That Purity Thing

I've never really understood the apparent need for some people to think of themselves as some kind of Pure Bred critter.

It's possible that the Out Of Africa thing isn't quite as accurate as they thought, but we do know for an almost absolute fact that we all share common ancestry in one form or another. And when it's proven that an awful lot of us have that Neanderthal strain as well, there's just no way to make the case for anything as deliberately ignorant as Racial Purity.

That Natural Law Thing

Sometimes, I have to let this junk outa the sewer just long enough to show it up for the dead-end bullshit it is.

"There's no equality in nature."

These guys are sure that's the whole banana. All they ever have to claim is that they're just trying to go along with "the natural order of things", and nobody can refute or rebut - there's no equality in nature.

Wanna know what else you don't find in nature, Mr Spencer? Here's one: There's no law in nature. 

In nature, there's nothing that keeps Charles Barkley from popping your fool head like a pimple.  So go play outside for a while, shortpants - the adults are trying to work.

Jesus, I hate dealin' with these shit-heels.

Beyoncé Is Black!?!

And suddenly, SNL is good and funny again?

More Bey

Rolling Stone

The Daily Show with Trevor Noah
Get More: The Daily Show Full Episodes,The Daily Show on Facebook,The Daily Show Video Archive

Mr Giuliani seems to think speaking the truth isn't wholesome.  He's saying having an opinion, stating an opinion, and defending that opinion is OK but only in places and/or circumstances prescribed by - who exactly?  The masters?  The Ruling Class?  Some blobby "majority" or "the American people"?  It's always some vaguely-defined image of an America that can be changed to fit whatever narrative they're flacking right now, but it always always always comes down to inviting the inference of a kindly white hegemony in a soft-focus past where all the black people were the good kind of black people who knew  how lucky they were to spend their lives cleaning our toilets and then conveniently dying with nothing to show for it - long before we had to think maybe we should pay them back for any of it.

The authoritarian mindset is always trying to tell everybody to shut up; get with the program; and don't say or do anything that might make anybody feel uncomfortable with the way the boss needs people to believe things are. And one of the main tools is Divide-n-Conquer. They work hard to pit us against each other to make sure we go on paying their rent, while looking for any opportunity to point and say, (eg) "Hey, look - Beyonce is being divisive".

They talk "Unity", but if you make any attempt to get people together, they'll be happy you've given them another chance to slag you by saying you're the one "tearing this country apart".

We're being fucked with like we've got tails.

What Jeb Said

hat tip = Little Green Footballs

Bless his pea-pickin' little ol' heart - he's trying so hard to lead some of these dolts away from the extremes, while trying so hard to step in the right places thru the minefield, which generally ends up meaning he's trying hard not to lead too much.  And that's pretty much exactly what electoral politics is all about.  You have to calculate; you say things that bring some voters over to your side while not alienating too many others.

I think Jeb is the GOP's only chance to pull that off, and I think Jeb is probably just not really up to the challenge.

He's half right, hoping to parlay it into enough of a message that's acceptable to enough of everybody wearing the Red Badge to stitch together a wobbly little coalition to get close to maybe being in contention for a shot at making a run for what may or may not be his big chance at the nomination - god willin' and the crick don't rise.  

Seriously, I just don't think he's up to it even tho' I think the GOP mover/shakers are working feverishly to prop him up, and I'm still not convinced he won't be the GOP's guy next fall.  Or is it that he'll be the GOP's next fall guy? This is all very confusing.

But anyway - half right.  He just got it kinda upside down and backwards.  He says the controversy over the Confederate Battle Flag isn't about the Confederacy so much as it's about what the flag came to represent in the 20th century.  That's the half-right part.

The upside-down-and-backwards part is that there was a long and concerted effort to change our perception, and to get people to believe that that flag represented Heritage and Commitment and Honor on the part of the glorious warriors who fought under it, instead of maintaining the truth about it, and making sure that it remained the symbol of Greed and Inhumanity and Bigotry and all the things this country has always said it doesn't want to be. It became the rallying point for people who need desperately to be lied into a political catatonia so they can go on pretending they don't have to do anything but wish their troubles away - or to kill their way outa the mess they're forever getting us all into.

But here's the thing, kids - that flag is the flag of quitters and losers and racist assholes. It is, it always was, and it always will be.

Today's Podcast

OUR NATIONAL CONVERSATION ABOUT CONVERSATIONS ABOUT RACE

Authors Baratunde Thurston (How To Be Black), Raquel Cepeda (Bird Of Paradise: How I Became Latina) and Tanner Colby (Some Of My Best Friends Are Black) host a lively multiracial, interracial conversation about the ways we can’t talk, don’t talk, would rather not talk, but intermittently, fitfully, embarrassingly do talk about culture, identity, politics, power, and privilege in our pre-post-yet-still-very-racial America. This show is "About Race."

Today's Scary Black Dude

This one's bouncing madly about in the Echo Chamber:

I don't know much about this King Noble guy, and I should prob'ly hold off on making this call, but - c'mon, really?  

He's indulging himself with a little Revenge Fantasy.  Is that really all it takes to frighten all you big strong hyper-macho types?  Y'know, it suddenly occurs to me that the scary black guy says "boo!", and your tiny little pecker gets very shy and even smaller than usual - is that why you immediately grab for your big steel substitute penis(?)  Just guessing.

I saw this on a coupla sites (Breitbart and Truth Revolt)...

...and it just fits too neatly into the standard play that the Right Radicals have been running and perfecting for a good 30 years.

Thousands of Americans killed by cops over the years. 

A cop is gunned down (by a guy who was found Non Compos Mentis in 2012, so where's the "isolated incident / our mental health system sucks" crowd?)

but no matter because now it's all even.

Hate crime for hate crime.

A little False Equivalence goes a very long way.

And let's not ignore the Mother Of All Obviousness here: This scares the fuck outa crackers because their worst nightmare is the thought that if given the chance, black people will start treating them exactly as badly as they've been treating black people for as long as anybody can remember.

Today's Rude

The Rude Pundit brings it:

6/22/2015

In Brief: A Glimpse of South Carolina in the Wake of the Call for the Confederate Flag to Be Shit-Canned

Here's what the Rude Pundit imagines happened in South Carolina right when word leaked out that Gov. Nikki Haley would call for the removal of the Confederate flag from its padlocked place on a pole on the grounds of the capitol:

94.9% of the white people in the state breathed a sigh of relief. Even if they had never expressed it before, they hated that the flag was still there, mocking any attempts for the state to seem like it was progressing past its horrific racist past and its position as the birth canal of the Civil War. This doesn't mean that a good many of them won't tell others they think it's a tragedy and what about their pride in their ancestors who fought for states' rights and bullshit lie upon bullshit delusion. 'Cause, you know, they still have to fit in with their loudest friends.

5% of the white people in the state got enraged, thinking that Haley was giving in to the bleeding heart liberals that didn't understand that the flag stood for pride in their ancestors who fought for states' rights and bullshit lie upon bullshit delusion.

In fact, Haley addressed them directly, saying, "Those South Carolinians view the flag as a symbol of respect, integrity, and duty. They also see it as a memorial, a way to honor ancestors who came to the service of their state during time of conflict. That is not hate. Nor is it racism." And that'd be awesome, except for the fact that it is racist and it is hate and their ancestors fought and many died for a racist, hateful cause. It's fucking perverse, like a gang honoring a fallen member for all the cops he killed. Believe it or not, sometimes your dead relatives are pieces of shit who only deserve contempt.

A tenth of a percent of white people are angry at the niggers and nigger-lovers for desecrating their symbol and want to start a race war. But, you know, that's pretty much what those fucknuts were thinking before today.

Most of the black people of the state are more than likely thinking, "That's a nice step. Now how about not shooting up or burning our churches?"

Nuthin' New

9 dead church-goers.  This makes 14 times the shit got real enough for Obama to address the nation about gun violence.  Over 100,000 gun-related deaths and injuries every year in USAmerica Inc.  And we can't do one fucking thing about it?

What worries me most right now - given the color of the most prominently shown victims' skin lately - is that somebody must already be saying, "Nothing changes until rich white people start dying in large enough numbers".

The conventional wisdom is that Reagan signed gun control legislation when he recognized  the need to placate his white majority Californians who were freaking out because the Black Panthers were walking around "their own" neighborhoods with weapons, and a few had decided to exercise their 2nd Amendment rights with a little open-carry demonstration in Sacramento.  (Some of those good times from the 60s everybody seems so selectively nostalgic for)

Like the man said, history doesn't actually repeat itself, but it sure enough rhymes like a motherfucker.

The First Black Prez

A 2-Fer Update

I'm just kinda still following the Ferguson thing, so I'm really glad somebody's keeping an eye on the shit-flingers.

First, this is NOT a picture of Darren Wilson:

It's a picture of a moto-x-er named Jim McNeil who crashed his bike in 2006:

OK - 2nd, again via Little Green Footballs:

CLAYTON • As a child, Michael Brown was never found delinquent of the juvenile equivalents of Missouri’s most serious felony charges and was not facing any at the time he died, a court official said Wednesday.

The Post-Dispatch filed a petition Aug. 22 asking a judge in the St. Louis County Family Court to open any juvenile records on Brown, the unarmed 18-year-old shot to death last month by a Ferguson police officer. A conservative blogger from California had separately requested the records be opened.

Police had said earlier that Brown had no adult criminal record.

The petitions went to a hearing Tuesday with St. Louis County Family Court Judge Ellen Levy Siwak, who took the case under advisement.

But disclosures during and after the hearing on Tuesday put to rest claims by blogger Charles C. Johnson and others that Brown was facing a murder charge at the time he was shot to death.

Cynthia Harcourt, a lawyer for St. Louis County Juvenile Officer Kip Seely, noted that some juvenile records and proceedings are open to the public: those that concern crimes that would be Class A or B felonies if a juvenile had been charged as an adult. But there were none for Brown.

Mike Brown is dead for some pretty fucked up reasons.  And now we know we can't just comfortably rationalize it away by swallowing the bullshit smear that he was a thug so he prob'ly had it comin' sooner or later anyway, and then pretending we're not racist assholes for thinking that way.

Today's Quote

"Negro poverty is not white poverty. Many of its causes and many of its cures are the same. But there are differences—deep, corrosive, obstinate differences—radiating painful roots into the community and into the family, and the nature of the individual. These differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice." --Lyndon Johnson

Ta-Nahisi Coates does nothing to help me as I wrestle with what I do or don't need to do about "Reparations".

Sometimes, I understand completely why people spend so much time and energy longing for the good old days, when (they think) everything was so much simpler and easier.  Shit makes my head hurt.

Respectability Politics

Jay sounds a bit angry - and if you can make Jay Smooth angry about anything, ya done fucked up pretty bad.



Yes - that's what Jay Smooth sounds like when he's pissed off.

Rejecting The False Premise

If we're convinced that there are actual and measurable differences between "the races" then we can be more easily manipulated into going along with cynical politicians who try to put up all manner of policies that just turn out to be weird and/or silly and/or dangerous.

We see "differences" like skin color and eye shape etc, and we generalize those observations (ie: a frame is set in our minds) in a way that makes it easier for us to accept something that sounds reasonable and logical, but turns out to be a load of specious nonsense - aka Scientific Racism.

An illustration from the influential American magazine Harper's Weekly shows an alleged similarity between "Irish Iberian" and "Negro" features in contrast to the higher "Anglo-Teutonic." The accompanying caption reads "The Iberians are believed to have been originally an African race, who thousands of years ago spread themselves through Spain over Western Europe. Their remains are found in the barrows, or burying places, in sundry parts of these countries. The skulls are of low prognathous type. They came to Ireland and mixed with the natives of the South and West, who themselves are supposed to have been of low type and descendants of savages of the Stone Age, who, in consequence of isolation from the rest of the world, had never been out-competed in the healthy struggle of life, and thus made way, according to the laws of nature, for superior races."

And so we get "theories" about Miscegenation and Genetic Hygiene, and then Eugenics and The Bell Curve, and then this recent and most un-excellent crap from Jason Richwine about how immigrants are dumb and so we need to shut down immigration of "all those people" because we'll never get a good bang for the buck because dumb immigrants have dumb children so we have to do something to keep from being overrun by dumb brown people blah blah blah.

Lots of push-back of course from the usual "librul" positions, but this guy sounds like the quiet voice of reason - Merlin Chowkwanyun at The Atlantic:

But the attacks on Richwine are missing something far more insidious than neo-eugenic claims about innately inferior intelligence between races. The backlash against Richwine and Murray, after all, gives some indication that their views are widely considered beyond the respectable pale in the post- Bell Curve era. Richwine and Murray are really extreme branches of a core assumption that is much more pervasive and dangerous because it isn't necessarily racist on the surface: the belief in biological "races." This first assumption is required to get to claims like Richwine's, which argue that between Race A and Race B, differences exist (in "intelligence" or whatever else) that are grounded in the biological characteristics of the races themselves. Public outcry always greets the second Richwine-Murray-esque claim. But the first assumption required to reach it is more common and based on as shaky an intellectual foundation, even as it continues to escape equal scorn.

There is no real problem "between the races" because there is really only one race.  There are superficial differences that superficial assholes can and do exploit for political and commercial advantage.

But wait - Chowkwanyun?  Yikes, he must be one of those people.  It's clearly another Conspiracy!!!  Send me your donations right now and help me fight the onslaught!!!

And Jesus wept.

Jay Smooth Gets It

On the one hand, there's something I think is pretty important about the Charles Ramsey part of this story because it makes us challenge our own bias and see "the black dude" as a real person; and for some at least, we can generalize that perception, and remind ourselves that people are just people.

But then this:

And this:



And suddenly, lots and lots of us have the permission we need to return to a more comfortable mindset, and we're right back to: "Well, I never said there aren't any good black people...all I'm sayin' is they (insert stereotype here)".

Enter Jay Smooth to help nail it down for me, but in an even larger context.

We need to resist "this mad dash to make a meme-ified clown out of anyone who fits into the Wacky Black Guy box, or the Charmingly Uneducated Hick box..."

Advantage: White Guy

Louis CK on Being White.



From a piece about the myth of voter fraud by Andrew Cohen in The Atlantic:

Last week, as one federal judge after another struck down these new measures, as one court after another called out Republican lawmakers for the lack of evidence supporting the push to stop "voter fraud," it dawned on me that this national debate suffers, as so many do these days, from a lack of a common starting point. There is so much fear. There is so much ignorance. There is so much exaggeration. Here are six of the most frequent comments I get when I write about voting rights followed by my attempts at a few answers that perhaps can get us talking about this in a more productive way.

The Myths:

• We need these new voter ID laws to stop voter fraud
• We need these new voter ID laws to stop illegal immigrants from voting
• The new voter laws do not create substantial burdens on registered voters
• The new Republican voter laws are the results of reasonable compromises between and among state legislators
• There are many restrictions upon the right to vote -- what's so vital about another such restriction?
• Burdening the rights of voters to cast their ballots is not the same as disenfranchising voters

In the end, Voter ID is just not fair - and fairness is one of things American Exceptionalism is really about.

And, oh yeah - I almost forgot.  When voting is outlawed, only outlaws will vote.

To Be Clear

If somebody tells you they think you're sounding a little racist, it doesn't have to mean they're just "playing the race card" and that you should ignore them and go right on being a cheap imitation of a normal human.

Sometimes it means you need to stop for a minute and recheck your assumptions.

Baldwin vs Buckley

The great debate of its time (mid 60s I think).

The American dream at the expense of black people
- or -
The American dream in spite of the injustices shown black people



Two things always to remember:
1) When a great injustice has been done, it becomes nearly impossible for either side to trust the other.  On some level, the victim will always expect the perpetrator to repeat the crime, and the perpetrator will always expect retribution from the victim.

2) The victim requires the witness to (voluntarily) carry part of the burden of his victimhood by making a morality judgement.  The perpetrator only wants the witness to be morally neutral - to see, hear and speak no evil.

At about 48:00 Buckley makes the classic 2-part conservative argument that (1) yes, it's true "the black problem" is bad, but hey, we're workin' on it, and (2) we're working on it harder than anywhere else in the world (this is where nowadays somebody starts the USA USA chant).  The problem here is that conservatives always conveniently ignore the simple fact that the USA has foundational documents that are very explicit in calling for (and requiring) equality for all people, and that those same documents REQUIRE the government to work towards ensuring that equality on behalf of everybody in this country.  Plus, this conservative argument seems always to ignore the simple fact that guys like Baldwin are never asking for anything more than for the USA to live up to its own declarations and fundamental tenets.

One Thing Leads To Another

History is a not a bunch of random unrelated events.  The point that really stings is at the end of this segment, when it's made clear that the Nazi death camps didn't simply pop up out of the sick-fuck imaginations of a few maniacs - the holocaust was just kinda the latest in a long line of racial terrorism.

If you're looking for a little taste of reality, try watching this whole BBC series.  I dare ya.