God damn, god damn, god damn.
But not all of them are focused on border concerns. If you talk to the Minutemen long enough, the subject of immigration inevitably floats to the surface.
“I see the nation descending into poverty, philosophically, and part of it is illegal immigration, a big part of it,” says a twentysomething young man named Eric, who declines to give his last name. “It’s also outsourcing, increasing corporate power, excessive corporate power, that kind of stuff. What I can do here, since I’m so close to the border, is help out with the immigration issue.” His fiancée, he says, can’t understand why does it. David Niewert, Borderline Personalities
So this particular Minuteman is concerned about the globalization of capital, and the “we all see it but pretend it isn’t staring us in the face” future economic downturn in the U.S., and he chooses to do his part by stomping on brown people.
God damn, if that isn’t the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. Way stupider than healing crystals and intellegent design.
The alternative is the stuff about corporate power was thrown in there because more people care about out-of-control, legally un-accountable corporations than they do brown people, and “Eric” is simply talking up the same bait-and-switch that got the word “Socialist” stuck in the “National Socialist German Workers’ Party”.
The advantages of internet radio continue on.
They, they always try to blame it on the blacks
But it’s really those in power that stab you in the back Newtown Neurotics, Living With Unemployment
In an earlier post, I had noted that I would write some more on a photograph I had posted to provide a graphic illustration of the kinds of regimes that decided on trials when it was in the best interest of the state, rather than, for example, the interests of justice.

When you look at the use of color in that photo, the first thing you should notice is everyone in that photograph is white. It’s shocking to watch so many people internalize and regurgitate the “White = Normal” lie without even thinking, and that attitude is obvious in the responses to the start of rendition and the Military Commissions Act.
Start with the fact that the U.S. government denies even the possibility of habeas corpus, every day, all over the world. Immediately after 9/11, 1,400 people were rounded up and imprisoned by the INS without charge or the ability to see counsel. Thousands more are languishing in jail after being sold to American troops in Afghanistan by the our heroin-producing “allies” (one would be hard pressed to call anyone who helps junkies stay that way an “ally” in any but the most corrupt, Machiavellian sense). No writ for Iraqis or Afghans suspected of supporting whoever the bad guys are this week in those two countries, either.
Nor is this some new phenomena in American life. There was no habeas corpus for slaves prior to 1861. Or outspoken northern Democrats from 1861 – 1865. Native Americans weren’t allowed to file those writs until 1891. Japanese immigrants and their kids didn’t get it during WWII either.
Even prior to the Military Commissions Act„ whether this basic human right applies to non-citizens residing in the U.S. was a question considered up for debate by the same Congress: recall their earlier attempts to make local police ethnically cleanse Latinos from the U.S. — until the targets of that lily little genocide started marching by the millions and broaching the subject of neighborhood defense committees (rally ’round your family, pocket full of shells).
Naturally, like all laws, this will be primarily used against non-white people, but that does not mean it won’t be enforced against whites who don’t go along. In America, you can’t do that kind of thing to white people without passing laws and such (well, maybe commie-pinko whites, but they hardly count), which is why this law is a huge deal among the progressive groups when it merely institutionalizes what:
It simply sucks that nobody here seems to care about anything unless they are personally threatened or attacked — well enough that the whole right-libertarian free-market/greed-is-good ideology deserves a look in a whole other light.
I’ll post still more on that photograph later.
So I’m listening to an older clip from CNN, and I have to say this. To ask George Allen whether he is Jewish or not is a scumbag question. The “he’s just a celebrity” excuse is lamentably lame, and I for one got the impression that Arianna Huffington would just as soon the person who said it stop helping her. However, Ms. Huffington’s defense of the question as a “test of honesty” — while passing a basic credulity test — does not quite stand up to the example given by David Frum, that of Clinton’s infidelity. To my mind, at least, lying about cheating on your wife is at best a few hairsbreadths away from lying about your Semitic heritage in Virginia, not coincidentally because both are done to save your political ass from ignorant bigots.
Which is the real point about this story: candidates from both parties are actively courting what amounts to the KKK vote: George Allen calls an Asian-Indian kid a monkey like it was nothing; a reporter outs Allen as a Jew.
It’s the most vile, disgusting debasement of politics that I’ve seen in my adult life, and there is no excuse for it. It’s 2006, gentlemen, scarcely concealed racist crap as an electoral strategy is like, sooo 1988. As a good friend of mine used to say when confronted with that kind of shocking, throwback racism: They still make people like you?
Apparently so, and they’re still thick as theives in Virginia.
To add a rather quaint, pre-Internets layer to the story, party hacks up here (i.e. the North) are making hay by painting the other team’s player as a bigot — an obvious embarrassment to their party. So far the Democrats have had better luck at this than the Republicans, in part because Webb appears to be smart enough to know what “plausible deniability” means — have people not linked to you actually do the dirty work — whereas Allen’s bigotry tends to come out of his own dumbassed mouth.
From Wired, via Boing-Boing:

Look closely at the “Green” threat level. Yes, you are reading that correctly. As a resident of America, you are more likely to be shot by a police officer than killed in any type of terrorist attack. Now factor in the well-documented racial bias in law enforcement strategies and arrest rates, and suddenly rap songs from 15 years ago don’t sound all that radical. Of course, nobody would even blink hard if D-12 recorded “Fuck al-Qaeda,” and 50 Cent wouldn’t get dropped from his label over a “Terrorist-Killa” single.
Yesterday, I read Greg Palast’s Armed Madhouse. On the one hand, it’s nice to know that I intuitively understood the neo-conservative invasion plan and reason — the so-called “Plan B” — well enough to describe it as “globalization by force” in a paper I wrote for a Political Economy course. It’s also nice to know the vaunted-but-ignored State Department plan was, essentially, the oil industry plan, and not all that much less fanciful (an “invasion disguised as a coup that would be over in three days” — sure).
The climate chaos unleashed by finding large new reserves would make the mere collapse of industrial civilization look like a sideshow bagatelle
1
On the other hand, it’s somewhat disappointing to have my belief in Peak Oil skewered so expertly. The issue is not so much that I believed in it, but rather that there is so much petroleum in the world as to make both extreme climate change and further impoverishment of the U.S. poor and middle classes essentially inevitable.
I don’t, however, subscribe to his hand-waving dismissal of the petrodollar theories for the invasion of Iraq, if for no other reason than he does the standard “only on the Internet” shuck-n-jive in lieu of any actual counter argument. Yes, Bush wants to devalue the dollar against the Euro. That does not include throwing the global economy into chaos by letting over three billion dollars sit idle each day — or worse, come back to the Federal Reserve as countries dropped their dollar currency reserves, no longer requiring them to trade oil? Because that is what a switch from the dollar to the Euro would entail.
Americans really don’t care about freedom; they don’t really care about liberty; they don’t care about any of that.
2
After that, the book reaches into the various voting scams which allowed Bush to steal the office, again. It covers quite a bit of information, from Ohio to New Mexico, from the more mundanely racist lists of voters to challenge to the more “sexy, Hollywoodish” (the book’s term) machine hacking. On page 243, I read the following, from an African American who was illegally denied the right to vote in 2000 in Tampa, and would have been again in 2004 had Palast’s filming crew not shown up to do a story on him:
I went into the place to vote and I was with my son and there were about 40 to 50 other people around and I got up there to vote and they told me I was a convicted felon. I told the young lady that I had never been arrested. I’ve never been arrested in my life. I I was in the military for four years and have been in the medical field ever since. You can’t even work for a hospital being a convicted felon… I was in the Persian Gulf War in ’91. It’s pretty screwed up how they did me, but what can I say?
I was upset, I was ashamed — with 40 people around — it made me feel real bad. And I’m just hoping I get a letter stating, hey, you can vote again, Willie.
I really feel it was bad for African-Americans — but hey, what can we do sometimes? What can we do?
At which point I collapsed out of my chair with a colossal fucking headache behind my left eyeball. After lying down for a few minutes to get my bearings back (an interesting experience in itself, BTW), I continued reading, eventually coming across another couple gems from New Mexico: Governor Bill Richardson (the only Latino governor in the U.S.) is the son of a Citibank executive and a woman who hails from Mexico City, and the only greater predictor of how worthless your vote is than race is income.
The resistance is just waiting to be organized
3
When this is all finally sorted out, the middle class in general, and white people in particular will have a lot to answer for. It may be us, the younger-types in the workforce today asking for the accounting. It may be our kids. People will turn back to the last few generations and ask them: why did you let them get away with all this? Why did you keep your head down, trying to not fight them.
We’re all so busy scraping, just trying to hang onto our own toys, that they can get away with these kind of colossal crimes they’ve been getting away with. And while you’re busy trying not to get fired, they lynch the black guy next door. And that’s just the progressives/liberals/left.
The self-described “conservatives” will have more. One thing I don’t want to see, after the fight has been won, is some kind of phony “healing process” where all the bosses get to pretend they had nothing to do with it — to pretend they weren’t right there at the table, waited on by starving people. Where none of the police can quite remember who was in the K-9 units, and none of the military men can recall who was killing families and raping women in some desert hut, 12,000 miles away.
Ever notice how they never can find the racist cops in those civil rights documentaries — the cop who was siccing the dog on the kid, or the fireman manning the fire hose? That’s what I mean.
I’ve delinked American Samizdat after a racist post was not only published, but defended by both the original poster and another contributor to the site. My exact comments on the racism are available on the offending AmSam post, for those who are interested. Supposedly the same post got them banned from Daily Kos. I had originally linked to AmSam after they linked to a post of mine on trolling.
I should also note that in spite of my belief that Daily Kos is a horrendous (though obvious) shill for the Democratic Party, and my revulsion at Mr. Markos’ views that social issues such as womens’ and gay persons’ rights are expendable in the name of electoral victory — which I believe to be the very worst form of opportunism, that which harms others who are already discriminated against — I do agree with their decision not to publish the anti-semitic tripe thrown out by Mr. Shropshire.
I recently IM’d someone who sounded interesting on an unnamed quiz/dating site, and was pleasantly surprised to find someone who made me feel dumb. Not that feeling dumb is good, just that it’s easier to see the next plateau when there’s someone there waving at you.
Unfortunately, reaching that plateau involves tracking down a particular essay by Gayatri Spivak, professor of Post-colonial Studies at Columbia University. The essay itself is from 1988 1985, and it’s not on the web anywhere.
Which is the real message to professors everywhere: if you want your writing to be read by people other than yourself, your collegues, and your grant committees, please put them online, for free. Yes, Chomsky has a cadre of fanboys to do such things for him (or at least, that’s my understanding), but he is also practicing what he preaches regarding the responsibilities of intellectuals. He may have a cushier job than most academics, but to my mind that simply means that you should spend a few hours a week wrestling with a computer instead of, for example, a kiln or baggie of psyclotropics. Make web design/publishing your hobby until you get decent at it, then put your shit online so anyone with a network hookup or a laptop can read it.
What I’ve managed to glean from reviews of Spivak tends to mirror my thoughts anyways. As a bit of background, I was introduced to radical politics through black nationalism and white anti-racism, so what she’s quoted as saying regarding the essay doesn’t seem to be anything open for debate — particularly regarding those known within civil rights histories as “white liberals,” and their inability to speak for anyone but themselves. White people telling everyone else what they need to be doing, ostensibly for everyone else’s benefit. Where have we heard this bullshit before? (Hint: It’s the same old racist “White Man’s Burden” that undergirded the whole global colonial enterprise.) White revolutionists (love that term, Emma) can’t tell everyone else how to run their revolution. Yeah, no shit.
But anyways, without getting my hands on an actual copy of the damned essay, any reading I can come up with is just me ranting and raving out of my ass, by turn, so to all you professors: put your stuff online so people like me can grok it, mmmkay?
Seriously, if you got into academia for the money, you really fucked up somewhere — probably in thinking that something with zero reproduction cost can (or should) be commodified.
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