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Showing posts from July, 2016

Why Ben Shapiro is Wrong About BLM

If Ben Shapiro really wants answers to his condemnations of BLM, he should start by reading a few books, and then some. For example, he can find all of the answer's he's looking for in: Slavery By Another Name , by Douglas Blackmon, which shows how "thousands of African Americans were pulled back into forced labor with shocking force and brutality," right up until the 1970s, when I was still in grade school. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness , by Civil Rights litigator and legal scholar, Michelle Alexander, which explains how "mass incarceration" under the ruse of a War on Drugs, has effectively created a caste system that is as pronounced in America today as it was in the Jim Crow south, if not more. Ghosts of Jim Crow , which was written by Constitutional Law Professor, F. Michael Higgenbotham, which explains in great detail how "the shadows of Jim Crow era laws and attitudes continue to perpetuate insidious,

America: Borne in Blood - Race War by Addiction

In the movie Crash (2004) a "good cop" gives into his fear, and a "bad cop" gives into his humanity,   as the former shoots a black male hitchhiker   who had reached into his pocket like Philando Castile, and the latter reached into a burning car to save a person's life. In short, the movie captures the complicated nature of who we are and, by extension, just how complicated issues of race and racism can really be.   And today, race relations in America are perhaps more complicated and more strained, than any other time in recent history.   The complex and ever more complicated web of racism that is both direct and implicit in our society, is interwoven with both social and legal measures designed to combat it. Racial quotas for schools and universities, for example, are undermined by the even greater quota demands that police departments put on their officers to fund their budgets, and private prisons put on the American tax payer to satisfy their shareh

The Brother Karamozov

If you watched the RNC, you probably noticed how much some extremist Christians suffer from the very sin they say Satan was thrown out of heaven for. Such Christians suffer from the very sin that the serpent promised they would suffer from in the Garden of Eden, when he promised them that, by eating the apple, they would "become like God, knowing good from evil." And ever since then, these Christians have been running around "like God," and deciding for everyone on the planet what is "good" and what is "evil"  - according to them (even though they insist it is only according to their imaginary friend they call "Jesus," for whom they are as willing to smite all those who question his existence, as ISIS is willing to behead someone for drawing a cartoon of Mohammad.)   That the very act of making such God like pronouncements, by those who can't even agree among themselves about how to interpret something as simple as a bible vers

Gun Nuts and Drugs

God only knows how Christians come to believe that the phrase, "to live by the sword is to die by the sword," has nothing at all to do with their guns. Talk about a miracle even God can't explain! A close second to this is the fact that so many of these same Christian's demand that something as harmless as marijuana should be illegal, that you have to be 16 and have a valid drivers license to drive a car, and that a person must be 21 to drink alcohol, but that it is completely preposterous to suggest that there should ever be restrictions on gun sales to minors. Such gun nuts also insist that God gave them the Second Amendment, even though that same God sent out his original apostles, "like sheep among wolves," to "spread the word of God" by relying solely on their exercise of the First. 

O.J. Simpson and God?

12 jurors, with all of the evidence in the world, couldn't agree that O.J. Simpson murdered Nicole Brown Simpson, but we're supposed to believe that 2.2 billion Christian's in the world, and 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, have all come to the unanimous conclusion that God exists, and he created the universe, even though there isn't a single shred of evidence to prove any of it, and plenty of evidence to suggest otherwise?

America: Borne in Blood - The Blame Game

Thanks to social media, the shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile ricocheted in every direction around the country, tearing the fabric of society to pieces as people began blaming "racist cops" and then "racist Liberals" and anyone else they could think to blame. Kevin Jackson from The Blacksphere," for example, said "the people to blame for this are Liberals" whom he referred to as "the worst people on the planet." He went on to explain that it is not African Americans, but Native Americans, "who are killed more, per capita, than any other race,” as if to suggest that African American’s should therefore be thankful that things are not worse for them.   Others joined in the linguistic lynching of BLM on social media. Judge Jeanine Pirro, for example, "stoked the (emotional) fires" of division by saying Obama "stokes the fires (of racism) every chance he gets." In the comments, the focus was not about

America: Borne in Blood - Blame Not Lest Ye Be Blamed

I do not wish to blame all those who blame. I have no doubt that they sincerely believe everything they say, and that they say it with such urgency and force because they really do care. (I may be wrong, of course, but what good would it do me to think in any other way?) But we really have to ask ourselves, is what they're doing, by telling us who to blame, a way of trying to make things better for us, or for them?   BLM does not just stand for "black people only," nor is it simply a movement protesting only police shootings and brutality. It is a response of a people who have always borne societies ills the most. During the subprime housing crises, for example, blacks lost their homes at twice the rate of any other race, and today, they have toughest time getting a mortgage. In 2015, the black unemployment rate was 9.2%, more than twice the unemployment rates for whites, at 4.4%. And even though it is not always the case that blacks are the most killed or the wo

America: Borne in Blood

If the Abolitionist Movement of  the1800s and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s had been subjected to the same kind of political spin doctoring as BLM, slavery would never have been abolished and black people in America would still be fighting to sit in the same trains, at the same lunch counters, and even on the same toilets, as white people today. Instead, political spin doctors are working everywhere in the name of "patriotism" to accomplish through social media what COINTELPRO failed to accomplish through subterfuge, by subverting all those who seek equality by accusing them of using the color of their skin to seek a special status. Doing so is like calling Martin Luther King a terrorist, Muhammad Ali a communist, and Rosa Parks an anarchist. But worst of all, it is to judge a movement not by the content of its claims, but by something as superficial as a name. And in so doing, demand that those we treat as separate necessarily see everyone as equal, even though