GOOOOD morning!
Ready for an ethical week?
1. I am beginning to wonder if aimless protesting and demonstrating has become a fad. Here is one piece of evidence: over the weekend, dozens of New York City police officers held a rally in support of getting quarterback Colin Kaepernick a job in the National Football League. Among the demonstrators was Frank Serpico, made famous by Al Pacino’s portrayal (Do not watch that movie now, as it has aged horribly), who must be bored or something.
What possible good can this rally do, other than to serve as some kind of perverse virtue-signaling by police (“I support the guy who said that when I’m falsely accused of murder, I should lose my salary before there’s an investigation or a fair determination of what really happened! Love me!”)? If the rally is supposed to tell NFL teams who they should hire to play based on talent alone, no team in its right mind will or should pay attention. “Hey, a bunch of cops in Brooklyn think that Colin’s better than we think he is. What the hell: lets give him a few million bucks!” If the rally is mostly about his National Anthem-dissing stunt, all they are doing is guaranteeing that the borderline quarterback will stay unemployed. Kaepernick, by his own actions (and routinely inarticulate and simple-minded justification of them) irreversibly made linked his political stand to his football abilities. It’s like the dilemma Michael Sam created when he made a big deal about being openly gay. Was he being drafted because he was gay and the NFL didn’t want to appear bigoted, or because he was good enough to play? When he was cut, was it really because he was gay (Naturally Sam hinted it was) or because the team’s management thought it would have a better team on the field without him? The same was true of Tim Tebow: if a team cut him, it was suspected of hating God. Who needs a constant distraction like that?
If a protest can’t accomplish anything constructive, then it’s an unethical protest.
2. Popular culture in the Age of Trump is sending even more muddled and unethical messages that it used to. I’m trying to get though Marvel’s latest for Netflix, “The Defenders”, a series based on Marvel’s second-tier super-hero team that consisted of a rotating squad of hopeless mismatches, like Dr. Strange and the Submariner. It has been recast as a group of urban misfits (Bulletproof ghetto warrior Luke Cage, depressive and cynical strong girl Jessica Jones, blind super-nimble lawyer Matt Murdock (aka Daredevil) and boring young tycoon Eastern master Iron Fist, whose real name I can’t remember. Yesterday i watched, Luke, easily the most likable of the four, berate Iron Fist because we was white, rich, “privileged,” and had the cruelty and audacity to regard a young black kid who was being paid to spray acid on multiple murder victims of a sinister criminal enterprise as a criminal himself. “He just needs a job,” explains the huge, indignant, racist, classist, bullet-proof black guy.
Oh, well, that’s all right then! (Pssst! Luke! Don’t hurt me, but it’s called “accessory after the fact.”)
3. This bleeds a bit into the upcoming Part 3 of the statute-toppling orgy saga, but the intensifying attendant rhetoric about “fighting” or “banishing” hate is facile and sinister in the extreme. James Murdoch, no relation to Daredevil but son of media mogul Rupert, sent out his own simpleminded screed blathering about how “there are no good Nazis” and how “the presence of hate in our society” was appalling. Personally, I hate other people who get to hate whatever they choose to telling me what I can hate, and that they get to decide what hate is acceptable and what hate isn’t. I suspect other citizens also hate this. I suspect that this exact species of hate was what motivated many of the non-white nationalists to march in Charlottesville against tearing down Lee’s statue.
Emotions are non-ethical considerations. What matters is how you channel your emotions; what you do matters in ethics, not what you wish you could do, or think about doing in your dark and bitter moments, or fantasize about doing, or even say you would like to do. An effort to “banish hate” is productive as long as it deals in persuasion, education, reason and modeling ethical values. When the effort crosses into coercion, indoctrination, grandstanding and condescension, the effort becomes hate-worthy itself. As with the civil rights movement’s tragic wrong turn toward trying to eliminate bias rather than focusing on promoting unbiased conduct, the anti-hate movement will only further polarize society. American don’t like being told what to think, or that what they think makes them lesser citizens or unworthy of their individual rights.
The anti-hate merchants are the ultimate hypocrites. They hate as vigorously as the worst of the haters they deplore. They just hate different things, ideas, and people.—you know, the right targets of hate, because they say so. They are masters of good hate.
Got it.
Ethics Alarms 
On 1… It’s kind of funny, kind of sad, but there’s a handful of progressive journalists who think it’s their job in life to see Colin Kaepernick employed, and so whenever damn near anything happens, they’ll trot out his name and demand he be hired. So in the wake of Charlottesville…. Yup…. You guessed it.
And just in case you think I’m picking obscure sources or something… That’s on ESPN’s verified YouTube channel. I can’t make this up.
“whose real name I can’t remember.” (Danny Rand) But yeah… That scene was a low point in an otherwise likable 8 episode season that I, to my eternal shame, binge watched the day it came out. The dialogue seemed so unnatural, I can only assume that somewhere, there was a director of some kind that thought that the lack of pandering might cause SJW’s to meltdown like they did over Iron Fist, and so he pigeonholed the scene in to placate them. Either that or that director was the SJW, but even they couldn’t make pious thugsplaining less abrasive than 10 grit sandpaper. I recommend sticking it out though, they do the obligatory SJW scene, and then basically move on like it never happened.
That scene in the Defenders jumped out at me too. At least (so far, I’m on episode 7), it’s not as bad as Jessica Jones, where every single white male was made out to be either evil or a bumbling wimp. The males “of color” were depicted as strong and virtuous, and the lone black guy who was shown with less-than-desirable traits (the drug-addict neighbor) was seen as an honorable guy who was just struggling with his demons.
I try to tell myself to stop thinking in terms of black/white, and that these SJWs have a divide-and-conquer mindset. But when the white male bashing is so blatant, it’s hard not to get pissed off about it.
Have any of you ever read a Luke Cage comic, especially one featuring his relationship with Iron Fist? That scene had nothing to with Trump or our modern conception of “SJWs.” It was straight out of the comics, and true to their dynamic for the past five decades. Lecturing Danny on his white privileged is what Luke Cage *does.*
Um… Actually, Four decades… Power Man and Iron fist joined up in 1978 and it is currently 2017 (I couldn’t resist).
But regardless, I’m was more concerned with how jarring and clunky the scene was than whether it was cannon. You won’t hear me complain about all the racial overtures in Luke’s main series either… It’s true to the source material. My point is that not everything from the source material makes to past the cutting room, if it was ever shot at all, and that scene… Both the set up to it (I will continue to use “thugsplaining” because it amuses me), and the execution of it feels like it was wedged in there as an afterthought.
I just rewatched the scene. It had a direct effect on the plot: Luke tells Danny that he needs to stop focusing on the kids “at the bottom,” which leads directly to Danny deciding to take the fight to the board at Midland Circle. This leads to the final confrontation at the end of the episode involving all four of our heroes. There’s no way it was wedged in as an afterthought; it plays pretty much exactly how the fans I saw were speculating Iron Fist’s first meeting with Luke Cage would go, and is crucial to the episode’s plot and theme.
The dialogue and setup was clunky, but that’s true of about 90% of the show.
I mean… Let’s really unpack those scenes… Luke says Danny was too hard on the guy pouring acid onto corpses in an abandoned warehouse (a brother’s gotta work, right?) Luke yells at Danny for being privileged, Danny points out that the guy was disposing of corpses for the hand, and Luke says he should go after bigger fish. Danny looks like he was bitch slapped with a fish and is about to cry for three scenes, when he says to Colleen “Luke might have a point, I should go after bigger fish”.
Now, I’m not saying you’re wrong, after Iron Fist, I can’t say that the B list marvel writers have my confidence… But I still wouldn’t be surprised if the first take of that series of events was MUCH different than it worked out.
I’m not saying they did it well–I found the entire series fairly boring aside from a few good scenes–but any version of events that didn’t have Luke Cage calling out Danny’s privilege would have been disappointing given how integral that is to their actual dynamic in the comics.
I would like to take a moment to admire just the outrageous foolishness of wanting to “call someone out” for being privileged. Privileges are nice. I want everyone to have them. Call someone out for being entitled, or some other actual bad behavior within an individual’s control. Calling someone out for having more privileges than you is just putting a nice face on jealously. And coming from a person who was privileged with accidental superpowers, it’s even dumber.
You’re right, I should have phrased that better. He called out Danny for being blind to his privilege, which is another way of calling him entitled.
When I saw that scene I had the impression that maybe they finished filming and weeks later brought them back to do that scene. It was disjointed and the flow was not there, just seemed to be inserted into a finished product.
Haven’t you heard? Nazis are all the rage these days; they’re hiding behind every tree.
At least there have been no clown attacks recently.
Hey! Maybe we can combine the two: Nazi clowns. There’s got to be one Nazi clown out there somewhere I can turn into the Next Big Scary Thing!
I thought the original Nazi Clown was Hermann Goring…
What about the Juggalos? https://www.google.com/search?q=Juggalos&safe=off&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiTpo2eyOjVAhXlsFQKHZOWBI8Q_AUICigB&biw=1449&bih=910
Like that David Lee Roth song?
You do know that the Insane Clown Posse’s Juggalos and a big Trump rally are both scheduled for the same date on the Mall in DC? I know people who live close enough they plan to leave town… I just grabbed a link that wasn’t a very questionable source, but there are multiple. https://www.metrotimes.com/city-slang/archives/2017/08/16/pro-trump-rally-in-dc-is-the-same-day-as-the-juggalo-march
3. This is part of what got Trump elected… progressives telling everyone else what is acceptable behavior, and changing it every ten minutes. Having an opinion is fine: when they start persecuting people for disagreeing is where Americans get peeved.
Truth. And yet they continue. Blind as bats.
#1 “Among the demonstrators was Frank Serpico, made famous by Al Pacino’s portrayal (Do not watch that movie now, as it has aged horribly), who must be bored or something.”
Good for you, Jack, You got in a slur and a ridiculous/clueless teeny weeny review of film many of the people haven’t even heard of. What a disservive to your visitors!
SERPICO is a movie released in 1973 that is as impactful and relevant today as it was when it was made. Performances, writing, attention to detail, and the visual story-telling are all first rate. With stark, harsh scenes which show greed and savagery on the part of both the criminals and the law enforcement officers assigned to protect the public, it is a story of courage, risk, and weighty consequences for both the hero and those he opposes.
Frank Serpico was an “outsider” in company that followed a code of protecting the police brotherhood at all costs. His dilemma transcended the confines of the station house and will have resonance for older teens and adults who find his story and this film both relatable and admirable.
https://www.commonsensemedia.org/movie-reviews/serpico#
#3 “James Murdoch, no relation to Daredevil but son of media mogul Rupert, sent out his own simpleminded screed blathering about how “there are no good Nazis…”
Only recently did I get my butt off the fence. So here ya go, Jack. There are absolutely, positively, no good Nazis anywhere on the planet. Fuck them. All of them. I don’t want them dead. I want them to crawl back into the dung hole they crawled out of. That’s all. Let’s start with this bunch… https://twitter.com/The_UnSilent_/status/899605815543443456
For the guests here who never saw the film, Serpico… which Jack says “has aged horribly,” let’s let our guests decide if they want to see it. Or see it again.
Where was the slur? Frank is using his worn out celebrity for a bogus cause. And the movie, always over-rated, is unwatchable.
OK, I’ll see your blast, and raise you. Saying “there are no good Nazis, besides meaning taht you foolishly refused to read my earlier post specifically laying out several,” is pure emotional grandstanding and bigotry, embracing the uniquely Leftist junk-thinking that one’ political view all all that matters. It is of similar quality as saying there are no good Communists, socialists, republicans, anarchists, racists, Democrats, abortion advocates, and Methodists. It’s not just narrow and facile, but demonstrably wrong, and dumber that a brick pile. Since there is no current Nazi party, I presume you mean that someone who is a white nationalist who builds cathedrals, feed the hungry, raises a healthy and loving family, serves her nation and gives 10% of all worldly good to the needy is still “bad,” because you don’t like their value system. You can say that such people have mistaken priorities and messed-up values. That does not mean they cannot be good.
Your mindset is totalitarian. How ironic.
Gonna be brief (chile harvest started outside my house this morning and I wanna be there with my camera during the eclipse) and answer your question, “Where was the slur?”
I wasn’t responding to the piece about Serpico attending the rally. (I haven’t followed that story, probably cause it involves football and I don’t follow that or any other sport.)
However, seems like your slur about the film Serpico somehow is a way of sliming the real Serpico. But, as I said, I was only responding to your slur of the film, not your criticism of the real Serpico.
As for the film being overrated, I hope guests here will voice their opinions.
Hear ye! Hear ye! If you already watched the film Serpico, please tell us whether you think the film is, as Jack opines, <i.unwatchable
*I’ll be back later with my answer to your second graph.
I don’t see no eclipse. I looked at the sun for 19 seconds and didn’t see nuthin’. I think Trump’s right. Fake news… again! That’s why I’m back early. Point me to your earlier post, Jack, about some good Nazis. I’ll read it and then come back.
What da? Where’d everybody go? Did I miss the ascension? Just my luck it’s just me and the Nazis here.
Nobody here but us deplorables… 😉
Oh thank God I didn’t miss the rapture.
Wait… I thought you have insider information the world will burn, and that you would be around to toast marshmallows. Are you now saying you want to miss the party?
Never said the world would burn and never said I’d float away. What I did say was what I was told during my near death episode. First, the voice said I was crazy (the voice used a Jewish word, meshuganah… not sure of the spelling) and then added, I’m paraphrasing here, “You wouldn’t believe all the bad shit queued up in Earth’s timeline.” I specifically remember the last five words in that statement… queued up in Earth’s timeline.
No specifics were given. Perhaps the most intriguing parts of the incident was, after I pleaded that “I can’t go now, I have things Ineed to do” the voice responded with these exact words… “Why haven’t you done them?”
Bottom line is the country and many parts of the globe appear to be on the cusp of a major catastrophe. It could be another world war, it could be the assassination of a political figure leading to mass uprisings, hell, it could be an asteroid strike or an EMP attack. I don’t profess to know. I do think I’ll be here to witness it. I hope it’s not as bad as the voice made it out to be… I don’t relish the thought of me regretting my decision to float away before the shit hits the fan.
Maybe the event is nearer than you think, Fatty:
http://www.al.com/news/index.ssf/2017/08/largest_asteroid_ever_tracked.html
And the asteroid is named after Florence Nightingale… there is humor bound as potential energy there, I think.
“Earth destroyed by Florence Nightingale’s namesake”
Swish!
As you said, these campaigns to “banish hate” are going to backfire big time. This is sort of like political correctness which has been mocked throughly on the internet in countless memes and cartoons. The arrogance in which these social justice warriors display in telling fellow Americans what they cannot tolerate is stunning.
Progressives like to pretend that tolerance is a paradox… That they cannot tolerate intolerance, and so they recognize that they’re being intolerant of the intolerant, and that’s necessary for true tolerance.
In reality, there’s a difference between tolerance and acceptance, you tolerate babies crying in restaurants, that doesn’t mean you have to like it. And the “paradox” of tolerance only functions if you fail to separate words from actions. We CAN tolerate the mouth noises that people make, regardless of what it is they’re saying… What they do, however, can be prohibited. Take the Red Skull there… Chances are Cap isn’t punching him for yelling Seig Heil while brandishing a tiki torch. I’m just saying.
But Humble! If we break out what all that really means, how are we supposed to lump everything that doesn’t march lockstep with the progressive cause into a group we can call Nazis???
Funny how when the Dems are in power the Russians are kind of cute and admirable for having tried to implement communism and the Neo-Nazis are kind of cool for letting liberals show what great respect they have for the Constitution (and they get to kind of stick it to the Jews in Skokie at the same time). But now, TRUMP! and the Russians are an existential threat to the U.S. and there’s a Russian plutocrat under every rock. And every single white person, all 200 million or so of them, is a Neo-NAZI and Kristallnacht is only hours away. Weird.
Yes, outrageous straw man arguments are weird. Good job!
How so? What’s straw man about my observation?
You’re kidding. All of it. Every single sentence.
Come on, counselor, you can do better than that.
Have you taken a recent blow to the head?
Self-evidently stupid, bigoted partisan screeds based on nothing but deliberate misrepresentations of your opponents don’t deserve any better than what I gave you, OB.
Hey. Speaking about Russians.
I’m not about to forget the last six months where progressives sat in a circle and beat each other off to Russian espionage porn. I’m mean, I get it, if I were someone who took part, I’d be doing my best to forget about it too. Seriously, after the last couple of reports showing how manufactured and hollow the entire slew of allegations were, when’s the last time you saw someone willing to put their commie fever on display?
But I digress. I shouldn’t be surprised. The fad has passed, right? It’s not cool and hip with your fellow children to make political hay about the Ruskies anymore, da? You’ve moved on to full blown Nazi fever. Well, I’ll be here, throwing in my occasional jab, at least until next… February? Let’s call it… That’s six months from now… When you’ve moved on to your next tin foil circle jerk, and found a new group to hate. I wonder who it will be.
And I’m really scratching my head over this. Progressives have recently discovered that they like Jews, if only as an offshoot of their dislike for Nazis, but still… nice to see them on the right side of that particular issue, finally. Maybe they’ll follow that through and start castigating the BDS movement. Or maybe once their Nazi fever is done, they’ll start hating the Jews because they’ll remember they’re in favor of BDS…. Never underestimate the progressive ability to step on the rake of irony.
Thanks, HT. When did “bigot” take on the additional meaning of “someone who doesn’t agree with someone else?” I missed that.
I agree that the sudden silence on the left of all things trump russia is pretty fantastic. I disagree on the statues. I think this is a short cycle hyperventilation manufactured for electioneering purposes. Establish enough racial animosity to last until 2018 then move on to another freak out with that racial animosity stored up for use in campaign season.
There haven’t been any new revelations in a while. I do miss the days when there was a new break in the Russia story every week and you still said it was based on nothing.
*chuckle*
Jack, et al, have trounced you time and again on this topic.
Alas, I am trounced! I shall contact my good friend George Soros post-haste and have him order Robert Mueller to drop the investigation at once.
I really don’t care that you fail to recognize it. But any objective and rational reader (those not suffering from Trump-election Derangement Syndrome) saw the analysis and knows the accusations wildly tossed around amounted to nothing.
Chris is having a hard time with how the logical progression his side has come to is indistinguishable from the fascists he says he abhors.
Progressives lied about the Russians and the elections, just like they are lying about the Civil War and Charlotte today. Don’t expect them to admit it.
I really don’t care that you fail to recognize it. But any objective and rational reader (those not suffering from Trump-election Derangement Syndrome) saw the analysis and knows the accusations wildly tossed around amounted to nothing.
So the investigation is already over, then?
The fantasy. The reality: https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-BmnMqEimGAE/WZR3BuS6wNI/AAAAAAAAZl4/jCCO-_WF9uotqFB8E0fj0WcnsGRq0yw2QCLcBGAs/s1600/Women_March_Crazy.JPG
It would appear that some have been spared Lefty’s fervent, sharp-shooting rancor in the ongoing effort to tar-n-feather any-n-all whose past has crossed paths with that ”Peculiar Institution.”
“When investigating Obama’s background, (genealogist William Addams) Reitwiesner found the future president’s familial ties to a Virginia slaveholding family.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/mar/04/uselections2008.barackobama
But Paul, let us never let the fact President Obama’s mother was white and he was raised by his white grandparents long after his bigamist father abandoned him and his mother cross our lips. Never. You think we’re ancient Greeks and actually know the back stories of our Gods? Get real.
What?
No, seriously: what is that paragraph supposed to convey? What meaning is supposed to be taken from what appears to be a random soup of facts seasoned with way too much resentment and attitude? Why are you angry? Who is telling you that those facts are unutterable?
Okay, Chris, I’ll spell it out for you: If a person is a lefty icon, they are perfect and unassailable. If a person is a conservative icon, they are indefensible. Obama was black BLACK Black! Except he wasn’t. Remember when Jesse Jackson said he’d like to cut Obama’s nuts off? It’s just an annoying double standard. I just get tired of being told the sky is green rather than blue. And let’s not forget who the first black president was. Until he wasn’t.
Okay, Chris, I’ll spell it out for you: If a person is a lefty icon, they are perfect and unassailable. If a person is a conservative icon, they are indefensible.
I don’t understand. What do Obama’s father’s sins have to do with making Obama less “perfect and unassailable?”
Obama was black BLACK Black! Except he wasn’t.
Wow. Half-black people aren’t black? Are you joking? My uncles are half-black; they self-identify as black. Most do. What rule book are you operating out of that says half-black people cannot self-identify as black?
Remember when Jesse Jackson said he’d like to cut Obama’s nuts off?
No, because Jesse Jackson is completely irrelevant. Bringing him up as an example of what leftists think is like bringing up Gloria Steinem as an example of what modern-day feminists think. It does nothing but reveal the speaker as comically out of touch.
It’s just an annoying double standard. I just get tired of being told the sky is green rather than blue.
Ok, but Obama is black.
And let’s not forget who the first black president was. Until he wasn’t.
What?
Bill Clinton was our first black president, Chris.
I guess you don’t remember the “one drop of black blood” rule from Jim Crow days, Chris. I just find it curious that even though half black kids are often ridiculed by more black kids for not being black enough, the one drop rule seems to now allow people to deny their whiteness if they want to. Just strikes me as strange.
And no, I think its’ much more appropriate and accurate to call Obama mixed race. Particularly since he has made his career on identity politics.
You call me comically out of touch. I think you’re lacking in perspective and I try to bring it to my comments here.
So Obama was perfect and unassailable? Let me ask you this: was Obama authentically black? I’m not sure he’d pass that test, frankly, given the push of identity politics.
Other Bill on August 21, 2017 at 9:59 pm
Bill Clinton was our first black president, Chris.
No, he wasn’t, and that meme was always stupid.
I guess you don’t remember the “one drop of black blood” rule from Jim Crow days, Chris. I just find it curious that even though half black kids are often ridiculed by more black kids for not being black enough, the one drop rule seems to now allow people to deny their whiteness if they want to. Just strikes me as strange.
Obama has never “denied his whiteness.” Your gift for projection has been aptly demonstrated in this thread, though.
And no, I think its’ much more appropriate and accurate to call Obama mixed race. Particularly since he has made his career on identity politics.
He is both mixed race and black.
So Obama was perfect and unassailable?
No. You said he was, and then used the existence of his white mother and black father to somehow cast doubt on this. This bizarre choice of yours remains unexplained.
Let me ask you this: was Obama authentically black?
If that question has any real value at all–and I am highly skeptical that it does–I am definitely not the person to answer it, and such an answer would have absolutely zero value.
But your weird obsession with the former president’s race is noted, and filed away for future reference.
I’m not sure he’d pass that test, frankly, given the push of identity politics.
That last sentence is yours, and I accidentally left it in. But hey, let’s test your theory. Find me a prominent person whom you see as a proponent of “identity politics” (so, anyone to the left of Mitt Romney on social justice issues) who espouses that half-black people aren’t “really” black. My suspicion is you can’t, and that this statement of yours will be just as much an invention as basically everything else you’ve made up about liberals in this thread.
This reminds me of (many) fights that I have had with my mother on this issue. My mother does not think she is a racist, although she adamantly believes that there should be no marriages between blacks/whites and Christians/Jews. (Obviously, she is a racist — she just doesn’t like that word.) “Think of the children,” is one of her favorite sayings.
In high school, we had one black family in our huge school. By black, I mean one white parent, one black parent. They had two daughters. My mother said senior year, “I feel so sorry for [insert name], she has no one to take her to prom.” When I asked what she meant, my mother said that their are no black boys at my school. (I think you can all imagine the conversation that followed.) Years later, my mom (a huge James Bond fan), refused to go see the latest release because Halle Berry was the primary love interest. Mom: “I just don’t like that.” Half-black people are viewed as all-black by people who care about these issues. And, if you press them, like I have with my mom, relatives, and friends where I grew up, you will learn their rule: “It’s okay for half-black people to marry half-black or all-black people, but they shouldn’t marry white people.” They aren’t even consistent — you would think their rule should be that half-black people can ONLY marry half-black people, but nope. They just care about preserving white skin.
So, do you have any wonder why half-black people choose to identify as black? They have to — society has pushed them in that direction. I can’t imagine how hard that must have been for Obama given that he was raised by an entirely white family even though society viewed him as black. Talk about an identity crisis.
Very well said, Spartan.
I’m perfectly fine with people being whatever they happen to be. But the identity politics thing is a dead end. Here’s an example: Let’s say reparations is enacted by Congress. Who qualifies for payments? Barack Obama, ne Barry Dunham? White mother descended from a slave owner (purportedly, but in any event he’s descended from whites on one side) and an African father who whose predecessors were very unlikely to have ever been enslaved in America. Who knows? Maybe they made their fortune providing slaves to the traders? But he identifies as black. So he gets his share of the reparations pie? Was he even qualified as a minority applicant to the various elite schools he attended?
I hate to play the Martin Luther King card here, I know that makes me hilariously old and out of touch, but do we really want to have policies based on the color of our skin rather than our character?
And Sparty, you’re the near eugenicist in residence around here. If you want poor women to not have kids to increase their likelihood of success, wouldn’t you also want to discourage intermarriage for all the same reasons, i.e., it’s hard on the parents and the kids? Isn’t “think of the children!” a standard lefty cry? Ironically, mixed race kids grow up to be highly desired in the entertainment and fashion industries because they’re so good looking.
I’m perfectly fine with people being whatever they happen to be. But the identity politics thing is a dead end.
You are the one who brought up Obama’s race and family background in a bizarrely derogatory fashion. You don’t really get to complain about “identity politics” after doing that.
Here’s an example: Let’s say reparations is enacted by Congress. Who qualifies for payments?
A pipe dream at this point, and irrelevant to whether Barack Obama right now, in our current social context, qualifies as black.
And Sparty, you’re the near eugenicist in residence around here.
Dear god…
If you want poor women to not have kids to increase their likelihood of success, wouldn’t you also want to discourage intermarriage for all the same reasons, i.e., it’s hard on the parents and the kids?
What evidence do you have that intermarriage, in this day and age, is hard for parents and their kids? What evidence do you have that families such as this face similar obstacles as families in poverty?
Isn’t “think of the children!” a standard lefty cry? Ironically, mixed race kids grow up to be highly desired in the entertainment and fashion industries because they’re so good looking.
You really, really need to stop digging. This is painful to watch.
Other Bill — I’m not even going to dignify any of this with a response. My initial comment stands (but for the grammar mistakes, please forgive those).
Yes, this is due to the stupid identifiers of mulatto, quadroon, octaroon, etc.
Because race is a silly artificial construct to begin with.
You are of course correct. Unfortunately, race still has massive social implications in our society today.
Were we to apply the George Zimmerman “White Hispanic” standard of racial assignment, Obama would be a “Black White.”
“And let’s not forget who the first black president was.”
But, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, he rented office space in Harlem!!!!!
Hey, you don’t think that was a weak-titted effort at absolution for the horrendously ruinous affect his Omnibus “Three Strikes” Crime Bill had on the HUGE increases in the mass incarceration rates of Blacks and other minorities, do you?
So we’re going to criminalize emotions now? That’s the plan?
Orwell was wrong. He thought the government would force thought-crime laws onto people, turns out people are going to demand them.
No happy crap about the eclipse?
I mean, it’s being, if not racist, like…um…totally racially insensitive.
Why? According to Alice Ristroph in The Atlantic, its chosen path won’t affect enough Black people.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/08/american-totality-eclipse-race/537318/#article
Then there’d be an obligatory Global Warming tie-in: If we trust scientists to predict THIS, why don’t we believe them when they say we’re going to be warmed to death?
The Gray Lady’s Justin Gillis: “Should You Trust Climate Science? Maybe the Eclipse Is a Clue”
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/08/18/climate/should-you-trust-climate-science-maybe-the-eclipse-is-a-clue.html?smid=tw-share&referer=https://t.co/S5oapqFrSU?amp=1
When you stop expecting this prattling blather to make sense, it finally makes perfect sense.
My favorite was a discussion on the eclipse path leading into a critique of the electoral college.
Leftists…laugh lest we cry.
”My favorite was a discussion on the eclipse path leading into a critique of the electoral college.”
My erstwhile trusting credulity being shaken to its very core, that brilliance escaped me.
Oh, and you’re a racist/denier/vote suppressor!
The narrative is: “Right-wing white supremacist groups are on the rise.” The Poynter Institute, the go-to journalism think-tank, just published an article asking whether news organizations should assign reporters to the “white supremacy beat.”
Journalists almost always cite the Southern Poverty Law Center when it comes to assessing how much “hate” is in America. There are major problems with using the SPLC, but let’s play along.
A perfunctory dive into the SPLC’s “hate groups” lists show the fastest-growing hate group segment is…black nationalists.
According to the SPLC, Nazi groups have diminished, from 142 in 2014 to 99 in 2016, the most recent data available. From 2014-2016, the only group that grew each year was black nationalists. There were 72 KKK groups identified in 2014, which jumped to 190 in 2015, and then dipped down to 130 in 2016.
The black nationalist groups went from 113 to 180, to currently 193.
Let me put a fine line around this data:
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the media’s favorite arbiter of hate in America, there are currently almost twice as many black nationalist hate groups (193) as there are Nazi groups (99).
Let me say that again: for all the furor (sorry) over Nazis, there are twice as many black nationalist hate groups defined by the SPLC — and Black Lives Matter is NOT included in that group.
If you combine all the SPLC’s white-specific hate groups on this year’s “hate map,” you’ll get 450. Even if you include all the listed hate groups, including those that don’t specifically mention race, such as organizations listed because of their traditional Christian beliefs about gay marriage, of the 917 “hate groups” listed, if black groups make up nearly 200 of those, that’s still way out of whack with their 12-13 percent population (black groups making up 21 percent of all hate groups — and this is using every hate group besides black hate groups, according to the SPLC).
So if you take population into consideration, since whites are 77 percent of the US population, and blacks are just 12-13 percent, it’s a fact that, according to the SPLC, blacks are far more likely to join a hate group than whites.
This correlates with the ADL, which has published several studies finding blacks are far more likely to engage in antisemitism than whites. So are Hispanics.
I’m always skeptical of these statistics, because they aren’t based on convictions, but on subjective data. And, of course, we’ve seen literally dozens of instances of hate hoaxes.
Of course, there are always fringe idiots who do idiotic things. But how big a threat are Nazis, anyway? If we go by the media’s darling, the SPLC, the black groups are a faster-growing, and much bigger threat.
The narrative is complete bullshit. And it’s fairly easy to refute.
I really wish we could edit our posts! 🙂 Anyway, I wanted to add that I’m not just cherry-picking SPLC stats from 2014-2016; according to their “hate list,” black nationalists were also the biggest growing segment of hate groups from 2005-2015. So both long-term and in the past few years, the black hate groups have been the biggest gainers, according to the SPLC.
Personally, I think it’s just a few fringe idiots on both sides.
Comment of the Day. And true, too!
So if you take population into consideration, since whites are 77 percent of the US population, and blacks are just 12-13 percent, it’s a fact that, according to the SPLC, blacks are far more likely to join a hate group than whites.
No, you haven’t demonstrated this.
To do so, you’d have to count not just the number of groups, but how many black individuals are members of those groups. It’s possible that the black nationalist groups are smaller or less consolidated than the white nationalist groups. Were you able to get any data about the membership of those groups? Without that, the conclusion you’ve reached is not valid.
Even if you include all the listed hate groups, including those that don’t specifically mention race, such as organizations listed because of their traditional Christian beliefs about gay marriage,
There are no groups listed because of their traditional Christian beliefs about gay marriage.
“It’s possible that the black nationalist groups are smaller or less consolidated than the white nationalist groups.”
Your dog-eared copy of Darrell Huff’s “How to Lie With Statistics” at the ready, Chris?
That’s not your best hope, it’s your ONLY hope.
Otherwise, yet again, and in a story as old as time itself, Lefty’s spittle-flecked, slobbering narrative wilts like August lettuce, reducing them to sputtering with horrified ignominy:
FAKE NEWS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Bringing up a possibility is fake news? Ok, buddy.
But funny that you bring up lying with statistics after I just showed that Tippy’s interpretation of the statistics wasn’t justified.
As long as you apply that same logic to all “hate groups,” I’m ok with it. My feeling is, other than fringe idiots, we don’t have a “growing hate problem.” It’s largely the construct of a media that wants to gin up anger for ratings.
Of course. We can’t say that any race is more likely to join a hate group without knowing the number of members in those groups. I think that would also help know whether there is a growing hate problem or not as well.