I have a feeling I may be using this clip, the final lines from “The Bridge of the River Kwai,” a lot from now on. In fact, I’m going to add it to the Ethics Alarms clips list right now. Back in a minute…I just realized that there’s another clip I left out of that post, so we are now up to eleven.
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Back. As Lili Von Shtupp said, “I feel wefweshed!
These are truly the crazy times. The George Floyd Freakout has emboldened the power-hungry, the self-righteous, the manipulative and the irresponsible, while those who have not abandoned their values and faculties descend into fear and submissiveness. For example…
- These are banner days for the Niggardly Principles, especially the Third, which states,
“When…suppressing speech and conduct based on an individual’s or a group’s sincere claim that such speech or conduct is offensive, however understandable and reasonable this claim may be, creates or threatens to create a powerful precedent that will undermine freedom of speech, expression or political opinion elsewhere, calls to suppress the speech or conduct must be opposed and rejected.”
The City Council of Duluth, Minnesota, is considering stripping the word “chief” from the job titles of top administrators because the mayor thinks the word is offensive to Native Americans. It was reported that during a press conference yesterday, Mayor Emily Larson “implored City Council members to vote to approve the change next week ‘”so that we have more inclusive leadership and less language that is rooted in hurt and offensive, intentional marginalization.”
Alicia Kozlowski, the city’s community relations officer, told reporters, “I think there are other titles that we have the opportunity to use to steer away from language that may put people down based off their race or culture.”
These women are idiots and ignoramuses, but they are virtue-signaling, and while madness reigns, facts don’t matter. “Chief” is not a Native American word: it’s Middle English: from the Old French chief, or chef, based on the Latin caput ,’ meaning “head’.’
Then we have this item from the University of Florida, where for the last two decades or so “Gator Bait!” has been a popular chant by the football team’s fans in response to a song played by the school’s band…
- The University announced yesterday that it is banning the “Gator Bait” cheer from all future sporting events, ESPN reported. Why, you ask? School President Kent Fuchs said the cheer will be taboo because of “history racist imagery associated with the phrase.”
And what would that be, Mr. Fuchs?
“While I know of no evidence of racism associated with our ‘Gator Bait’ cheer at UF sporting events, there is horrific historic racist imagery associated with the phrase,” Fuchs told ESPN.
You see, Ferris State University’s Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, says that black babies may have been used as alligator bait, according to a couple of accounts:
During slavery and the Jim Crow era in the United States, African Americans were brutalized and mistreated in almost every way imaginable. If there was a way to kill, maim, oppress, or use an African American for any reason, it more than likely happened…. In 1908 the Washington Times reported that a keeper at the New York Zoological Garden baited “Alligators With Pickaninnies” out of their winter quarters. In the article two “small colored children happened to drift through the reptile house among the throng of visitors” and they were “pressed into service.” …T.W. Villiers chronicles the entire process of using black babies as bait and how “these little black morsels are more than glad to be led to the ‘sacrifice’ and do their part in lurking the big Florida gators to their fate without suffering so much as a scratch.” Villiers is quick to point out that the babies are brought out of the “water alive and whole and come out wet and laughing” and that “there is nothing terrible about it, except that it is spelling death for the alligators.”
The cheer, however, had nothing to do with these tales; indeed very few people at the University of Florida or anywhere else have heard of using black children as “gator bait.” The cheer was invented by Lawrence Wright, an African-American player for the Gators in 1995. He would taunt opposing teams, “If you ain’t a Gator, ya Gator bait, baby!” and it caught on. He’s not happy about his contribution to his college’s traditions being erased.
“Me and the president need to sit down and talk about this,” Wright said. “I’m not going for it. I created something for us. It’s a college football thing. It’s not a racist thing, It’s about us, the Gator Nation. And I’m Black.”
Well, if a black man’s popular contribution to a college’s rich traditions has to be jettisoned because lunatic Black Lives Matter fanatic misunderstands a football cheer to be a reference to an obscure racist horror story, so be it!
Madness! Madness!
Ethics Alarms 
This is getting to be the perfect storm, isn’t it.
That’s exactly what it is.
Yup, and this is going to be the storm that sweeps Trump out of office and, quite possibly, makes the GOP, if not a permanent minority party, at least the beaten minority it was in 2008, with a whole lot longer to come back, and makes everyone not of color a presumed racist.
How will this storm sweep Trump out of office, unless it is supposed to goad him into actually supporting this madness?
I think you are likely 180 degrees wrong on this, Steve-O. I think it will exacerbate racial division and determination among an increasing number of Americans not to be bullied, insulted, and lectured at. History tells us that until society puts its foot down, these things keep escalating until they alienate the public, and that’s what’s likely to happen again.
I don’t see anyone putting their foot down on this yet. Roger Goodell cowered like a special needs six-year-old in the dark. The mayor of Seattle is actively aiding the “autonomous zone.” Pajama boy Frey was made to look like BLM’s bitch. Milley turned on Trump. Esper publicly disagreed with him. Other police chiefs have knelt to wash the feet of black pastors like servants. Who’s going to say no now?
We The People will at some point soon.
Goodel and all the others are merely the corporatist tools the fascists use to obtain resources. What happened to all those corporate lackeys in 1945 – 1950. I bet Goodell or the head of Walmart would not have lasted 10 minutes after Mussolini was captured.
What do Milley and Esper have to do with this madness?
Both are people who could have backed the president on his response to this craziness. They didn’t. Therefore, it looks like the president has no control over anything.
What exactly did they do?
The State itself has determined that Trump must go. It is naive to imagine that this is simply or only ‘the Democrats’. This has to do with a governmental and corporatist establishment that seems to be making it clear what they support and what they don’t support. They do not support the original demographic that, mistakingly, got Trump elected president and thus upsetting huge elite-global plans.
So, the only hope here is if that dispossessed demographic — the same demographic that elected Trump — manages to concentrate itself electorily. Curiously, it is not an easy call. It could go one way or the other. If the last time around so many of the Systems media representatives got it wrong, it is not impossible that they will get it wrong again.
But let’s examine a Trump loss: this will result in the System itself working to calm things down. To put back in their cages (so to speak) the radical factions they have set loose. The System itself, with help from the Intelligence sector, certainly has all the tools to do so. The ‘narcotic Americanism’ can be called forth as needed. Other ’emergencies’ can be manufactured for that purpose. After all the purpose of the Government-Corporate collusion is essentially to narcotize the population whose real function, whose determined function, is to consume not opine.
The advantage of a win by Biden with the bizarre wildcard of a running maitresse of color for the American Right will be that the oppressive controls that the State possesses will become more evident and there will be that much more to react against. To the degree that whatever sort of *régime* shows itself as operating behind the elected President and selected cabinet becomes that much more obvious and intolerant, is the degree that the American Right will continue to solidify its disparate ideas. Note that there is a strongly dissident Right that is indeed developing, and they are opposed by the centrist Right of which this Blog is largely composed. How will that stark division be bridged? How will the Conventional and sold-out American ‘Conservative’ Right sell out the more vibrant and activist ‘fringe’?
These are questions that require more analysis.
A Trump win will likely set the country in even more flames. If they have gone as crazy in their opposition as they most certainly have (10 exclamation points need to be inserted after ‘crazy’) (!!!!!!!!!!) they could very well engineer a coup d’état. A “coup lite” is what has been attempted and there is no reason to suppose that it could not harden into something stronger. The point? *They* seem capable of stopping at nothing.
Who are *they*? Jack, Steve? Chris? Wayne? Michael?
One way or the other it will remain *highly interesting* but also highly dangerous, highly strange, and also highly absurd.
This storm is getting in the way of sweeping Trump from office.
Everything is happening so fast, one hardly has time to process it. Since I have been on this blog (6 years) we have entered new territory which is overpowering yet demands interpretation. Here on this blog, as I have said many times, you clearly see the immediate situation but have almost zero interpretive schema. These alarming, strange, disconcerting events just keep occurring and they keep rising in intensity . . .
But why? What does it mean.
I would like to propose the following: We are now entering a time of war. It is world war but the terms of that war — as we all notice — are unlike what we think of when we consider what war is. We cannot identify that we are in time of war because it is so unalike what we’d imagine that to be. But *war* implies large and of course vast struggles between power groupings in relation to which the individual . . . means nothing. Does ‘ideology’ mean something? I am not sure if this is a war that involves the conventional or previous notions of ideology to which people could commit their heart and mind. Why? Because it is so evidently about power and control.
Information war, biological war, lockdown conditions that are abused by ruling structures, a general sense that enemies abound but that we do not know who they are, or where they are. Evidences of martial law. Internal nation-wide riots that were encouraged and supported. And now the on-going enforcement of ‘politically correct confession’ that is demanded. All of this points to the conditions of war, or the controls that are enacted in populations during war-time.
I also propose a betting pool (not sure what it is called) where we can place monetary bets (avoiding the coin toss as in No Country For Old Men type of wager!) on who will win the Presidency in November, Biden or Trump. There should be a third option here: the wildcard. What if there is no election? (I honestly have to say that I have this intuition that something weird will happen soon enough).
The River Kwai line I’ve had in mind is the Colonel’s very late, “What have I done?” A lot of safe leftists set out to create chaos four years ago, and are just finding out that chaos can be scary for them, too.
Mrs. OB informed me Jimmy Kimmel is taking the summer off to repent for his black face skits. Hah! Next Jimmy will have to repent for The Man Show. Off with his head! I have to say, this witch hunt is having serious economic impacts on people. No wonder the NFL and all colleges and universities are cowering and groveling.
That sounds a lot less like repentance and more like cowering in hiding from the angry mob and hoping it all blows over…
I suppose any reference to planned parenthood is out as it uses black babies as a means to lure out idiot voters. The only difference is the black babies don’t come out wet and happy.
Well, there is a racist song by Johnny Rebel in which LBJ sees two Cajuns bulling a black guy on skis and says “thanks for helpin’ your black brother,” and they say to each other “he might be smart, but I’ll tell you somethin’/he don’t know a thing about alligator huntin’.” I’ll spare you the rest of the song, it’s pretty bad.
The City of San Francisco removed a statue of Columbus yesterday because otherwise locals were going to celebrate Juneteenth by tearing it down and throwing it off Pier 31. Meantime a statue of Washington in Portland was wrapped in a burning American flag and torn down. I don’t get this. How do we make the leap from poor treatment of one black man by one bullying policeman, aided and abetted by three others too new to the job to say hey, he’s subdued, to tearing down Confederate statues, against which there is a certain argument, to destroying anything and everything that the woke hate?
And you really think tearing down statues of George Washington will “drive Trump out of office”?
If Trump said, “Hell yeah, replace it with as gold statue of me!”
In the days when Joe Biden had his faculties, he would condemn this madness!
Not that action specifically, no. I think it is more a symptom of the disease. That disease is the angry mob mentality that will make political changes by violence or the threat of violence. They’ve already cowed just about every public figure. Who’s going to say that they aren’t going to cow the voters too? Who’s to say the voters won’t finally just be like “AAAAH! MAKE IT STOP!”
Which candidate is promising to capitulate?
Not even Joe Biden, as diminished his faculties are, would campaign on dropping his drawers and bending over for the crazies.
You think he’s going to stand up to them? Hell, he’ll probably create a post of “racial justice advisor” in his cabinet.
Can anyone tell me the relevance of Juneteenth to those who were slaves in Maryland, Delaware and Virginia. Juneteenth is really only applicable to slaves in Texas and the Emancipation Proclamation did not affect the involuntary servitude of Blacks in states that did not secede from the Union.
There is none but you are making the classic critical thinking mistake of using facts, reason, and logic to guide your thinking. To be in vogue today you need to embrace making decisions based only on emotions or mob mentality. Using facts only confuses the masses and ruins the narrative.
I’d never heard of “Juneteenth” until a few days ago. However, emancipation has special significance in Texas, because it is the only state to have declared its independence from two different nations while keeping slavery legal. Ending slavery in Texas once and for all is a pretty significant moment in our nation’s history.
Was Mayor Larson wearing a red MAGA hat during the conference?
?
He must have been wearting a red MAGA hat when he said this.
“We’re doomed…DOOMED, I tell you!”
Love those old FedEx commercials. “Pittsburgh is perfect for you, Peter.”
What was left of the Washington statue was also spray painted with such lovely phrases like “white fragility” and “1619.” Apparently it was also urinated on.
When the other Mrs. Q and I broke the news recently to our friends and clients that we’re moving away from Portland next month almost everyone, including progressives, said “I’m so happy for you” or “I’m thinking of leaving too.”