Go Larry Go

hat tip = Talking Points Memo

Today's Contextualizationing

There really was a time (quite a while ago) when Geraldo Rivera was thought to be a journalist.

The very well-practiced frozen smile on Rivera's face is a dead give-away that he suspects just how irrelevant he is; and that he's afraid that that irrelevancy is about to be shown to the world.  He desperately wants to be the gutsy plucky reporter he thinks he used to be as he's almost literally running away from that guy.

And the fact that he can't hold a candle to that guy's arguments is great tribute to the simple fact that whenever anybody working for the DumFux News crew ventures outside the bubble, reality short-circuits their closed-loop thinking and the whole program craters in on itself.

To be (kinda) fair, most of the other Press Poodles have run into similar buzz saws - it's just a little more satisfying when I get to watch some schmuck working for the GOP's PR Channel shit himself in public.

And now this:

Larry Wilmore

Keith Last Nite

Coupla Things

I've got just 2 (main) points about the aftermath of the Freddie Gray thing in Baltimore.

First - when did we become so totally averse to and repulsed by violence in response to being pushed around - whether it's a real thing or only perception?  And in particular, what's with all the pearl-clutching and concern trolling coming in waves from "conservatives"?  When did the Right Radicals start being shocked by violence in response to any-fucking-thing at all?  Last I checked, most of the people who're all so utterly aghast at the prospect of protests turning to violent confrontation are the same bunch who cheered as a whole army of nutballs stormed into Nevada last year on the off chance they might get to shoot it out with the Federalés.  Selective Values Judgement much?

And that kinda leads to my second point, which is:  C'mon now, guys - this country was founded on armed rebellion in response to an uncaring, disinterested power structure that dealt with common folk in thoroughly hostile and brutalizing ways.  We've all been taught that good Americans stand up and fight for what they believe is right; and that there's nothing more noble that standing up to fight against the forces of oppression etc etc etc.  Why are we expecting anybody to not behave exactly the way they've been taught to behave from the time they were in 3rd or 4th grade?

And BTW: Looting? You fight your revolution and I'll fight mine. Comme ci, comme ça muthuhfuckuh.

So anyway, there's only one more question left to ask and it's about something we all know perfectly well (even tho' way too many of us are still too afraid to let the notion filter into our upper cortex), so I'll just say that there're some very real and very obvious differences between Baltimore and the Bundy ranch (eg) but they all boil down to one very real and very obvious aspect.  Simply stated, Freddie Gray can expect to be treated very differently by law enforcement than the way Cliven Bundy can expect to be treated by law enforcement, and it's really not so much that I think we're afraid to ask why - I'm pretty sure we know why; at least we can think we know when we contemplate it as an external thing - something to do with bad cops and the dumb way other people think blah blah blah.

But I'm afraid the real problem is that we're terrified something really bad will happen to us inside if we hear our own inner voice tell us the answer, because it just might be that we expect Freddie should be treated differently than Bundy.

And that grates on our soul.

Jay Smooth

Shocked But Not Surprised

Look At Yerself

Here's a bit from Scabrous Joe and Mika The Attack Bunny - along with other MSNBC Meat Puppets - saying how can we expect these fine innocent teenagers not to behave like racist assholes when it's so obvious that all those rotten hip-hopsters are putting out all those horrible rap songs that use the n-word and kill this muthuhfuckuh and bang that bitch and blah blah blah.

Aside from the standard bullshit trying to make this all about Respectability Politics (tell it, Brother Jay - from way back when)...

...and aside from more of the standard bullshit trying to make some stoopid point about 'reverse racism', maybe we could look at why all the white folk gettin' all bent outa shape.

I think I hear something along the lines of "well, if black people can call each other nigger, then why can't we call 'em niggers?"

That's a question that comes from way down deep in the bottomless well of White Privilege.

Look, guys - I'm not likely to be brutalized and/or murdered by the cops just because I was driving at night in a nice neighborhood.  I'm not gonna get Red-Lined by the mortgage companies; I'm not gonna be the suspect in a string of crimes because my facial features and my skin tone fit some artificial profile manufactured by a "justice system" that's become cynical and corrupt.  And there's a shitload more examples of built-in prejudice once you start thinking about it.

Secondly, the use of any of the words available to us has to be subject to scrutiny from a standpoint of what relationship we have with the people we're trying to communicate with.  If you sidle up beside your wife, and you give her a little squeeze on the buns and a peck on the cheek, and you say, "Hey babe - wanna get laid tonite?", you're just trying to be playful or romantic or provocative or whatever.  If you do that with somebody's teenaged daughter, you don't get to be all huffy and indignant when they take exception to it and start pounding you down into a greasy spot with a piano leg.

So after all that; knowing what Privilege allows for The Privileged, and what it does not allow for those Un-Privileged, can't we let up on the idiot notion of being so fucking privileged that we insist on "What's mine is mine and what's yours is mine too"?

Can't we give black folk one lousy word that they get to own and the rest of us just get to stay the fuck away from it?

Surprise Surprise

Turns out, Racial Bias actually is a thing.  Which makes Race-based Privilege into a thing as well.

Not that anybody who needs to hear this will actually hear it - much less put any stock in it because of course it's just more academic mumbo jumbo from people who've spent the better part of their lives studying such things, and who gives a fuck about Australia anyway!?! - but anyhoo.

From Univ of Queensland via NYT: 

With more than 1,500 observations, the study uncovered substantial, statistically significant race discrimination. Bus drivers were twice as willing to let white testers ride free as black testers (72 percent versus 36 percent of the time). Bus drivers showed some relative favoritism toward testers who shared their own race, but even black drivers still favored white testers over black testers (allowing free rides 83 percent versus 68 percent of the time).

The study also found that racial disparities persisted when the testers wore business attire or dressed in army uniforms. For example, testers wearing army uniforms were allowed to ride free 97 percent of the time if they were white, but only 77 percent of the time if they were black.

This elegant experiment follows in a tradition of audit testing, in which social scientists have sent testers of different races to, for example, bargain over the price of new cars or old baseball cards. But the Australian study is the first, to my knowledge, to focus on discretionary accommodations. It’s less likely these days to find people in positions of authority, even at lower levels of decision making, consciously denying minorities rights. But it is easier to imagine decision makers, like the bus drivers, granting extra privileges and accommodations to nonminorities. Discriminatory gifts are more likely than discriminatory denials.

A police officer is an out-and-out bigot if she targets innocent blacks for speeding tickets. But an officer who is more likely to give a pass to white motorists who exceed the speed limit than to black ones is also discriminating, even if with little or no conscious awareness. This is one reason the Twitter hashtag #crimingwhilewhite is so powerful: It draws attention to the racially biased exercise of discretion by police officers, prosecutors and judges, which results in whites getting a pass for the kinds of offenses for which minorities are punished.

So the discrimination is there; the biogtry is there; it's just behind a slightly less thoroughly disgusting mask.  It's about the "positive" of granting a little favor for the White Folk so it looks and sounds a little better, but it's still the same old "negative" of denying that favor (ie: privilege) to Black Folk.  I'm willing to call it as having made some progress, but we're still pretty well stuck with a problem of unequal treatment, and having that inequality based on the color of somebody's skin.

It's just not enough.  We gotta do better.

Know Your Shit

Here at the end of White History Month which (paraphrasing Tim Wise) goes by the clever name of March-thru-January, we should oughta maybe not concetrate only on the Black History part, but make sure we look at the other side and examine our own shit a bit more closely.

Today's Chart

I have to think long and hard about how the hell I'm gonna get a coupla 17-year-olds thru the next 4 years of college.

I don't like thinking about that right now, but what I really don't wanna have to fuck with is the belief on the part of so many rubes that "them durn thugs are getting all the scholarship money, and all the good placements in all the good schools just because they're black and it ain't fair that they're takin' the spot of a deserving white child blah blah blah."

(btw - the rubes really do use the word "thug" in polite company so they don't have to use the word "nigger".  Yes. Really.)

Anyway, here's another of my handy dandy charts to illustrate just how stupid some of these clowns can get.

That tiny blue line at about 12 o'clock on the doughnut is the one-quarter of one percent of the total scholarship money available which is actually "earmarked" for use by kids with brown skin.  Which means that the white people, who make up about 80% of the total population are collecting most of the remaining 99.75% of the bucks.  Sound familiar?

Could you please stop bitching about it now?

Just Shut Up And Listen

17 minutes that started continued some pretty momentous change.  The prospect of change (and the agents of that change) proved so scary and dangerous that the authoritarian assholes among us moved quickly to try to kill it.



The problems King was trying to tell us about haven't gone away.

Here's one of the more imprtant points from a longer talk by Tim Wise - I've put this one up a coupla times before, and I'll keep going back to it until I can recite it verbatim:



It's about what's fair vs what's unfair.  It's about getting USAmerica Inc to live up to its promises, and to stand by its word.  It's about demanding "the power" to behave like regular human beings.

We should never expect anything more, and we must never accept anything less.

And also too - if this doesn't apply to you, then why're you gettin' all bent outa shape about it?

Today's Olbermann

Since he got back on the air, it seems like ESPN has been doing its best to hide him from us by bouncing his show time all over the damned place.

As of last night: ESPN2 at 5pm, and repeating once or twice a day at odd hours on other of the ESPN channels - like I said, ya gotta hunt for it.

Anyway, the guy can be a little bombastic and a bit precious on occasion, but there's no better truth-teller anywhere on TV.

And The Beat Goes On

Rolling Stone has a bit on 11 instances of Cops Killing Brown People:

Brown and Garner were two people living a thousand miles apart, at very different points in their lives. But they share one tragic fact in common: They were both black men executed in broad daylight by cops. And unless the U.S. Justice Department nails their killers on federal civil rights charges, neither of their families will get even the cold comfort of a day in court.

Sadly, there's nothing new about this pattern of lethal racial profiling. For far too long, African-Americans in this country have had to worry about whether police will kill their loved ones on the slightest pretext without facing any meaningful punishment. Racist violence is a deep-rooted part of this country's history, and it's going to take substantial nationwide reform of the policing and court systems to change this awful reality. Here are 11 of the most heartbreaking examples of black men, women and children killed by police in the last 15 years. Their stories are different in many ways, but none of them deserved to die the way they did – and we could fill many more pages with others like them.

1. Amadou Diallo (1999)
2. Patrick Dorismond (2000)
3. Ousmane Zongo (2003)
4. Timothy Stansbury (2004)
5. Sean Bell (2006)
6. Oscar Grant (2009)
7. Aiyana Stanley-Jones (2010)
8. Ramarley Graham (2012)
9. Tamon Robinson (2012)
10. Rekia Boyd (2012)
11. Kimani Gray (2013)

'Conservatives' spend a buncha time and lung capacity carping about Da Gubmint being overbearing and repressive, but not when it comes to killing brown people - then it's nothing but "cops making a noble effort to do a very dangerous job".

Almost as an aside, in all but a couple of these cases, the cops testified to being afraid the 'suspect' had a gun.  So, also too, 'conservatives', maybe you could rethink some of your bullshit rhetoric about the absolute-ness of the 2nd Amendment.  

After all, if it's OK for you guys to have any gun you want, and it's OK for you to do whatever you want with your guns (including defending yourselves from a violent and repressive Gubmint), then you should be praising brown people for doing exactly the same for themselves, and you should be condemning whoever shoots them down.  Unless of course y'all actually are the racist assholes your arguments and actions usually reveal you to be.

A Cop's Eye View

I copied this whole post at Democratic Underground.  The author says he asked his nephew about Darren Wilson killing Mike Brown. Take it or leave it according to your own bent.

Not only is he a 29 year cop, he is the third highest ranking officer in the county that he works in. I asked him about this. Being the Republican that he is, I expected him to jump to Darin Wilson's defense. He had this to say.

He would not say it was a racial thing because he doesn't know. He did say he read all of the reports and the grand jury testimony.

1- He said at very least Wilson is completely incompetent. That you never get out of the car by yourself if you know there is going to be a physical confrontation with an unarmed person. Especially if you were in Wilson's words, "afraid" of the guy.

2- He said Wilson should have let Brown go, followed him as far as he could in the car as he called for back up. If he had to, arrest him later.

3- He had no business firing once Brown was down on the ground. He fired four shots too many even if you believe his story.

4- It is unheard of to leave the guy laying in the street for four and a half hours.

5- If all of this was in accordance to Wilson's training, an idiot trained him.

6- Brown's family will get a huge settlement from Ferguson because if this goes to civil trail it will cost them many millions more.

What my nephew thinks happened is that Wilson got into an argument with the guy, got out of his car to whip his ass. Quickly realized he bit off more than he could chew, so he shot the guy.

Take it for what it's worth.

One From Way Back

A little perspective from Michael Moore in The Guardian, 2002:

I have never been attacked by a black person, never been evicted by a black person, never had my security deposit ripped off by a black landlord, never had a black landlord, never had a meeting at a Hollywood studio with a black executive in charge, never had a black person deny my child the college of her choice, never been puked on by a black teenager at a Mötley Crüe concert, never been pulled over by a black cop, never been sold a lemon by a black car salesman, never seen a black car salesman, never had a black person deny me a bank loan, and I've never heard a black person say, "We're going to eliminate 10,000 jobs here - have a nice day!"

I don't think that I'm the only white guy who can make these claims. Every mean word, every cruel act, every bit of pain and suffering in my life has had a Caucasian face attached to it.

So, um, why is it exactly that I should be afraid of black people?

I look around at the world I live in - and, I hate to tell tales out of school, but it's not the African-Americans who have made this planet such a pitiful, scary place. Recently, a headline on the front of the Science section of the New York Times asked Who Built The H-Bomb? The article went on to discuss a dispute between the men who claim credit for making the first bomb. Frankly, I could have cared less - because I already know the only pertinent answer: "It was a white guy!" No black guy ever built or used a bomb designed to wipe out hordes of innocent people, whether in Oklahoma City, Columbine or Hiroshima.

hat tip = Crooks and Liars 

Thoughts On The Side

“It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement, and remembering.” --Judith Herman, MD - Trauma and Recovery

Mike Brown gets buried in more ways than one.

We jump up and down on it for a while, but then somebody blows up a building or there's a bus crash or another jack-wad celebrity gets caught nanny-humping, and suddenly we're heading back for the group rate on self-lobotomy at the National Center For Social Amnesia.

Maybe we can get some things done that need to get done in places like Ferguson once some of the glare fades away, but don't count on it.  

If it turns out that Holder and his merry band of FBI careerists find anything that substantively exonerates Darren Wilson, we're right back in some very deep shit.

But if they scorch Wilson, & / or if they confirm what looks to be a pretty obvious pattern of abuse and corruption in Ferguson, we're likely to hear a very loud chorus of Obama The Race Hustler on an endless loop.

Mainly tho', why does it seem like somebody's always pushing us pretty hard to get back to an "equilibrium" that ends up sounding like "Both Sides", and feeling like Paralysis?

Worth Repeating

Paying particularly close attention to the first 3 minutes.

(the embedding has been disabled, so all I can do is post the link)

Tim Wise - The Pathology of White Privilege

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SIINVfqnxw

Suffer The Children

I have some kids, and I've tried to teach them a whole boatload of life lessons.

From--
"please and thank you"
--to--
"no, your socks don't have to match - it just makes it easier when you do the laundry"
--to--
"learn to live your life without needing me or a cop or Jesus looking over your shoulder all the time".

As any parent knows, some of the lessons will stick, while others get thru but don't take hold right away, and the rest just kinda bounce off and may or may not come back around in a (hopefully) benign way later on.

But since my skin is not a particular shade of brown, it never even occurred to me that I should be teaching my kids this:

That's just pretty fucked up right there.

The Very Excellent Mr Oliver