Elon Musk promotes free speech...then did THIS! Shocking.
25 Apr 2023, 9:54 am
Misslizard wrote:
Grant wasn’t that great in his dealings with the inhabitants of the plains.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/ ... 180960787/
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/ ... 180960787/
That needs to be taught in schools, too. Even at the risk of causing some White children to feel ashamed of their race.
_________________
"We are all gonna die." --Senator Joni Ernst
25 Apr 2023, 10:06 am
Meanwhile...
https://apnews.com/article/divisive-ban ... 9be643bf72
Quote:
Alabama advances ban on discussing ‘divisive’ race concepts
MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — Alabama lawmakers on Wednesday advanced GOP-backed legislation to ban discussion of “ divisive concepts ” in classroom lessons and worker trainings on race and gender.
The bill would prohibit a list of what it calls “divisive concepts,” or ideas that people from any one group should be asked to accept “a sense of guilt” because of their race or gender — or that fault, blame, or bias should be assigned to a race or gender solely because of their race or gender.
The House State Government Committee approved the bill on a 9-3 vote, so it now moves to the full House of Representatives.
Republicans in several states have proposed restricting how race and gender are taught in classrooms and diversity training sessions for state workers. Rep. Ed Oliver, the bill’s sponsor, told the committee that the bill is needed because people are concerned about racist ideas and what he said are “woke policies” taught to children.
“It is designed to prevent racism in schools and state agencies,” Oliver said.
But opponents have called the legislation an attempt to whitewash the nation’s history.
“This is a slap in the face to every decent hardworking Black Alabamian that’s in this room, that’s out of this room. It’s divisive that not a single white person on this committee is going to vote against this bill,” said Democratic Rep. Prince Chestnut, a Black lawmaker from Selma. He noted that white Republicans are voting to ban ”divisive concepts” while supporting the state law protecting Confederate monuments.
Several educators expressed concern that the bill would have a chilling effect on classroom discussions, making teachers afraid to broach already difficult topics.
“I feel like HB 7 has a pretty predictable outcome which is to create an atmosphere of intimidation that causes educators to reasonably fear for their careers and their livelihoods if they were to unintentionally cross some ill-defined (rule) in the classroom,” said Steve Murray, director of the Alabama Department of Archives and History, after the vote.
The whitewashing continues in the South. They're using the term "woke" as a ridiculous buzzword.
Some White people are so fragile, aren't they?
Moreover, yesterday was Confederate Memorial Day.
https://apnews.com/article/alabama-miss ... ubscribers
Quote:
Alabama and Mississippi mark Confederate Memorial Day
MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — Alabama and Mississippi closed most government offices Monday for Confederate Memorial Day as efforts have stalled to abolish state holidays that honor the old Confederacy.
Legislation has been introduced in the ongoing Alabama legislative session to remove, alter or rename Confederate-related holidays, but the effort has so far gained little traction.
Camille Bennett, the founder of Project Say Something, an organization that has worked for the removal of Confederate monuments in Alabama, said the determination to keep Confederate holidays comes at the same time Alabama lawmakers push legislation banning so called “ divisive concepts” from being taught in state classrooms and diversity training for state workers.
“On one side, you have white conservative men defining what divisive is and what it means. ... At the same time, you are honoring the Confederacy, which in itself is a divisive concept. It’s really hypocritical, quite tone deaf,” Bennett said.
An Alabama Senate committee last week rejected a proposal to separate the joint state holiday celebrating Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee and slain civil rights leader the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. on the same day.
“We’re trying to separate the holidays of two men whose ideologies were totally separate, from one end of the totem pole to the other. One believed in justice and fairness for all, and another believed in slavery,” state Sen. Vivian Davis Figures said...
...The vote split along racial lines, Figures said at the end of the meeting, with white Republicans voting against it and Black Democrats voting for it...
...Mississippi Public Broadcasting on Monday had historians read Mississippi’s secession declaration, which makes clear that slavery was the central issue.
Mary Jane Meadows, a member of the north Mississippi chapter of the Indivisible advocacy group, told Mississippi Public Broadcasting that the group protested Confederate Memorial Day last year and planned to do the same for 2023.
“That means that 25,000 or more state employees have a day off with pay courtesy of the Mississippi taxpayers, 39% of whom are Black persons who are voters and taxpayers,” Meadows said...
...Bennett said she believes the continued recognition of Confederate holidays “speaks to the blatant disregard of the humanity of Black Alabamians.”
“We experienced a Holocaust, right. We experienced our families being ripped apart, and there is a celebration saying, ‘We wish things could have stayed the same,’ ” Bennett said.
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"We are all gonna die." --Senator Joni Ernst
25 Apr 2023, 10:17 am
And, here is Mississippi's Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_missec.asp
Quote:
...Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.
That we do not overstate the dangers to our institution, a reference to a few facts will sufficiently prove.
The hostility to this institution commenced before the adoption of the Constitution, and was manifested in the well-known Ordinance of 1787, in regard to the Northwestern Territory.
The feeling increased, until, in 1819-20, it deprived the South of more than half the vast territory acquired from France.
The same hostility dismembered Texas and seized upon all the territory acquired from Mexico.
It has grown until it denies the right of property in slaves, and refuses protection to that right on the high seas, in the Territories, and wherever the government of the United States had jurisdiction.
It refuses the admission of new slave States into the Union, and seeks to extinguish it by confining it within its present limits, denying the power of expansion.
It tramples the original equality of the South under foot.
It has nullified the Fugitive Slave Law in almost every free State in the Union, and has utterly broken the compact which our fathers pledged their faith to maintain.
It advocates negro equality, socially and politically, and promotes insurrection and incendiarism in our midst.
It has enlisted its press, its pulpit and its schools against us, until the whole popular mind of the North is excited and inflamed with prejudice.
It has made combinations and formed associations to carry out its schemes of emancipation in the States and wherever else slavery exists.
It seeks not to elevate or to support the slave, but to destroy his present condition without providing a better.
It has invaded a State, and invested with the honors of martyrdom the wretch whose purpose was to apply flames to our dwellings, and the weapons of destruction to our lives.
It has broken every compact into which it has entered for our security.
It has given indubitable evidence of its design to ruin our agriculture, to prostrate our industrial pursuits and to destroy our social system.
It knows no relenting or hesitation in its purposes; it stops not in its march of aggression, and leaves us no room to hope for cessation or for pause.
It has recently obtained control of the Government, by the prosecution of its unhallowed schemes, and destroyed the last expectation of living together in friendship and brotherhood.
Utter subjugation awaits us in the Union, if we should consent longer to remain in it. It is not a matter of choice, but of necessity. We must either submit to degradation, and to the loss of property worth four billions of money, or we must secede from the Union framed by our fathers, to secure this as well as every other species of property. For far less cause than this, our fathers separated from the Crown of England.
Our decision is made. We follow their footsteps. We embrace the alternative of separation; and for the reasons here stated, we resolve to maintain our rights with the full consciousness of the justice of our course, and the undoubting belief of our ability to maintain it.
I'm guessing that this declaration won't be studied in any Southern schools. White children are just too "fragile" to know the truth, according to the Republican masters.
Even the lame excuse of "States' Rights" is contradicted. Nullifying the Fugitive Slave Law in almost every free State in the Union was a matter of "States' Rights."
Note how "fragile" they were, back in 1860:
"It has enlisted its press, its pulpit and its schools against us, until the whole popular mind of the North is excited and inflamed with prejudice."
They just couldn't handle the antebellum notion of "wokeness."
_________________
"We are all gonna die." --Senator Joni Ernst
26 Apr 2023, 1:26 pm
AngelRho wrote:
Even during the slave era there were a few known black individuals who were achievers.
The most notable was Frederick Douglass
https://www.history.com/topics/black-hi ... k-douglass
Things would have been a lot easier for him had he not been born into slavery.
AngelRho wrote:
In my experience, black culture where I lived condemned black achievers for trying to be white, as though personal enrichment is a betrayal of black values. So they often know what’s possible and they’re discouraged on pain of being ostracized by their own, or they are overwhelmed by the intense effort it takes to rise above themselves. And that’s not a race thing, that’s everyone. But if you are raised with your own people telling you black people can’t do this or that, you’ll likely see white achievement as the product of white privilege and black people need not apply.
I detect a bit of echoing of the attitudes expressed in the "declaration of the causes which impel the State of Texas to secede from the Federal Union."
https://www.tsl.texas.gov/ref/abouttx/s ... b1861.html
Quote:
...She was received as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery--the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits--a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time. Her institutions and geographical position established the strongest ties between her and other slave-holding States of the confederacy. ..
...In all the non-slave-holding States, in violation of that good faith and comity which should exist between entirely distinct nations, the people have formed themselves into a great sectional party, now strong enough in numbers to control the affairs of each of those States, based upon the unnatural feeling of hostility to these Southern States and their beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery, proclaiming the debasing doctrine of the equality of all men, irrespective of race or color--a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of the Divine Law. They demand the abolition of negro slavery throughout the confederacy, the recognition of political equality between the white and the negro races, and avow their determination to press on their crusade against us, so long as a negro slave remains in these States...
...We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable.
That in this free government all white men are and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil and political rights; that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations; while the destruction of the existing relations between the two races, as advocated by our sectional enemies, would bring inevitable calamities upon both and desolation upon the fifteen slave-holding States....
It all sounds like the makings of a dystopian science fiction novel, like Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, where the citizens are engineered through artificial wombs into predetermined social castes.
If large group of people are being treated as subhumans, like America's Black population or India's Untouchables, generation after generation, for centuries, then it probably isn't surprising a large number of them would grow up with a constrained understanding of their potentials.
_________________
"We are all gonna die." --Senator Joni Ernst
AngelRho
Veteran
Joined: 4 Jan 2008
Age: 48
Gender: Male
Posts: 9,366
Location: The Landmass between N.O. and Mobile
26 Apr 2023, 4:07 pm
Honey69 wrote:
AngelRho wrote:
Even during the slave era there were a few known black individuals who were achievers.
The most notable was Frederick Douglass
https://www.history.com/topics/black-hi ... k-douglass
Things would have been a lot easier for him had he not been born into slavery.
Of course it would have been easier, but that isn’t the point. Douglass was an actual victim of something real. He resolved not to perpetually remain a victim. He commanded the respect of a lot of people in a way that transcended racial boundaries. I see him as a hero not for black people alone, but for all of humanity.
Honey69 wrote:
I detect a bit of echoing of the attitudes expressed in the "declaration of the causes which impel the State of Texas to secede from the Federal Union."
If large group of people are being treated as subhumans, like America's Black population or India's Untouchables, generation after generation, for centuries, then it probably isn't surprising a large number of them would grow up with a constrained understanding of their potentials.
If large group of people are being treated as subhumans, like America's Black population or India's Untouchables, generation after generation, for centuries, then it probably isn't surprising a large number of them would grow up with a constrained understanding of their potentials.
Well, yeah…I mean, white collectivists considered blacks a underclass who couldn’t fend for themselves and required the civilizing effect of the slavery institution. So it was justified by saying whites and blacks are better together with whites being a master race and blacks being a slave race.
And you’re right, it’s not surprising in the least. Nobody is surprised by it. It’s not about that, anyway. There is cultural and political pressure to maintain this sense of victimhood and perpetuate a collective identity as an underclass.
Collectives don’t break free from collectivism. Individuals do. Blacks already have individual rights. It’s a matter of whether you can convince black individuals to set aside their identity as BLACK people and exercise the rights they already have as US citizens.
26 Apr 2023, 4:14 pm
Give up their identity and the richness of Black culture?wtf??
https://exhibitions.lib.udel.edu/lift-e ... rotection/
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I am the dust that dances in the light. - Rumi
26 Apr 2023, 5:42 pm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qviM_GnJbOM
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"We are all gonna die." --Senator Joni Ernst
26 Apr 2023, 6:29 pm
^Her childhood home was Stamps, Arkansas.
https://www.arkansas.com/articles/visit ... 928%2D2014).
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I am the dust that dances in the light. - Rumi
27 Apr 2023, 8:19 am
Elvis Presley also famously also copied from Black musical culture, and repackaged it for a White audience.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SurjB5BY23c
I think that, back in the day, woke (or anti-woke) "conservatives" labeled this as "cultural appropriation", and denounced it.
Maybe it was indeed "cultural appropriation", but I don't see anything wrong with it.
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"We are all gonna die." --Senator Joni Ernst
27 Apr 2023, 8:44 am
We were talking about US Grant. Today is his birthday.
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-his ... 6c3675c604
He did have some problems--alcoholism and smoking (he died of throat cancer).
But, on the bright side
Quote:
...There were bright spots in Grant’s tenure, however, including the passage of the Enforcement Act in 1870, which temporarily curtailed the political influence of the Ku Klux Klan in the post-Civil War South, and the 1875 Civil Rights Act, which attempted to desegregate public places such as restrooms, inns, public conveyances on land or water, theaters, and other places of public amusement...
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"We are all gonna die." --Senator Joni Ernst
27 Apr 2023, 10:26 am
We had Baldknobbers and anti-Baldknobbers here after the war.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bald_Knobbers
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I am the dust that dances in the light. - Rumi
27 Apr 2023, 11:58 am
The cuckoo Ku Klux Klan was active in my part of the country during the 1920s:
https://www.uppermichiganssource.com/co ... 88343.html
Not having many people of color to harass, they expressed themselves mainly as anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish, and pro-prohibition.
https://www.bridgemi.com/guest-commenta ... ry-midwest
A song from the era
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-laslMQwMA
With the ascendance of Trumpism, these damned idiots have made a resurgence.
https://lailluminator.com/2022/04/13/wh ... -politics/
_________________
"We are all gonna die." --Senator Joni Ernst
27 Apr 2023, 2:17 pm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCaXcgv ... hannel=CNN
_________________
"We are all gonna die." --Senator Joni Ernst
AngelRho
Veteran
Joined: 4 Jan 2008
Age: 48
Gender: Male
Posts: 9,366
Location: The Landmass between N.O. and Mobile
27 Apr 2023, 6:17 pm
Misslizard wrote:
Give up their identity and the richness of Black culture?wtf??
https://exhibitions.lib.udel.edu/lift-e ... rotection/
https://exhibitions.lib.udel.edu/lift-e ... rotection/
Wrong culture.
If you’re talking about black culture in America, what you hear in the news and Democratic political speeches is a culture of poverty and perpetual victimhood. Ain’t nothing rich about it. If someone think that’s a cultural identity blacks should hang onto, well, I think that’s the most racist thing ever.
Which…is exactly what CRT is about. It’s always WHITE liberals that say things like that. White liberals love for blacks to stay oppressed and call it a “rich culture.”
What I’m getting at is achievement is not a race thing. Nuclear energy isn’t a product of Jewish identity, but Jews and ex-Germans laid much of the groundwork for building the bomb. Jewish culture fosters a love of learning. It does NOT mean every Jew is an Oppenheimer.
Frederick Douglass overheard someone say that blacks shouldn’t be educated because it meant they would desire freedom. He associated intellect with freedom and became a gifted speaker. Black culture didn’t make him a great speaker and powerful abolitionist. At the time, it was assumed black slaves were incapable of intellectual exercises on that level, yet Douglass stands out as a singular individual. That makes him a hero for all PEOPLE, not just for dark-skinned people.
Be very careful when you go wtf on cultural identity. Douglass’s “rich culture” identity meant that he was a slave and could only ever even BE a slave. That…forgive the racial connotations here…Douglass was just a talking monkey and his words on abolition were meaningless is a seriously racist attitude.
And no…this is not meant as a personal attack. I do think that there are individuals who happen to be black who happen to stand out at cultural icons. Neil DeGrasse Tyson. But what does he have to say about race?
Quote:
I don't give talks on it. I don't even give Black History Month talks. I decline every single one of them. In fact, since 1993, I've declined every interview that has my being black as a premise of the interview.
It’s not that Tyson has a problem with black people or culture. It’s that NDT identifies as, well…Neil DeGrasse Tyson and as an astrophysicist. People try to pigeonhole him as “black,” or “atheist,” when all he really is is just himself.
Has NDT ever been a victim in some sense? Sure. Black man astrophysicist in a white man’s world. Yes, he’s had to struggle. But he isn’t respected for being black. He’s respected for being an excellent astrophysicist and a unique ability to communicate about his field with a wide, often non-scientific audience. He has proven his own value, and that transcends race/culture. NDT may have struggled against a traditionally white institution, but he was never content to REMAIN a victim of it. He’s achieved things many white men never do.
So while you “wtf” about cultural identity, think very, very carefully what that means. Accidental racism is still racism.
The ACTUAL “rich culture” you associate with African/African-American people isn’t what most people think it is. African art, jazz/blues, proto-rock/rock and roll are developments of creative individuals telling their story. Left entirely to culture, those things shouldn’t exist because cultures as a whole don’t normally place much value on the work of individuals. It’s the African artist who creates value from his imagination that inspires culture, not the other way around. Cultural and societal pressure to create things usually ends up producing consumable goods that are forgotten just as quickly as they are made. Most everyone knows who made the incandescent light bulb a household item. I don’t know anyone who can name the person who invented toilet paper. Edison’s light bulb was FINALLY obsoleted by the LED, yet we still know the name. Toilet paper? We literally flush it into the sewer. Who cares? Before Edison made a marketable product, “culture” and “society” didn’t really know a problem existed to be solved by light bulbs. Why doesn’t the inventor of toilet paper get the same respect?
And that’s the thing about African art. It’s not valuable only because black people made it. It’s valuable because it is unique, distinctive, and for its own sake. “Culture” didn’t make these things. Gifted individuals did. Perhaps as a reflection of cultural values at the time, but not as a direct product of culture itself.
Examples of things culture produces? I can’t find anything. Wait…statism. Ok, that’s one thing. Lovely gems like monarchism, national socialism, and communism. The emphasis of each of those kinds of government is always culture itself. Well, that and power structures. Power structures create victims and oppressors. But not great music. NAZI culture was unable to move forward from music of the past unless there was propaganda involved. In the Soviet Union Dmitri Shostakovich was denounced twice for formalism. Sofia Gubaidulina was forced underground to get her music performed because of her “formalist” leanings.
Where is all the great music of NAZI Germany and Soviet Russia? There’s not any. Because culture doesn’t produce new things. Individuals do. The only aesthetically pleasing thing that ever came out of NAZI Germany were SS uniforms—which came down to the vision of a INDIVIDUAL fashion designer nobody cares about anymore because of what it all represents. Meanwhile, Soviet industrial design never represented any original thought except it had to look better than what those dirty Americans were doing.
And victims, specifically the permanent oppressed underclass necessary for communism and CRT’s continued existence, never produce ANYTHING. It’s not an indictment against race or people suffering through no fault of their own, or people facing ACTUAL oppression. It’s just a statement of fact. They don’t produce anything of value because they are fed the lie that they can’t. They are taught that the government will supply their needs and they need not produce anything to earn their freedom. They are taught that their “rich culture” identity is bound up in poverty and hopelessness, that they cannot control their circumstances, that they are and will always be victims. Nothing positive comes from a culture of failure because there’s no incentive.
It’s a lie. Why would anyone want to define themselves by this cultural identity? Yet they do. To WANT a group of people, and I mean ANY group of people of any race, to perpetually identify as hopeless victims is the epitome of cruelty and racist attitudes.
27 Apr 2023, 6:33 pm
AngelRho wrote:
Which…is exactly what CRT is about. It’s always WHITE liberals that say things like that. White liberals love for blacks to stay oppressed and call it a “rich culture.”
How do you explain Derrick Bell
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021 ... ace-theory
and Kimberle W. Crenshaw?
https://www.law.columbia.edu/faculty/ki ... w-crenshaw
_________________
"We are all gonna die." --Senator Joni Ernst
27 Apr 2023, 6:55 pm
Black culture as in the arts , blues, music, food .It’s part of the history of a people, bad times and good.It’s also American history.You wouldn’t have gotten the blues without someone chopping cotton.
As for cultural identity, I have one.I’m a hillbilly ,and I’m not giving my culture up because someone says it makes me ignorant, illiterate ,barefoot , pregnant and inbred or my dialect.
It’s the history of my people.I’m not about to ask anyone to give up theirs.
To think that Black folks should give up their cultural identity is one of the most racist things I’ve heard.What identity should they assume?Yours?
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I am the dust that dances in the light. - Rumi
