t=gUnONEY8F1xOtzdQ_Exwvg&s=19

https://x.com/rabbitdongo/status/1811292890338836902?t=9X35bdYQXTj5PGH792mOEQ&s=19

Doesn't really help his accusations He says he's also Pansexual But I think he's just gay and not the good kind of gay Only G Matters to him and the in LGBT Community Including fictional kid characters I'm not against anyone's cakes or anything and I know some people who have kinks, but the difference is, they're actually safe with it and don't aren't hurting anyone Before RandomFox He is super creepy with it , especially with fictional kid characters And he likes seeing boy characters dress up in female clothing Which feels super creepy The only female character he's ever talked about is cream the rabbit And finally, he really likes to sexualize everything And is weird brain. He talks about. He has a boyfriend but I highly doubt it He's never shown his pitcher up his boyfriend at all.

Any hateful fan made projects Especially the sonic eye and dragon wall of bridge when again, he's a hypocrite. I believe his friends made a fan made game And he makes erotic fan fictions with the sonic characters a big hypocrite He talks about he's sometimes a victim being bullied when he's kind of harassed and sends death threats to people and screenshot people And like you said, when you were arguing with that weirdo

Yeah, he kind of stalks kids and screenshots them and gets mad at them and sends trets to them Really not helping the pedal accusations for RandomFox Again, he talks about he knows how Sega works and thinks Sega is his best friend Just because he plays the games Whenever one has their own interpretation with the games He literally believes that if we didn't had any other sonic content or any type of media adaptation to what series we would all not fight each other.

He literally stalks and harassed kids who are minors in the fanbase When this whole series is targeted to kids sometimes even if they will be all ages He screenshots them sets threats to them on his tumbler or Twitter Not really helping the pedal accusations He literally If we didn't have any type of sonic media We wouldn't be fighting shutter or any type of media.Any type of series. And he clearly thinks he knows saga Like he thinks Sega is his best friend When the more you buy their products and special IDW the more you're supporting IDW.

Again? Has he ever interviewed with Sega or any of the people of idw nope? I've seen actual people interview them and talk to them. Civilly like normal people, including in the fanbase, what does he do? That's all he talks about every day, what a waste of his life.

Thank you for informing me, I was aware he harassed young sonic fans, an anon already told me that. I dont want to make any assumptions about his love life, orientation or kinks , But Im pretty sure no professional wants to interact with this kind of person for obvious reasons. I know you send me another ask about this but I wanted to leave this topic on this for now. Best to avoid this guy. I do agree it all reminds me very much of Arick.

#Sonic fanbase #Arick

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mariacallous · 2 years ago

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TUNIS, Tunisia—Tunisian President Kais Saied’s clampdown on both political opponents and undocumented Black migrants has accelerated in the past weeks, turning Tunisia into a country that has become unrecognizable from the one that gave birth to the Arab Spring revolutions that swept the region in 2011.

“Hordes of illegal immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa are still arriving, with all the violence, crime, and unacceptable practices that entails,” he told his national security council on Feb. 21. As for those arrested, often without charge, they were simply called “terrorists” and “traitors.”

The conspiratorial thinking that has long defined the novice politician, who came to power in a landslide election victory in 2019, now looks to have spread across much of Tunisia, with the hitherto little-known Parti Nationaliste Tunisien (PNT) leading a campaign flooding Tunisia’s social media with attacks on the country’s migrants.

Elsewhere, newspapers and television channels devote airtime to the latest international and domestic conspiracies intended to destabilize Tunisia. All the while, gaps on supermarket shelves remain, and the long-promised International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout of the country’s economy is as distant a prospect as ever.

Outside the International Organization for Migration building in Tunis,, a makeshift village of tarpaulins and blankets—which has grown over the last few months—is now strained to breaking point, as more undocumented Black migrants from across Africa compete for space.

Stories of evictions are the norm. Accounts of attacks with machetes, knives, and beatings are common. Many people speak about the burning of property and the withholding of wages. Before the president’s speech in February, awareness of racism in Tunisia existed but was barely spoken of. Now, it has come to define their lives.

On one street, a young Nigerian couple and their baby nestle under nylon blankets on a makeshift bed, protecting themselves from a bitter wind that blows off the nearby lake. “We’ve been here for almost a week,” said the woman, who asked not to be named. Before that, they’d spent the last few months living in one of the working-class neighborhoods that skirt the capital. “Things are very bad now. No home to stay in. The landlord drives us out. The police and the people harass us in the street. No work, no money. Nothing.”

Asked how she will describe Tunisia to friends in Nigeria, she barely pauses. “I will tell them what I experienced. A lot of Tunisians are very good, but many”—she pauses—“are very bad.”

Saied’s crackdown on internal critics and opposition figures had already drawn international criticism before his racially charged broadside against Tunisia’s vulnerable community of undocumented Black migrants on Feb. 21. He accused them of participating in a plot to change the demographics of Tunisia, echoing the so-called great replacement conspiracy theory popular with the European and American far right and that has inspired a number of racist killers around the globe. Saied’s claims have already won the approval of French far-right politician Éric Zemmour. However, to what degree Saied is motivated by cynicism and whether he believes these theories remain unknown.

The number of Black migrants, just like the number of white migrants—who include Western aid workers, development officers, and a large number of Libyans living in the capital’s northern suburbs—is impossible to determine with any accuracy. All told, there are thought to be around 21,000 Black migrants overall in Tunisia; many of them, through Tunisia’s opaque bureaucratic systems, are without the correct paperwork—meaning that establishing legal residency is almost impossible.

As such, accommodations are often arranged informally, through friends or with pliant landlords, and income is generated through casual employment, a plight ironically familiar to the thousands of Tunisians who migrate to Europe without paperwork every year.

Any mention of the dissonance between the treatment of Tunisians in Europe and what is meted out to undocumented Black migrants in Tunisia elicits little but frowns in the working class reaches of La Soukra in Ariana, next to the capital. “The EU won’t let them in, so they’re forced back here,” Bassem Khazmi, a fruit and vegetable wholesaler, said of the Black migrants to a translator.

Asked how the relatively small number of undocumented Black migrants compare to the thousands of Tunisians who leave for Europe without paperwork every year, Khazmi swiftly changes the topic.

However, the scale of the violence that followed Saied’s comments has surprised many observers. Testimonies of those impacted are startling. Evictions of Black migrants are widespread, with entire families being displaced across the country. In the last few days, InfoMigrants, a news site dedicated to the issue of migration, reported that four Black migrants were stabbed in the central coastal city of Sfax, while in Tunis, four students reported being attacked after leaving their university residence.

Elsewhere, in many of the country’s cities, gangs of predominantly young men are nightly kicking down doors and dragging Black migrant families into the street, some to watch their possessions burn. Testimonies of those confined to their houses, too scared to emerge for fear of their neighbors reporting them, are legion.

Few people would deny that some underlying racial tension has simmered under Tunisia’s ostensibly progressive surface for some time. However, since the start of February, a campaign calling on Tunisians to report undocumented migrants to the authorities by the PNT—under the leadership of Sofien Ben Sghaïer and recognized as an official party since 2018—has gained both traction and media coverage. In the first 25 days of February, spanning the period before and immediately after the president’s intervention, the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights told FP that an estimated 1,540 Black migrants were arrested.

“I don’t know what his motivations are,” Amnesty International’s Amna Guellali said, whe asked if the president’s comments were an effort to distract from his economic failures. “I don’t know if he’s surprised at the level of vigilante violence and xenophobia his words have unleashed … but he’s given the green light to a lot of people’s hatred.”

As the unrest has continued, hundreds of members of Tunis’s predominantly young and educated activist community, largely absent from the country’s street politics since Saied’s power grab in 2021, mobilized over the weekend to voice their solidarity with the country’s Black migrants.

By doing so, many Tunisians found themselves in surprising ideological lockstep with their former opponents among the country’s political parties, who were exercised by the arbitrary arrests of many former legislators when Saied froze parliament and dismissed the country’s prime minister. Whatever their intention, by coming together, they at least present the president with something approaching a unified—if still fragmented—opposition.

What difference that might make is unclear. Saied’s clampdown on the opposition has received widespread international criticism, from the United Nations to the African Union. His response has been to express surprise at censure and remind his critics overseas that Tunisia remains sovereign, risking future isolation and potential penury at a time when the country needs its allies the most.

However, what the president’s vision—either political or economic—for the country might be remains a mystery. As a potentially catastrophic default on Tunisia’s international loans becomes increasingly likely, Saied appears oblivious to the looming disaster. Rather than form a social contract with the country’s principal trade union—the Tunisian General Labor Union, which he will need to introduce the social reform he will likely require—he has expelled the union’s high-profile guest, European Trade Union Confederation chief Esther Lynch, for interfering in the country’s internal affairs during her address to a union rally.

Elsewhere, as negotiations on the IMF’s vital $1.9 billion bailout appear to have stalled, doubts over Saied’s willingness to engage in the international commitments and internal concessions needed to secure the loan are also finding voice.

In their place, he continues to target the “traitors” and “terrorists” of his opposition, accusing them of conspiring to assassinate him and selling out the country to unnamed foreign powers. With every showing, the president’s accusations have grown more idiosyncratic, with one list purporting to be of those conspiring against state security, including French public intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy.

The scale and ferocity of Saied’s political purges are increasing daily. A growing number of the president’s critics and opponents have all been arrested—many without charge—in just the last few weeks. Those detained include key figures, from the leadership of the National Salvation Front and Citizens Against the Coup—groups dominated by many of the country’s former political parties—to the owner of a popular independent radio station to judges, lawyers, and businesspeople who have all been arrested by a freshly invigorated police force.

Some people have been accused of conspiring in the subsidized food shortages, and some are accused of increasing prices across the country. Others stand accused of plotting with the U.S. Embassy against Saied’s increasingly idiosyncratic rule.

Screenshots of representatives from Citizens Against the Coup, including what appears to be opposition activists Chaima Issa and Jaouhar Ben Mbarek setting up a meeting with the U.S. Embassy in Tunis, have been shared widely on Tunisia’s social media. Both Issa and Ben Mbarek have since been arrested. Issa has been charged with spreading false information; charges against Ben Mbarek are unknown as of time of writing.

In a statement issued to Foreign Policy, the U.S. State Department expressed its alarm that criminal charges against individuals in Tunisia resulting from contact with embassy officials may have led to their detention. The statement said: “A primary role for any U.S. Embassy or diplomat in every country in which we have a diplomatic presence is to meet with a wide array of individuals to inform the United States’ understanding of the different views and perspectives in that country. Tunisian and other foreign diplomats posted to the United States regularly engage in similar meetings.”

Irrespective of the details of any particular meeting, charges and accusations against many of the people now detained strain credulity.

“So much of what he’s saying is ridiculous,” said Hamza Meddeb, a fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Center. “I mean, how can a few individuals in Tunis cause a national food shortage and price rises? However, many within Tunisia’s security services are going along with it. It’s a marriage of convenience. They get to close down the public space while escalating repression across Tunisia. They don’t need to worry about the logic of what the president is saying. It doesn’t matter. This is about power.”

Moreover, with many of those arrested perceived as members of the country’s elite and political classes—whom many citizens blame for their current difficulties—the recent round of arrests is working in tandem with the campaign to scapegoat Black migrants.

“It’s basically an essay in populism,” Meddeb said. It has also unleashed repressed racism.

In Tunis, with the memory of former autocrat Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali still fresh in people’s memory, an old man in the city center openly boasted to a camera that his ancestors had trafficked in slaves.

For many Black migrants, undocumented and increasingly documented, none of it matters. Standing outside the embassy of the Ivory Coast near central Tunis, a family of documented Black migrants are preparing to leave. “Since the president’s speech, it has been very bad,” the father said. Asked if the change in attitudes toward migrants was sudden, he added, “It was like a switch being flipped.”

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aroseofonesown · 5 months ago

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What does my room look like?

A few months ago I made a point to read through Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, a foundational work of feminist thought. Woolf explores with us the Library at Oxford, a place she is not even admitted without a man's introduction, and there she ruminates on the history of women's written work; first poetry, then novels, and finally academic works.

The core argument of A Room of One's Own is that women could not write, not because they lacked the intelligence or the creative spark needed, but because they were not given the means to do so. It is only when women have time, money, and education that they can create.

"Be that as it may, I could not help thinking, as I looked at the works of Shakespeare on the shelf, that the bishop was right at least in this; it would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare." -Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

Much more educated and elegant writers have said a lot about this text, so I will leave the analysis of it to them. I do however want to talk about what struck me powerfully when reading it.

Indeed, since freedom and fullness of expression are of the essence of the art, such a lack of tradition, such a scarcity and inadequacy of tools, must have told enormously upon the writing of women. Moreover, a book is not made of sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades or domes. And this shape too has been made by men out of their own needs for their own uses. There is no reason to think that the form of the epic or of the poetic play suit a woman any more than the sentence suits her. -Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

I was floored when I read this passage. Woolf argues not just that women lacked the means to write, but that the entire history of the written word is built on the foundations of male thought. And I, with my questioning of women's identity in the absence of male definition, immediately and keenly felt the parallel. What is it to be feminine when femininity has always been defined through the lens of men's needs? Their need for us to be wide-hipped and big-breasted to carry their children and secure their property. Their need for us to be meek and soft-spoken so we would be easier to control. There need for us to only feel validation from men's approval and only feel fulfillment from having children so that we won't seek love from nonmale companions instead. Their need for us to be "biologically normal" so they can affix neat labels on us. What is it to be feminine when femininity has always been defined through what it says about your social privilege?

Their need to keep us fighting for rank amongst each other so we don't fight together against the racists and classicist social systems that keep us all down. They tell us that beauty comes from biological imperatives, but century after century, culture after culture, it is proven that beauty and all we do to obtain it, is the codification of wealth signifiers. Woolf gets so close in her writing to identifying class structures as a core problem for women but she is writing for a white, educated, middle-class audience. She seeks to secure for them the benefits of white, educated, middle-class men. As a white, educated, middle-class woman writing 100 years later, I don't want a room of my own. I want my own identity that does not define me by my relationship to masculine-built systems of power.

Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history. She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger. -Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

Why A Rose of One's Own? Because a flower is the one thing I can point to, that so many women seem drawn to throughout the world and history, that does not reinforce our relationship with patriarchal systems of power. Roses grow wild. Yes many of them have been commodified for profit, yes they are given by men as gifts, but we have never needed men so we could have flowers. They have never taken the wild roses from us. What does it mean to be feminine in the absence of patriarchal systems of power?

I don't know, but I want to know what that would look like, and I am starting with the roses.

#intersectional feminism #all women are valid #queer feminism #intersectionality #feminist history #feminine identity #trans inclusive feminism #socialism #men deserve femininity too

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indigenousandnativewaysofbeing · 2 years ago

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Synthesis Report

Technology, simply defined, is information with a goal and a way to be reproduced. Writing is technology. So are telephone polls, hammers, knives, and AI. Technology has often been cited as the driving force of the United States empire. And for Western ways of living, technology has been seen as a gift to foreign regions. For the purposes of this essay, I will connect concepts of racism that have led to what we consider today as objective technology– that is, tech that is unbiased and bears science-backed ideas of truth. And thus, we will discover how the intersection of tribal sovereignty, (un)naturalized algorithms, and colorblind ideology all help us understand how technology has historically been used as a tool to boost colonial motives. Let’s first look at tribal sovereignty, what it means, and how it works in our modern world.

Tribal sovereignty, as defined by Marisa Elena Duarte, is the right for Indigenous and Native tribes to self-govern. But because white leaders have a penchant for manifest destiny, the Indigenous peoples of what is now known as “America” are forced into difficult situations like losing land and access to the internet. To understand how to move forward, Duarte asks us in her book “Network Sovereignty” to look at Indigenous spiritual practices and appreciation of the land in contrast to how colonial technology is developed under racist guidelines. She lists these considerations for the digital generation: colonial technologies have historically been weaponized against Native and Indigenous peoples, digital technology can support Native youth, and awareness of digital technology’s ability to limit traditional Native notions of grace and peace.

On that note, the “Natives in Tech” conference, which was held in 2020, has provided that there are big movements created by Indigenous and Native tribes to cut out third-party vendors and big tech companies and is moving forward with creating a network of Native software engineers. These software engineers move within the parameters of the sacred land connection integral to Indigenous ways of living. These movements teach us that it is possible to create systems of technology that fully encapsulate non-white and non-western existences and that doing so actually makes the spread of information found in the complexities of globalization.

Ever since the birth of search engines and the internet at large, we've been told that algorithms tell us more about ourselves than they do about the people who make them. What our screens show us is a product of what we’ve searched previously and what we’ve clicked on the most. The reality is algorithms are not naturalized. Algorithms are, actually, highly simplified systems based on the coder’s bias. Safiya Umoja Noble, author of “Algorithms of Oppression,” contends they currently “[do] not provide appropriate social, historical, and contextual meaning to already overracialized and hypersexualized people who materially suffer along multiple axes” (36). A big hint for why this is such an issue comes from the lack of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color employed in Silicon Valley. In “Silicon Valley Pretends That Algorithmic Bias Is Accidental,” Amber Hamilton discusses the tech culture, which has a history of racist and sexist hiring discrimination.

What’s more, Hamilton continues, is that tech companies, like Google, have a habit of dissuading employees from holding political discussions in the workplace. Yet again, we see an example of how easy it is for white tech to reflect white interests. We return, again, to the overarching idea that white tech seeks white power. Even if these instances seem unintentional, they tell us a story. The colorblind ideology that ensues, as Ruha Benjamin says in “Race After Technology,” “are sold as morally superior because they purport to rise above human bias” (38). It is almost impossible to challenge tech as we are brought to believe it's an entity all of its own, totally void of its creator's morality. MIT's data scientists work hard to construct robots without gender, class, or race. While the robots indeed were “servants” and “workers,” MIT scientists referred to them as “friends and children, addressing them in “class-avoidant” terms (Benjamin 42). Programmers felt so uncomfortable inputting the varying histories of racism, transphobia, and misogyny that they just let them out altogether. Unfortunately, acting as if these things didn’t exist doesn’t make technology better. It only makes it worse. So how do tribal sovereignty, naturalized algorithms, and colorblind ideology all tie together?

Colonial tech is so focused on reaching the biggest audience it can that there really is no space for them to care about the repercussions of their product. And if they are legitimately concerned, it's generally in favor of discriminating against Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. Decolonizing tech looks like creating tech according to accurate histories and with values that empower people. It doesn’t look like plowing through sacred land. It doesn’t look like perpetuating racism or claiming racism doesn’t exist. Tech has the power to be something more. Tech has the power to create better lives not just for white people but for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.

#raceaftertechnology #algorithms of oppression #network sovereignty

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flamboyantposting · 2 years ago

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I have thoughts about talking with people 50+ years old who are grappling with the state of the US (and a lot of them)

I've got to be real for a minute, but I really feel so bad for my parents and people their age who are boomer-lite, the people who picked up the last scraps of the solidly baby boomer economic prosperity and ethos, only to then be thrust into:

the height of the cold war mania, the war on drugs, the Reagan administration, years upon years of war in Iraq and Iran, the war on terror, the housing bubble bursting, shrinking wages, and the increasingly unhinged political conservatism that is no longer masquerading as a movement for fiscal and environmental responsibility and is outright for white supremacy -

Because they really believed what they were told. They were given just enough to think it could happen for them too, that if they worked hard enough, they would not be the ones worrying about how to retire, that would be for people without the chutzpah to make it in such a meritocracy.

I don't hate these people, I truly just feel sorry for them, because now they're seeing the problems, because now they're being affected. Previously they believed themselves above that, and coming to grips with that lie is either going to make them despondent, or extremely angry.

Generational lines are blurry at best and blaming a single arbitrary group of people born in a specific subgroup has historically not been a successful way to make progress, the rhetoric used by white supremacists is not restricted to racists or even people in positions of power, people who don't recognize the language of supremacy when using it are useful mouthpieces for the ones making the talking points. It's frustrating to argue with someone who is already angry about feeling lied to by making them feel accused of racist language, and downright impossible to make a disappointed and sad person feel better by piling more responsibility for perpetuating the concepts they've come to see lately.

Ask them questions, make them sort their thoughts out and help guide them towards understanding the world as it is, not as they thought it might be when they were told hard work was enough. The mantra I've heard a lot is "Life isn't fair," and I can't help but ask the question "But why not?" and it never fails to get a blustering response that attributes some arbitrary thing or group, and that speaks volumes on the specific lack of interest in their own autonomy within a system they were stuck into with no alternative concept. It's not "just asking questions" either, it's genuinely asking for a thought out analysis of the conditions we find ourselves in, both for themselves and for those around them. Why are you frightened of the homeless? Why are you upset with inflation? What do you have against unions? Why are your bills higher? Why didn't you ever know anything about LGBTQ+? These questions have answers, and they might be uncomfortable, but they need to reckon with them, because burying your head in the sand will only drown you faster when climate change catches up.

We all deserve a shot at redemption in a crisis, but it has to come from oneself. Telling someone how they're wrong makes them defensive; letting someone answer questions for themselves makes them grapple with the ideas. Guiding someone through those questions as they answer them lets them put the cognitive dissonance down. Have patience, and ask sharp, pointed questions.

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semi-imaginary-place · 2 years ago

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Tolkien's Legendarium in the Modern World

There's many social issues I could talk about here, but for me what is most blatantly chaffing is the Catholicism. Tolkien's Legendarium is a Catholic work. Professor Tolkien himself was devotedly Catholic and traditionally Catholic, and that undercurrent of Catholicism permeates every aspect of the Legendarium. The Catholicism shows up everywhere from the mythos have a one true god that is a all powerful, all knowing, and benevolent creator, to how weird the Legendarium is about divorce (like a divorce had the butterfly effect causing most of the First Age's problems), discussions of morality and free will are very much made with Catholic theology in mind, the Catholic focus on purity, marriage is a sacred act between two soulmates destined for each other, sex is what makes a marriage real, and divorce is evil. It would be impossible to remove all the Catholicism and have the Legendarium to still be recognizable. As someone who recognizes the sheer amount of cultural destruction Christianity has wrought upon this world, if I were to rewrite the Legendarium, to create its ideal form, I would tone down the Catholic-ness of it though not entirely eliminate it, the question is how.

Other's have discussed the problems with depictions of women in the Legendarium but to cover a couple major points, the Legendarium just lacks women there are barely any female characters, and of the women present it's like they are only allowed to act within the bounds of traditional European femininity. Take for example Luthien who is probably the single most powerful non-Maia in the series (well she is half but she's counted among the elves), and yet her power in the story manifests solely through traditionally feminine domains like weaving. This on its own would not be a problem, women are allowed to like feminine things and Luthien has a lot of agency within her story, the problem is that there are so few women in the Legendarium and they are all like this, what powers they have always coming from the feminine sphere.

#tolkien #silmarillion #tolkien legendarium #lotr #lord of the rings #the hobbit #eowyn #i love the catholic elves i hate the catholic elves im using the catholic elves as a chew toy #just to be clear since tradwife tumblr of all groups has found this post #christianity is the religion of western imperialism bigotry and hate #also terfs can fuck off

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twinregister · 2 years ago

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Should affiliation with a hate group disqualify police candidates?

If you thought "yes," you're in the company of a majority of Americans. But you would not be in the company of those in law enforcement or even the state administrative rules that govern police licensing and conduct.

We don't have to explain why this question is being asked. To many it seems ludicrous that this policy does not already exist. Given the long and short history of bigotry and policing, it should have been addressed a long time ago. Not in 2020.

Minnesota Justice Research Center sums up all of the times in the past that we should have done something about this.

A 1995 report from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) explicitly warned police and government officials of the growing threat of violence from what they called “extremists and militant white supremacists.” In 2006, the FBI released an intelligence assessment called “White Supremacist Infiltration of Law Enforcement,” describing how the presence of white supremacists among law enforcement personnel is a significant concern. A 2015 FBI report not only found links between police and white supremacist groups but what Purdue (2020) calls “direct infiltration” of police departments. In her research examining what she also calls an “epidemic of white supremacists in police departments,” Vida Johnson (2019) examined incidents in which police officers were found expressing their overtly racist beliefs or their direct connections to hate groups spread across 40 states and 100 police departments. She highlights examples across the country, including a few here in Minnesota (in Rochester, Minneapolis, and Burnsville).

Sobering.

The Minnesota Revisor's Office maintains the rules governing police, while the Minnesota Legislature appoints a Board of Police Officer Standards and Training (POST) that works out the exact minutae that are ultimately enforced. POST began the process of revising existing rules about police officers in 2020 following the murder of George Floyd by on-duty Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) officers, most notably now-former officer Derek Chauvin. The protests that it sparked went international, and much change happened locally. But not enough.

POST's standard Statement of Need and Reasonableness (SONAR) regarding their review and proposed changes to police rules notes that in Minnesota, the corpus of rules was mostly imposed in the 1970's and has remained largely untouched since then. Do you think the world and civil rights has changed since the '70s? I think it's changed since 2020. The update is long overdue.

What is POST proposing?

In a few words, the advisory body is proposing changes to existing rules and expanding the rules overall. Adding more rules gives POST (and thus other government bodies) more authority over police. Current rules are so basic that they are unlikely to change much, except to add clarity.

The rules govern how:

police candidates are evaluated and approved (licensed)

police conduct themselves while on and off duty

POST and other government bodies regulate and discipline police

police are trained and told how to do their jobs

This will give POST more authority to define what police are allowed to do and how they can be held accountable when breaking those rules.

Shockingly (or not), police departments are currently their own little worlds, which have little oversight. As the word "department" implies: they are given a broad definition of their work by a higher authority, and then told to do it however they see fit. They tend to make up their own rules in all that vast wiggle room. If they break their own rules, it's simply an internal affair that doesn't involve the law.

This makes it difficult, and frequently impossible, to hold them accountable for bigotry and violence. There's no law against it. If there's a policy against it, that doesn't mean much, when even the head of the department breaks those. POST's proposal will change that.

Changes include reviewing social media

The Rule-by-Rule Analysis begins on page 13 of POST's SONAR lists the exact details of proposed changes. Some rules were reordered or condensed, and others were expanded or new rules added. Here are the significant proposed changes we should pay attention to.

Background investigation requirements (Rule 6700.0670)

Subpart 1 Item B requires candidates to release information on their social media accounts, which will be investigated (while logged out).

Subpart 2 Item A (5) requires the background check (which includes social media) to investigate for discriminatory content or behavior, which would disqualify them for licensure by POST (and thus ultimately being appointed as a police officer). The description of "discriminatory content" is vague. It does enumerate that discrimination is towards protected classes such as minority religions, races, genders, and sexual orientations.

Subpart 3 Item A requires a police department to report to POST when a background check is initiated and then another report if the candidate is found to be ineligible for any reason. The original rule only required reporting if there was a criminal conviction that made a candidate ineligible, which doesn't count interviews during the background check, social media posts, dismissed cases, and anything else. (Makes one wonder why they even bothered with those in the past, if they couldn't really impact the outcome.)

Psychological screening requirements (Rule 6700.0675)

Psychological screening is already required for police candidates. Item A (1) proposes that the psychologist's preferred tests address the standards set by these rules. Item A (3) clarifies that a psychological test must also assess the candidate's likelihood of being discriminatory on the job.

Minimum selection standards for police candidates (Rule 6700.0700)

This section outlines the minimum requirements to be a police officer. Subpart 1 Item A goes into a back-and-forth about citizenship. The board could not agree on whether an applicant should be a citizen, but wanted to consider changing federal immigration policy and the need for local departments to hire officers that connect with the communities they serve, which may include immigrants.

Part of this consideration was federal employment law: only citizens or legal residents can be employed regardless of occupation. It also considered whether a non-citizen could be licensed to carry a gun as an officer, and noted that any officer regardless of citizenship is fully eligible to carry and conceal a firearm under current rules and regulations.

Ultimately it was decided that a citizen or "legal resident under federal requirements" could be licensed as a police officer.

Item E (2) expands the list of legal convictions that would disqualify an applicant:

convictions that reflect poorly on the applicant’s character

tendency to abuse authority

anger management and respect issues

failure to follow the law including disobeying restraining orders

Individual agencies can decide to have even stricter requirements than this.

Item G reiterates that applicants are disqualified if discrimination is found during the background check.

Rule 6700.0700 Item H is where the title of this post comes from. It explicitly states that hate group membership is a disqualifying finding from the background check or any other part of the hiring process.

Here is the exact SONAR explanation for your consideration:

This new rule part would prohibit licensure of applicants involved with a hate or extremist group. Such individuals are generally sorted out by law enforcement agencies through the background investigation, but are specifically included here to establish a statewide standard. Participation in hate groups by law enforcement officers is discussed thoroughly in the rule-by-rule analysis of part 6700.1600 Standards of Conduct, subpart 1, Item H on page 36, and the discussion establishes the need and reasonableness of this standard. The Advisory Committee approved the rule part by consensus.

In light of the many and changing duties of police officers in the 21st century, the physical skills test requirement is removed from Item J and reduced to simply a standard physical by a licensed medical professional that would indicate if there was some condition that could prevent a candidate from doing their specific job.

Item L requires prospective police officers to complete emergency medical responder (EMR) training, which is a more advanced version of civilian first aid/CPR but slightly less than full paramedic standards. This is important because police are often first on scene where there may be injuries. Especially since they carry guns they must be responsible for the damage they may cause. This also will include basics on how the human body operates, which may help officers be conscious of how certain movements can result in injury and death. This is clearly influenced in part by Derek Chauvin choking Floyd to death.

Officer standards of conduct (Rule 6700.1600)

POST notes that Minnesota legislation already mandates that they evaluate officer conduct outside of criminal convictions, and so the updated rules simply clarify the details of how exactly POST will do so. The current rules are wanting for those details, which makes it hard for POST to justify their authority to discipline officers.

Item A adds more legal offenses that count as misconduct.

Item B proposes that officers must tell the truth to law enforcement agencies and the courts. This includes testifying during proceedings to the truth of administrative reports they wrote about an incident. If an officer will not testify, the written report is inadmissible as evidence and considered hearsay, and POST may investigate them. If an officer does testify and doesn't tell the truth about the report, lying under oath in a courtroom is another kind of offense entirely, so POST may investigate as well as other relevant agencies.

Item D allows POST to investigate uses of deadly force as well as lethal force. Currently deadly force, force that doesn't result in death but grave injury, is not considered under POST's purview. This is a very important addition.

Item F proposes conduct that amounts to abuse of authority by police officers.

Item G reiterates that the discriminatory behavior of a licensed officer is a violation that POST may investigate. It states: "Conduct that would prevent a person from licensure is equally unacceptable after a person is licensed." This includes both on-duty and off-duty behavior.

SOAR then details that legally an officer with bias could not testify on a case involving a member of the group, which opens up the local law enforcement and judicial scene to a lot of risk. This is called a Brady-Giglio impairment: "Under Brady-Giglio, prosecutors must disclose evidence that could lead to the impeachment (inability to testify truthfully) of law enforcement officer. This includes any findings or allegations of untruthfulness, bias, or withholding evidence that may be favorable to the accused. Bias includes both personal bias towards an individual, and bias towards a group in which the individual in question is a member or perceived to be a member." Thus officers demonstrating bias should be removed from their posts or a large part of the legal system will suffer.

Rule 6700.1600 Subpart 1 Item H again enumerates the issue of hate group membership. It reiterates the standard laid out in the minimum hiring standards (Rule 6700.0700 Item H) for currently licensed officers. The "support, advocacy, or participation in white supremacist, hate or extremist groups or criminal gangs" is a violation that POST will investigate.

Item H (1) (2) and (3) define what a hate group is and specifically encodes white supremacist groups.

Item I proposes what the exact definition of "involvement in a hate group" will be.

Item J makes an exception for hate group membership if it is for the purpose of active law enforcement investigation. (Brings to mind BlackkKlansman.)

Obligations to report and cooperate with POST (Rule 6700.1610)

Subpart 1 already requires all licensed officers to report any violation they know of. The proposed amendment allows unlicensed officers (such as in training) to report as well, but does not require it.

Police pursuits (Rule 6700.2700) and pursuit procedures (Rule 6700.2701) are proposed for repeal, claiming that they are not rules but philosophy, and are outdated and no longer applicable.

[Will be updated further.]

Action

Submit public comment supporting the proposed changes by Dec 6th, 4:30 PM CST.

Submit on Office of Administrative Hearings website

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morlock-holmes · 2 years ago

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I've complicated my feelings here by talking to people about affirmative action and thereby reminding myself that people will say very weird things about affirmative action like,

"I don't doubt that specific racist policies have negatively impacted people in concrete ways, but how often are people compensated for past unjust policies?"

Which I'm still turning around in my head because the only two answers I can come up with to that question are, "100% of the time that people are compensated for an injustice" or "You are about to make a broad and daring attempt to prove that damages, as understood in US law, are fundamentally impossible."

But as far as I can tell, neither of those is the case; this seems to have been offered up as a kind of common sense question that's almost too obvious to ask.

I kind of reminded myself that a lot of white people live in a kind of psychological reality, where America has constantly tried more and more radical and unhinged forms of affirmative action, one after the other, and no matter how radical they get it never solves the problem, so finally we need to recognize that failure and maybe start trying something else.

Whereas my argument is that the fight against affirmative action started in the mid-70s and has been one of the most wildly successful policy battles in the last half-century; opponents of affirmative action have won, as far as I can tell, every battle they've fought since about a decade before I was born.

The perception is that this isn't the case because battles still need to be fought at all; the fact that proponents of affirmative action and opponents of colorblind policy still attempt to do things before the courts, legislature, direct citizen voting or public outcry stop them is understood as proof of their dominance and growing power; the fact that they lose all their battles is irrelevant.

I think my thinking has been clarified a little bit. Some right-winger told me that Johnson's Great Society stuff had been an abject failure and linked to an article mentioning Thomas Sowell, giving essentially a boilerplate conservative line of "We need to fix the culture of poverty and make sure government policy is properly colorblind" and I didn't say it then but thinking about it my response is, essentially,

Right we've been systematically putting your plan into practice for about 50 years and that hasn't worked either, when exactly do we actually start getting the dividends from this approach?

Honestly maybe the way to voice my skepticism is to say that as far as I can see the left-wing plan to massively rework white psychology to create a deep horror at and vigilant opposition to racism and the right-wing plan to eliminate affirmative action and institute colorblind policy at all levels have both been incredibly successful over the same time period.

The problem is that despite their successes they haven't created the results their proponents wanted, in either case; this is understood as a kind of powerlessness but I think that distorts thinking about both projects.

@onecornerface linked me to this paper, which I mostly agree quite a lot with, and lays out some thoughts that I've been having lately in a much more coherent, far less fundamentally angry form than I have. Particularly the fact that the American racial culture wars are primarily waged between rival groups of middle-to-upper-class whites and that the distinction between de jure and de facto segregation is actually important and worth focusing on.

I'm trying to think how to put certain thoughts in order, but over the last few years I have been increasingly fixated on the fact that de jure segregation and affirmative action have both been resolutely defeated in the law here in the US.

The defeat of segregation has been the quicker and more complete; I cannot bring to mind any attempt to revive Jim Crow or repeal the Civil Rights act.

Affirmative action, in contrast, has not been completely excised from the US but it seems to be well on the way out.

My followers will know that I like to piss people off by asking for a legislative or court victory for Affirmative Action that happened in the last half century. I think the closest I've gotten was a California ballot measure that didn't pass and maybe, like, one Supreme Court decision that was kind of a mixed bag rather than being entirely restrictive from the early 70s.

Both these situations strike me as incredibly weird, and people hate when I say that, because they sense a kind of dismissiveness lurking behind the assertion that these total legal defeats are weird.

Which frustrates me because it makes them incapable of even admitting that anything happened.

I cannot name any other important culture war issues like this. Roe V. Wade dates to very close to the Civil Rights Act, and American conservatives never once stopped working at overturning it through the courts and legislatures, and, as we know, they finally succeeded.

The same kind of continual push for legislation and court victories can be observed for every other culture war battle I can think of. If I asked you to name one legislative or court victory for anti-gay activists in the last fifty years you could probably name several off the top of your head, e.g. Prop 8 and the Defense of Marriage Act. If I asked you to name similar victories for pro-gay activists you'd cite Lawrence V. Texas and the Respect For Marriage Act.

Gay rights battles have been fought in the courts and legislature and continue to be fought up to the present day, just like battles over Abortion, drug use, gun rights, etc.

But the same is not true of Segregation or Affirmative Action. For example, current Supreme Court precedent bans the use of official racial quotas in college admissions. Affirmative Action advocates could pass trigger laws requiring such quotas, which would go into effect as soon as they could get friendly court judges to overturn current precedent. The same is true of white supremacists who want to bring back the bad old days.

But they don't.

When I point this out people get very angry and say, "Just because something isn't done by the courts or legislature doesn't mean people don't still do it. Here's an example of some private citizen doing something really egregious! Everybody knows that you don't get results by going to the courts or the legislature anymore! Please ignore all the states that are now banning abortion!"

I disagree. If something is a huge, controversial culture war flashpoint, but only one side has won any legal victories in a half century, that's actually so anomalous that I genuinely cannot come up with a third example after Segregation and Affirmative Action.

I think this is related to a conviction that destroying segregation and affirmative action are held (By different political groups) to be the key to achieving racial harmony.

It may look like segregation was defeated so thoroughly that nobody could possibly advocate for it seriously anymore, but that hasn't led to an end of racial strife. Since racial strife is caused by segregation, if it's still around that means segregation and race hatred must have somehow gone underground. Those feelings must be as strong as they were in the 60s, but now they're hiding and we have to do more and more psychological work to figure out where they're hiding.

And an essentially exactly analogous process happens for affirmative action.

Essentially, on the left the feeling is that if we had actually rooted out race hatred from the white psyche, we'd have racial harmony and equality.

We don't have racial harmony and equality, therefore the white psyche must still be riddled with race hatred, and we need to find it. It must be expressing itself through white chefs that want to cook soul food and tourists trying on kimonos, and we need to treat people who do those things as the racists they are.

On the right, the feeling is that the psychological problem is the ability to conceive of race at all; the way to racial harmony is colorblindness and particularly color-blind policy.

We don't have racial harmony and equality, therefore the affirmative action mindset must be heavily embedded in the left-wing psyche, and we need to find out where it is hiding. People hide it behind innocent-sounding phrases like "diversity" and "inclusion" and we need to run anybody who uses those phrases out of town on a rail.

Our whole approach to race in this country is devolving into increasingly hysterical attempts to force (white) people to have the correct attitudes about race.

Step back for a bit and the fact that we are trying to make it illegal to cause a white person to feel guilt about history has a sort of bizarre, 1,001 Nights fairytale quality about it. Like some fairy story where it is illegal to remind the Emperor that he will die someday.

I think I am coming around to the idea that racial strife in the US is no longer caused primarily by defects in the individual (white) psyche, and that our efforts to keep finding those defects are kind of the same mindset that convinced Soviet leaders that all failures were caused by sabotage.

#race #race in america

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kickthecan-revolution · 3 years ago

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I love Good Friday. It’s the most spiritual holiday for me.

I sit with him while he dies, thinking about his life - what he must have been like as a little boy. How much he laughed. How old people loved him. I bet he was a little shit sometimes. How he must have put so much love into what he made. I think about his first crush, if he had friends. I think about the relief he felt when he was in solitude, away from the pressure of being human. How many times he felt too weird and how isolating that was. I wonder if he was bullied. I think about dying so young - 33 - so much life left. How afraid and angry he got, desperate to bail on the whole terrifying ordeal. That no one ever knew him, I wonder, and how lonely that was. The activism that got him killed. The pain of being betrayed by your best friend. How funny he must have been. How he deeply respected women - he liked them - and what a shock that must have been not just to them, but everyone in his community. I wonder if he felt insecure about who he could trust.

He was hunted. Profiled. Plotted against. Murdered by fucked up people who were terrified of how liberated he was - how sure he was of himself and what he knew - and he couldn’t help but love them too. He never hated them. He didn’t even blame them. He didn’t need them. They hated him for the mirror his purity was, exposing their ego. They killed him instead of changing and he was asking for them to get a break for that, even in the end. How impossible that is to imagine.

I sit here with him as he suffers. Everyone gets to be here who wants to be, everyone has a place in this circle. No one is questioned here. Dogma and rules and religion aren’t here. I want my presence to be a comfort to him. I don’t want to leave him alone. If I’m honest, he’s the only man that’s ever been safe enough for me to love.

My mom went to Medjugorje. She experienced healing there. She brought back rosaries, this is one of them. One miracle of that place is rosaries change color, some even turning into gold. I’ve never shown it to anyone until now, it’s felt too private.

At a point of significant darkness where a spiritual director I trusted told me I’d blasphemed the Holy Spirit which caused a nervous breakdown, I had to live at their house for awhile. In a moment of despair, she gave me this rosary. The next day she said she thought something had happened to it - I took it out of its little bag and it had turned from peal white to translucent blue, and the metal is now gold. My mind and heart opened immediately and I found myself on the road to recovery.

So I sit here with him. I remind him of the moments he saved me. In my room from the evil that sat at the end of my bed. My neighbor Mary B. My youth groups. My getting into college. In cars with so many strangers that could have hurt me. The priests who hugged me. The moments at Malibu. Alone in my car, hearing a voice ask when I’d allow myself to be surprised with love. The stranger who I gave a ride home to who expelled these horrific evil things in me on the side of a road. Moments traveling in China where I was in real danger. This job. The thousands of moments at work. The atheists in my life who showed how toxic my religion was, how racist I was. How they led me into the light and continue to model what doing good and loving well really looks like without some kind of eternal payoff. I think they’d be the first people he would thank. The millions of moment he saved me from myself. And right now as the tightness fades from my chest.

I want your death to mean something in my life. I know I’m Judas. I’m fickle. I lack devotion. I am corrupt. And right now, that doesn’t matter. For now, I’ll stay with you until it doesn’t hurt anymore.

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cryptovalid · 3 years ago

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Racebending is a good way to promote racial equity in representation

To long-time followers this should be obvious, but for some reason there is still a vocal kind of anti-fan that gets upset when a character conceived of as white is adapted as a character of color.

I say anti-fan because if you won’t give an adaptation the benefit of the doubt because there’s less white characters in it, you are more committed to white supremacy than to the IP.

Just in case somebody hasn’t been told, white people have historically held, through force, a vastly disproportionate amount of economic, cultural and political power, which has had a profound effect on popular culture. Popular culture has, pretty much since its inception, reflected the interests and perspectives of white people more than any other ethnicity: their stories were more respected and distributed by publishers, by tv- and movie-executives, they rose to fame and were adapted more often, and until very recently, white people (especially white cis men) were the default audience for anything aiming for mass appeal. As a result, pop culture is not a reflection of reality, but of a perspective of reality that white cishetero men prefer. This is not just unfair on a theoretical level, it’s actively deepening racist attitudes. As this article notes, watching tv increases the confidence of white boys, but does the opposite for girls and black children. If you don’t see yourself relected in the stories other people tell, and you listen to enough stories, you might begin to wonder why people like you are ignored this way. Representation is important in building a sense of confidence. It is also a proven way to diminish bigotry. Racebending established white characters to be more racially diverse is a good way to adress that.

Many white anti-fans will act like this isn’t true (because they don’t believe psychology is real, unless it confirms conservatism), and will also come up with a bunch of alternatives for racebending that don’t address the root problem at all.

First of all, the idea that racebending somehow demeans audiences of color by ‘not giving them a story of their own‘ is a false dichotomy. We can absolutely promote new characters of color and new stories, as well as update stories that are already popular to be more diverse.

It’s also frequently an argument made in bad faith, by people who complain about or ignore stories from the perspective of a person of color whether it affects an existing canon they like or not.

Moreover, it feels very much like this suggestion is at best promoting racially diverse media that is ‘separate but equal‘ to stories that are disprortionately white. The whole value of diversity is that audiences enjoy them together.

The power of franchises is also so vast, that it is practically impossible to create media that is as widely distributed and promoted as the oldest fandoms, like Sherlock Holmes, Lord of the Rings, Marvel and DC Comics, and Star Wars. Keeping those franchises completely focused on white men is never going to result in a more representative media-landscape.

Paradoxically, representative media is also inevitable from a purely capitalistic perspective: by its own definition, whiteness is going to go away, and so is heteronormativity. White, cishetero men will be the minority someday, and that is inherent to the way they police identity, not to anything anyone else is doing. So why would a company with a profit motive exclusively cater to a community that excludes more and more members from itself? Why not change with the demographics?

And that brings me to another argument against racebending: that it is always a cynical move that is inherently detrimental to a story. I would simply state that racebending a character to make a story more diverse is a neutral act in regards to the quality of a story, unless the racial uniformity of a community or its relationship to colonialism and racism are an important part of the themes. Otherwise, it can be done in better or worse ways (but opponents of racebending like to pretend it’s always worse).

In reality, more diversity often improves a story. Imagine how much less douchey Iron Fist would come across if he were a Chinese adoptee to white parents.I’m always curious about the perspectives a prosecuted minority brings to a story about vigilantism, the law and criminal justice. The perspectives LGBT people bring to stories about identity and acceptance. To say that keeping everything the same for decades is inherently better or more artistically authentic is really limiting.

There is often a demand that racebending is justified within the story itself, but only if a white character is racebent. Even in fantastical places, whiteness is considered the default, normal race. Everyone else needs a special reason to be there, but a white character is never considered unnatural. This assumption is racist. The idea that racism would have prevented a certain character from being anything other than white is a selective demand for realism.

Neither realism nor canon are good arguments against racebending in pursuit of a more representative pop culture. The idea that diversity makes properties worse is not based in logic.

#racebending

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skimcasual · 3 years ago

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tbh, I hate using social media today. It’s an otherwise perfectly fine Saturday, except it’s *that* day so I gotta go mute words such as “victim” “victims” “towers” and “9/11″ to make it less obviously *that* day. And I live in New York (the state not the city, but we are only about 2 hours drive from NYC). What I dislike the most about today is the nationalism and the racism (xenophobia).

I thought I might write down what I can remember of *that* day so that I may never have to recollect it or think about it again unless I want to. I remember I was in 10th grade. The teachers were muttering something to each other, and then I changed classes to go to science. At science class, the TV was on. Every classroom had a TV that was primarily to watch VHS tapes on (some classes were lucky enough to have a DVD player attached to the TV) but it was playing the news.

I had never seen the news on the TV in school. The science teacher hardly used the television let alone put live TV on it. So I knew something really weird or big must have happened if the TV needs to be on and if the teacher’s staring at it. I don’t remember exactly what time it is, but it was morning.

I don’t remember the exact details on if we were watching the TV before both planes hit or only one plane hit, but I remember the rest of the week was really weird. People were sad-ish but nobody in the school that I knew personally had any direct family that had died. I think one of the teachers -- maybe my English teacher Ledet -- mentioned that their dad had helped build the towers.

I was very bipolar disordered most of my teen years, so during a low, I drew scary black and red drawings to see what it was I was feeling out onto paper so I could see it. My mom later found those drawings and scolded me for drawing frightening drawings when everyone is very sensitive because of the recent events. I also wrote some stories to exploit the recent event that my friends told me were in poor taste so those stories never saw the light of day ever again.

There was two south asian girls in my regents math class with the new young blonde teacher that I did not like. One girl had her hair tied back and another girl had her head in hijab. Like it was always perfectly pinned around her cute still-child-like face. Either both or just the girl in hijab suddenly stopped coming to school. Also some of the white boys and a few of the white girls were getting very aggressively nationalistic and talking about what they saw on the news or heard their adults talking about, which was mostly about how “America’s gonna go to war against terrorism!!!”, which I felt was none of my business but also I knew that was somewhere between xenophobia and racism.

Everybody white was really tense for a couple of weeks minimum over how they gotta get revenge.

I didn’t realize how much white folks were buying into this nonsense about where the terrorists came from and how America is going to go get them until I visited a white friend’s house. Their relative had come over for whatever reason, and when I mentioned there is no proven evidence that those specific terrorists are responsible, he got really mad at me (a fully grown male adult at me -- a 16 year old asian girl) that I didn’t believe the brown terrorists were responsible. I did not believe that information because 1. the information sure appeared quickly! way too conveinently quickly 2. the information is impossible to verify or has questionable sources

Anyway after that I stopped talking to white people about 9/11. I stuck to overhearing them.

And so much for all that talk about how racism isn’t that bad or that it was over that my white friends told me about in junior high and 9th grade when I’d mention various racist experience I would have: there was local news about south-asian taxi drivers in NYC getting beat up. I thought they said NYC is really diverse and less racist, yet white men were beating people up for not being white. It would still be another 5 years until I really fully understood how much racism was not over, but I think that was my first peep into how Japanese Internment was completely possible to happen again (and happened) to whatever group of non-white people that white people didn’t like.

By “NYC is diverse” they mean there was a variety of white and white-passing immigrants are welcomed there, but idk if the rest of us are truly welcome there. Apparently we can get beat up for driving taxis while looking like the wrong type of minority race?

It was after this that there was a lot of boomers on the news complaining that it’s too hard to take their shoes off to board airplanes, and there was baggage fees (there used to not be baggage fees), you had to take tiny bottles onto airplanes, you could no longer get through airport security with a bottle filled with water, the fact that there was airport security period???? And lots of cops everywhere and everybody white became very very very pro-cop and pro-firefighter.

That’s how I remember this day and as a non-white person it’s frustrating to know this all could have been avoided if white people saw more brown people than Aladdin and Prince of Persia. I guess every year when it’s today, I wish there would just be more stuff done to bring awareness to racism and xenophobia so that no more southasians get beat up by paranoid angry violent white people, but all folks ever do is hold candles for firefighters and give podiums to survivor families.

Oh, and for 3 years after *that* day I stole as many yellow ribbon magnets off cars as I could and threw them into the trash. I knew it was a made up war, and I thought people in support of the military are terrible. Another big contributor to why I don’t like military people is because I grew up in Korea.

#rant #abolish ice #no more dhs

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