Racism

[Mark]

Posted by Ewan (here)
Here you are Mark, a link to a video in our own Avalon Library.

Thank you so much, Sir! Checking it out now!

[Wind]

Posted by DNA (here)
Not to rain on your parades here but recent FBI released tapes show MLK to have had dozens of affairs and at least once to have laughed during a forced rape while being recorded by the FBI.

The link doesn't work, but I've heard about that before and I wouldn't put any value on what FBI said. So be careful when believing something, it just might be bs. Would you trust intel from CIA for that matter?

J Edgar Hoover was a very sick clown who got MLK, JFK and possibly Malcolm X killed too. FBI and CIA are responsible for so many atrocities. Does that mean that MLK would have been a perfect man? No, I don't think so and he himself knew his short-comings. Neither was Kennedy perfect and he had many failings, but then again politics is always a game where the good guys don't end up winning because the psychopaths and conmen more often rise to the top, it us almost a miracle to witness a good politicial leader, especially in US during this spiritual dark age which is now thankfully slowly ending. I don't know if MLK had any affairs, but if he did then that is between him and his Creator. I don't condone such actions if proven true. I certainly won't believe any slander from the likes of Hoover.

"The FBI’s attempt to discredit Martin Luther King Jr – new details of which are only just emerging some 55 years later – was a mammoth operation involving undercover informants, wiretapped phones and bugged hotel rooms.

J Edgar Hoover, the bureau’s notorious director, believed the material gathered by his agents in the Sixties exposed the civil rights leader as a “notorious liar” and “one of the lowest characters in the country”.

“At that time there was an ethic in the US that prominent men’s private affairs didn’t qualify as news. That was what also protected JFK.”

However, most of it never saw the light of day. In the end Hoover resorted to ordering an agent to send King the notorious “suicide letter” which threatened to expose his “filthy, abnormal” behaviour and urged him to kill himself before Christmas.

The letter was sent anonymously by one of Hoover's deputies, posing as a disaffected activist, in the weeks before King received for the Nobel Peace Price in December 1964.

By that time, King had become globally famous as the symbolic leader of the American civil rights movement after spearheading nonviolent demonstrations such as the year-long Montgomery bus boycott and the 1963 campaign of sit-ins and marches in Birmingham in protest over racial segregation in the Alabama cities."

Targeting black activism

As director of the FBI from 1924-72, J. Edgar Hoover had an outsized influence on the organization. The FBI operated within the Department of Justice and was tasked with investigating violations of federal law and developing intelligence on foreign agents operating on U.S. soil.

At various points in the 20th century, both Congress and the president instructed the FBI to investigate not just foreign agents but also “radicals” and “subversives.” Hoover interpreted that mandate to also develop what the FBI called “racial intelligence.”

From the 1910s to the 1970s, the FBI treated civil rights activists in general, and African American activists in particular, as either disloyal “subversives” or “dupes” of foreign agents. The FBI’s predecessor, the Bureau of Investigation, sought to “compel black loyalty” during World War I and investigate “negro radicalism” in the 1920s.

In the 1940s and 1950s, the FBI amassed 140,000 pages of documents as part of its investigation of what it called “foreign inspired agitation among American Negroes.” That didn’t even include its files on individual black “subversives” such as civil rights activist Ella Baker, the renowned scholar W.E.B. Du Bois, and the singer and actor Paul Robeson.

And from the late 1930s through the 1970s, the FBI and the House Un-American Activities Committee, through official reports like “The American Negro and the Communist Party,” popularized the notion among conservatives that communists were always trying to use the struggle against racial segregation as a “front” for the “subversion” of individual American liberty.

Focus on King

As Martin Luther King ascended in prominence in the late 1950s and 1960s, it was inevitable that the FBI would investigate him, like it did every other civil rights movement activist, for what it called “communist influence in racial matters.”

King did consult with former members of the Communist Party, among many others. One of his advisers – Stanley Levison – maintained closer ties to the party than he admitted to King, and the FBI knew it.

But it was the civil rights movement’s growing influence that inspired Hoover to become increasingly alarmed about these connections.

Two days after King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, William Sullivan, the FBI’s director of intelligence, famously responded by writing, “We must mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro and national security.”

In late 1963, FBI leaders met to discuss ways of “neutralizing King as an effective Negro leader and developing evidence concerning King’s continued dependence on communists for guidance and direction.”

One of those ways for “developing evidence” involved bugging hotel rooms and other places to record King’s conversations with colleagues.

The recordings did not provide evidence of “communist influence” on the civil rights movement. Instead, they recorded King’s extramarital affairs. FBI officials, who already planned to “neutralize” King before they recorded his infidelities, shifted the rationale for their campaign to “morality” without missing a beat.

‘Obscene file’

Perhaps surprising to a 21st century reader, policing sexuality had long been part of the FBI’s mission.

The agency had a history of selectively enforcing the Mann Act, the 1910 law that aimed to stem interstate transport of “any woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose.” The FBI did this by prosecuting African American men for traveling across state lines with white women. Its “sex deviates” investigation from 1951 through the 1970s produced over 300,000 pages of files as part of what one historian has called “a war on gays.”

FBI agents regularly collected “obscene” materials as part of their investigations, which were then deposited in an “Obscene File” that contained thousands of books, photographs and films by the mid-1960s.

And longtime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s “Personal and Confidential” files contained what Attorney General Edward Levi described to Congress in 1975 as 48 folders on “public figures and prominent persons… Presidents, executive branch employees and 17 individuals who were members of Congress.”

It wasn’t clear, however, how the FBI could circulate information about King’s affairs without also raising questions as to why the FBI was bugging King’s hotel rooms in the first place. When FBI Assistant Director Courtney Evans recommended in September 1964 that the tapes be destroyed, Hoover overruled him.

Instead, in late 1964, following the passage of the Civil Rights Act and King’s award of the Nobel Peace Prize, the FBI sent excerpts of the recordings to King’s wife, Coretta, along with a letter that encouraged King to commit suicide to avoid having exposure of his extramarital affairs ruin his life.

The stunt failed. In his autobiography, civil rights leader Andrew Young described his and Coretta and Martin Luther King’s responses to the tape that accompanied what he called the “sick letter”: “It was a very poor quality recording. … There was no question in our minds that this scurrilous material was coming from the FBI … few people had the capability of bugging hotel rooms except the FBI.”

Undeterred, the FBI continued to bug King’s hotel rooms from 1965 to 1968, and occasionally circulated memos to the attorney general about the results of the recordings, including both political and sexual topics.

But the FBI didn’t release the tapes themselves, because doing so may have generated the same suspicions raised by the one sent to King.

Context matters

The preservation of the FBI’s tapes so that they could someday come to light was a political decision made through acts of omission.

When J. Edgar Hoover died in 1972, his secretary Helen Gandy destroyed the FBI’s “Personal and Confidential” files on public officials and celebrities. At the same time, according to Athan Theoharis’ “The FBI: A Comprehensive Reference Guide,” Acting Director Mark Felt incorporated the Bureau’s “Official and Confidential” files into the FBI’s central records system, subject to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. Files on King’s private life were placed in this latter set of records rather than destroyed, and some were transferred to the National Archives in 2005.

Litigation by Bernard Lee from King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference sought to compel destruction of the recordings and transcripts. But the judge in the case, John Lewis Smith Jr., rejected the request, and instead ordered them sealed for 50 years until 2027.

People will rightly debate the trustworthiness of FBI sources, and Garrow’s interpretation of them. No figure, no matter how revered, should be immune from scrutiny over their potential support for violence against women.

But those weighing the evidence and its veracity should not forget that the tapes being used to facilitate this discussion were created and preserved with the goal of destroying Martin Luther King’s reputation. The FBI’s intent was to demoralize and fragment the coalition of supporters King brought together in his life, the people who find common purpose by honoring his memory.

In this respect, revealing these materials could be considered “Hoover’s revenge.”

While we are at it, let's see how the "war against drugs" was just also a political tool against so called radicals, black people and eventually hippies. All seemingly dangerous people who are opposing the status quo of the US empire, or in reality the dominance of the military industrial complex. The system always has to have the dangerous boogeymen opposing it.

As Mark said later it was the Muslims. Then the Chinese. There's always a patsy to be found!

Do you realize who else used that card? It was the jews!

Now there's a rhetoric of anti-semitism rising in America too and Klanye wasn't helping with that at all... Der ewige Jude.

Some of these tactics appeal very strongly to the base human instincts and the root chakra, which is based on survival, fear and separation when imbalanced. My tribe, your tribe, othering. "Us vs them". Let the hate or love flow? Every man makes that decision for himself.

How a racist hate-monger masterminded America’s War on Drugs

In 1931, Henry Smith Williams walked into Harry Anslinger’s Washington, D.C., office to plead for his brother’s life. Anslinger and his agents had locked up every drug user they could find, including Williams’s brother, Edgar. Williams was a doctor and had written extensively on the need for humane treatment of addicts. He had spoken vehemently against Anslinger’s brutal tactics, but, confronted by the man himself — slicked back black hair, with a falcon-like visage, a thick neck, and an imposing frame — Williams was suddenly deflated. He half-heartedly made a few points about his brother not deserving such treatment; then he left. After he was out the door, Anslinger mocked him, calling him hysterical. “Doctors,” he said knowingly, “cannot treat addicts even if they wish to.” He called instead for “tough judges not afraid to throw killer-pushers into prison and throw away the key.”

With this unforgiving mentality, Anslinger ruled over the Federal Narcotics Bureau (a precursor to the DEA) for more than three decades — a formative period that shaped the United States’ drug policy for years to come. As John C. McWilliams explained in his book about Anslinger, The Protectors, “Anslinger was the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.” During this time, he implemented stringent drug laws and unreasonably long prison sentences that would give rise to America’s prison-industrial complex. Because of Anslinger, millions of lives were swept up in the drug war’s dragnet, if they weren’t outright ended. But Anslinger’s wasn’t so much a war on drugs as it was a war on culture, an attempt to squelch the radical freedom of the Jazz Age for people of color. Anslinger was a xenophobe with no capacity for intellectual nuance, and his racist views informed his work to devastating effect. But he couldn’t have done it, nor reigned as long as he did, without a cast of complicit politicians who shared his bigoted vision for what America should be.

Anslinger’s zeal for law and order manifested early. He was born in Altoona, Pennsylvania, in 1892 to Swiss German parents. His father struggled to find work as a barber and got hired by the Pennsylvania Railroad, which was where Anslinger got his first job in the eighth grade. He eventually rose through the ranks by investigating wrongful death claims. His work was characterized by a distaste for anything extrajudicial, and a nose for fraud. This attitude proved useful when he pivoted to Prohibition enforcement. In the early 1920s, he worked for the government, chasing rum runners in the Bahamas. In 1930, he was appointed to helm the newly minted Federal Bureau of Narcotics by President Hoover. An astute judge of Washington’s ways, he quickly aligned himself with influential politicians, Washington insiders, and the pharmaceutical industry, whose support saw him through a series of scandals in the coming years. Congressman John Cochran of Missouri praised him, saying he “deserved a medal of honor.”

During the early parts of his career, Anslinger seemed little concerned about marijuana, known by most as cannabis. But when Prohibition ended, it looked as though Anslinger might be out of a job, so he sought a new threat to the American way, essentially manufacturing a drug war. As Johann Hari explains in his book Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, Anslinger’s office was focused on cocaine and heroin, but there were relatively small numbers of users. In order to ensure a promising future for his bureau, “he needed more,” Hari writes. Marijuana was Anslinger’s golden ticket. He used his office to trumpet the association between weed and violence, so that it could be criminalized. “You smoke a joint and you’re likely to kill your brother,” he was known to have said. McWilliams explains that in this effort, “Anslinger appealed to many organizations whose members were predominantly white Protestant.”

From the beginning, Anslinger conflated drug use, race, and music. “Reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men,” he was quoted as saying. “There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the U.S., and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing result from marijuana use. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others.”

Over the coming years, Anslinger would have a decisive hand in all of the country’s drug legislation, including the Boggs Act of 1951, which required mandatory sentencing and various state laws further criminalizing drug use. According to McWilliams, Anslinger was considered the preeminent expert on drugs in America. He remained at the helm of the Federal Narcotics Bureau until the Kennedy administration, but his ideas were swiftly adopted by successive administrations — always disproportionately to the detriment of people of color.

In 1971, Nixon declared his “war on drugs.” His aide and Watergate co-conspirator John Ehrlichman later revealed the effort’s nefarious motivations in Harper’s:

The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people … We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.

During the eighties, Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign was paired with race-based media hysteria about crack. Over the course of the next 20 years, the number of drug offenders in U.S. prisons multiplied twelvefold. This draconian mantle was picked up by George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton and remained the status quo until Barack Obama, who began pardoning or commuting drug offenders’ sentences and approaching the opioid crisis as a public health issue rather than a carceral one. But with the election of Donald Trump and his appointment of Jeff Sessions as attorney general, Anslinger’s legacy appears alive and well. This administration has attempted to block the legalization and decriminalization of marijuana, urged police to be tough on drug crime, and called for harsher sentencing. As Sessions said in 2016, “Good people don’t smoke marijuana.”

[T Smith]

Posted by Mark (here)

Isn't that human nature, though, to a large extent? Ever play the telephone game? Where you stand in a line and whisper something in someone's ear, then they whisper it into the ear of the person next to them and so on until it gets to the end of the line and the tale that's told by that last person is not the same as the original story?

Any phenomenon, any story has to get through the filter of human perception, first. And now, our human perception has another, artificial filter we call the media.

Of course. But I’m speaking almost entirely to your second point, to the artificial filter called media, and, by extension, all institutions of mediated experience, including higher education.

Take our telephone game analogy. Let’s jot down a fairly complex, yet simple parable, one with times, places, dates, people. A paragraph or two. Let’s say our parable has a specific meaning, granting for subjective interpretation. In our experiment we will ask the first person to read and whisper the paragraph word for word into the ear of the next, and that person in turn will do the same to next person, and so on. All things being equal, let’s assume every detail, time, place, event, etc., is all critically essential to retaining the original meaning. At the end of our experiment we will ask the last person in queue to recite the parable.

Sure, we’re all going to get a chuckle or two given a live demonstration of how information becomes distorted and skewed as it passes through the filter of human perception. That is human nature, but also an organic process and all fairly innocent.

Now, let’s do our same experiment, except this time we pass the written words to a middle man to edit before the middle man hands to next person, who reads and recites the edited composition into the ear of the next. Suppose the middle man, with a specific agenda, takes it upon himself to censor critically essential words, or even redact entire sentences, or worse, insert his own words and sentences into the composition with the deliberated objective to alter meaning. Perhaps he wants to fashion a specific meaning, one that will suit his ends to the detriment of the players. Thus the middle man tweaks the composition accordingly each time the new player passes him the recital. The point is, this dynamic is no longer innocent; it is not organic. It is pernicious.

Now:

Suppose the middle man not only has an agenda, but is also an adept social engineer who can fashion whatever reality he wants at the end of the queue, as an artist with a paint brush. And yes, this is an art form…. Suppose the middleman’s craft is done largely unbeknownst to those who may think they understand reality or, worse, believe they are “in the know” because of higher education or because of other subtle influences of the artist’s brush.

Goethe’s famous quote comes to mind here, “…none are more hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free…”

Posted by Mark (here)

Crazy elites, there’s a conspiracy to kill us all! ….but wait, haven't all generations in some form or another thought that their times were the end times? What makes our times any different?

Fair enough. But why do we accept this? A society run by elites who want to kill us? What? Shouldn’t we humans, as a unified race, strive to govern ourselves and speak out against any societal structure organized otherwise? Or, if that society is throwing my tribe some crumbs, or serving my interests in some way (perhaps at the expense of others), or if it appears to be bettering my narrative, one that serves my identity, best not rock the boat? (This observation goes for all colors and creeds BTW—I’m not just pointing at one group in particular, even those who openly embrace identity politics, or oddly embrace zero-sum only when they are are in bed with the positive integer). It’s always perplexing to me that those who fancy themselves the most progressive in society also fall back on, “cuz it’s just the way it is and always has been!” when they see no other use for “progress” to further their cause. This seems nothing but a reflection of interest-group politics to me. And, giving the benefit of the doubt, if those groups do embrace progressive values, then they’re under the influence of an interesting case of cognitive dissonance, IMO.

Posted by Mark (here)

When the world changes, it seems it does not play around and the dominant narratives shift. What is our dominant narrative? Is it shifting? It is indeed. It makes sense that the opposite of what has been the norm occurs and the world seems upside down to many. Questions abound and accrue about what is going on, whose behind it, we must fight it, who do we fight, where is the enemy?…

…I believe there is still space for other narratives to thrive, though, and they will, because diversity is key and multiple modalities of living and evolving have always existed. These times will be no different. Those who don't want to believe what is going on will believe what they will, assign blame and enemy status to those they must and live how they will for as long as they can.

There may be some who scramble to find an enemy in changing times. But if this is so, are these folks really the backward minded folks portrayed by Barack Obama “clinging to their guns and bibles?” Are all the questions abound, e.g., whose behind the change? Who do we fight to stop it? To whom do we assign the blame?, etc.—and, by implication—really the questions of the desperate, those in disbelief who will do what they must to preserve their White Privilege in a changing society? I imagine yes, there may be some gun-toting racists who would make BO proud to have uttered those words, and yes, I grant this dynamic does manifest in society, albeit at the periphery, and not just among blacks and whites but among all colors and creeds. The truth is, it is more likely folks in search of an enemy amid the rapidly evolving narrative you describe simply don’t fully comprehend what is happening. In other words, they are not aware enough to understand the narrative as it unfolds let alone articulate enough to defend themselves against a fabricated narrative pejoratively ascribed to them, one which renders them mute and fearful to talk about for fear of being labeled racist. Or, one that disqualifies them altogether from having an opinion or taking a stance because of their Whiteness. I, for one, have no problem at all with the shift—or in the changing narrative…I welcome it—but, in the name of individualism, not collectivism.

There it is. Nothing more, nothing less.

Posted by Mark (here)

Posted by T Smith (here)
They have somehow convinced an entire swath of the political spectrum, mostly to the left of center, to conflate liberty, freedom, and prosperity (and even world peace) with White Supremacy and racism. That is quite a trick.

Is it, really?

Hasn't it always been conflated since the beginnings of this nation?

Really?

I wouldn’t necessarily conflate the two. I would categorize them as unlikely bedfellows, forced together by political compromise and socioeconomic necessity (not too unlike much of our politics today) and by the sociocultural consciousness of the era. So yes, there were sociocultural proclivities of White Supremacy and racism at the beginnings of the nation—there is no argument here—but just as I wouldn’t conflate, say, the practice of the chaste courtship with the ideals of freedom, liberty, and prosperity (but rather with sociocultural reality undergirding colonial America) I certainly wouldn’t conflate White Supremacy and/or racism with the ideals of freedom, liberty, and prosperity. In other words, racist proclivities were condoned by, but not inherent to, the founding nation. The institution of slavery, for example, was among the most divisive and contentious of debates among the Founding Fathers, and in fact was a potential roadblock to ratifying the Constitution itself, namely because of a powerful and influential political faction dependent on the slave trade forced a compromise. But there were other heavyweights of the Enlightenment, the anti-Federalists, e.g. Madison, King, Morris et. al, who well understood the inherent contradiction between liberty and freedom and the institution of slavery, and who spoke our fervently against the immorality and incompatibility of the institution of slavery with the ideals of liberty and freedom.

Posted by Mark (here)

Posted by T Smith (here)
In other words, if America embraces liberty, freedom, and prosperity--and ultimately to government by and for the people, it's really embracing a pernicious and regressive ideology characteristic of its racist roots, to a government by and for Racist/Sexist White Males.

I don't think this is actually so. The problem is, though, that perspective is institutionalized. And always has been. Many people believe it needs to shift as the population demographics shift as well.

The perspective may be institutionalized, but it is ill-founded, IMO. And the changing narrative only seems to galvanize that perspective, which makes me suspect of its ulterior motives. There seems to be an underlying, hidden agenda to the narrative, something other than the advancement of positive change, which incessantly demonizes liberty and freedom (hmmm…) all in the name of change, which I suspect is but a big fat giant Trojan Horse. To which I say, beware of social engineers bearing gifts!

Posted by Mark (here)

To go down the road to stop that would be to embrace supremacy philosophies that have not worked out well for those who've attempted them.

I’m puzzled by this. I’ve failed to infer any philosophy espousing ideals of supremacy from any of the writings by Enlightenment philosophers who inspired the Constitution, e.g. John Locke, Charles Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau et. al. In fact, I’ve read all these philosophers specifically to the contrary. What am I missing? I suppose there may be supremacy tendencies among those who have embraced these philosophies and/or have been inspired by them in the formation of governments… But in the ideals themselves? Curious to hear your take on this; I’m truly puzzled. And as such, I find myself continually coming back to same conclusion. I’m lookin’ down at a baby emerged in some nasty, dirty bath water…. which way to go to sanitize the tub?

Posted by Mark (here)

I agree with the wicked and evil part.

Hobbes vs. Rousseau comes to mind. To simplify, Hobbes believed human beings were evil and wicked creatures and must be forcibly compelled to be good, managed by a heavy hand, put under lock and key, chain and ball, etc., etc. Rousseau believed exactly the opposite. To him, human beings were innately good and pure, but corruptible to wicked and evil ways by government and society.

Most of us subscribe to a Hegelian dialectic of the two and believe human nature is best described as a synthesis of Hobbes and Rousseau.

But my question to those who lean toward the Hobbsian bent: if human beings are so evil and wicked and cannot be left to their own devices, who watches the evil watchers? Who manages them with a heavy hand? Who puts them under lock and key, chain and ball? For only the most evil and wicked among us, those will do virtually anything or whatever it takes to reach the top of the social order in order to rule over the rest of us, including lying, cheating, stealing, and killing for it; how is that we so readily abdicate our freedom and lives to but a handful of these wicked, wicked humans? How is it we allow the most evil and wicked among us to force the rest of us wicked subordinates to do their bidding? Hmmm…. sounds a lot like the world in which we live today. I’ll stick with Rousseau, thank you. The model man is the independent farmer, free of superiors, and self-governing…

Posted by Mark (here)

Education kind of foments that understanding of the world through Modern Environmentalism and a zero-sum philosophy. And educated people are apparently now the majority of those called Liberal who vote Democrat these days.

This wasn’t always so. There was a time when the highly educated leaned conservative and voted Republican. So to what do we attribute the shift? Better quality of education? Or lesser quality? Or just evolving societal attitudes in general? In any case, the underlying implication of your observation is the more ignorant one is, the more apt she or he is to vote Republican. But if this is true, the flip side must also be true. The more indoctrinated one is, the more apt she or he is to vote Democrat. I would argue higher education was co-oped by a collectivist Statist agenda with the advent of the Department of Education Organization Act (1979)—and I’m well aware many on the left applaud this as progress—so it comes as no surprise to me at all that shortly after the formation of the Department of Education the majority who call themselves Liberal began voting in lockstep with the Statist agenda. And of course, this may be preferable to the prior ethos of higher education that subtly perpetuated systemic racism and White Supremacy, as the argument goes, but either way, it seems to me the mediated experience of higher education churns out voters via programming and conditioning and teaches folks what to think as opposed to how to think.

Posted by Mark (here)

Also, more than just white people want and need to be free, right? We all want that, yes?

I believe so, yes. I just think we are perhaps being lead down the garden path to get there? Hayek’s Road to Serfdom comes to mind.

Posted by Mark (here)

Oh my, we live in a post-modern world? You're into Critical Theory, T Smith? Are those big T "Truths" or little t? Big F "Facts" or little f?

LOL. I am hardly into Critical Theory—as I believe you are likely aware—but with no offense to those who subscribe, I’m certainly a critic of it. And I’d be a fool not to acknowledge the growing influence of postmodernism in every power center of society.

Posted by Mark (here)

Much of the more extreme expressions of racism are indeed peripheral. The only caveat is that people more mainstreamed are influenced by those peripheries when they are fearful and it becomes a block of like-minded individuals and a herd response. It has been apparent after every, single advance people of color have made in this nation. Reconstruction after the Civil War, Integration after the Civil Rights era, Trump after Obama. A collective, majority-population attempt to return, to some degree, to what the world was before these major shifts.

But each time there has been push back, there has still been incremental change, those who have wished to do so have not been able to turn back the clock fully.

That seems to be the way of the world and how it works.

I’m again puzzled. We keep circling back to a bigger picture that renders the fearful masses, or by implication, the White majority, to a collective in frenzied pushback against the steady advances of people of color. Is this really true? Is this really what is happening here? I can't speak for others, but I’ve stated as clearly as I can, and many times, that indeed, I concur with the observation of pushback, but it is not against the advancement of any minority, group, or identity. I am in pushback against collectivism, which caresses the hands of all of the various interest groups--especially the downtrodden and marginalized--while promising hope and change, and ultimately, the emancipation from the "White Man" (FKA "The Man"). Nice trick!

Allow me to translate. ...We will emancipate all you poor and downtrodden and marginalized folk from the rich middle class by marginalizing you all! We promise to deliver equality, as you will all be equally enslaved and equally impoverished. The decimation of the middle class will not shift downward, as we promise to those of you who are enabling us, it will shift upward, to us... We are the magicians, the trickers, the snakes, erecting, as it were, a lose/lose for all or you who survive....

So yes. I’m in pushback against the deception of this charade, the collectivist trick, but not its message. I am in pushback against Agenda 30, Club of Rome, the Great Reset, etc., etc.--whether these boogymen have been in the imaginings of every past generation or not. And to expand on that, what I describe is by no means some elaborate theory of mine. I should be so creative ...

To some degree I do recognize the fact that the current model of tinker-mongering by social engineers has indeed contributed to the incremental change attributed to the positive advancement of the marginalized. This is good. That said, my disdain for the slogan FORWARD has nothing to do with the hands of time, nor in turning them back, as much as it does in preserving them from falling off the damn clock in the first place...

[Brenya]

Posted by Wind (here)

Posted by DNA (here)
Not to rain on your parades here but recent FBI released tapes show MLK to have had dozens of affairs and at least once to have laughed during a forced rape while being recorded by the FBI.

The link doesn't work, but I've heard about that before and I wouldn't put any value on what FBI said. So be careful when believing something, it just might be bs. Would you trust intel from CIA for that matter?

J Edgar Hoover was a very sick clown who got MLK, JFK and possibly Malcolm X killed too. FBI and CIA are responsible for so many atrocities. Does that mean that MLK would have been a perfect man? No, I don't think so and he himself knew his short-comings. Neither was Kennedy perfect and he had many failings, but then again politics is always a game where the good guys don't end up winning because the psychopaths and conmen more often rise to the top, it almost a miracle if witness a good politicial leader, especially in US during this spiritual dark age which is now thankfully slowly ending. I don't know if MLK had any affairs, but if he did then that is between him and his Creator. I don't condone such actions if proven true. I certainly won't believe any slander from the likes of Hoover.

"The FBI’s attempt to discredit Martin Luther King Jr – new details of which are only just emerging some 55 years later – was a mammoth operation involving undercover informants, wiretapped phones and bugged hotel rooms.

J Edgar Hoover, the bureau’s notorious director, believed the material gathered by his agents in the Sixties exposed the civil rights leader as a “notorious liar” and “one of the lowest characters in the country”.

“At that time there was an ethic in the US that prominent men’s private affairs didn’t qualify as news. That was what also protected JFK.”

However, most of it never saw the light of day. In the end Hoover resorted to ordering an agent to send King the notorious “suicide letter” which threatened to expose his “filthy, abnormal” behaviour and urged him to kill himself before Christmas.

The letter was sent anonymously by one of Hoover's deputies, posing as a disaffected activist, in the weeks before King received for the Nobel Peace Price in December 1964.

By that time, King had become globally famous as the symbolic leader of the American civil rights movement after spearheading nonviolent demonstrations such as the year-long Montgomery bus boycott and the 1963 campaign of sit-ins and marches in Birmingham in protest over racial segregation in the Alabama cities."

Targeting black activism

As director of the FBI from 1924-72, J. Edgar Hoover had an outsized influence on the organization. The FBI operated within the Department of Justice and was tasked with investigating violations of federal law and developing intelligence on foreign agents operating on U.S. soil.

At various points in the 20th century, both Congress and the president instructed the FBI to investigate not just foreign agents but also “radicals” and “subversives.” Hoover interpreted that mandate to also develop what the FBI called “racial intelligence.”

From the 1910s to the 1970s, the FBI treated civil rights activists in general, and African American activists in particular, as either disloyal “subversives” or “dupes” of foreign agents. The FBI’s predecessor, the Bureau of Investigation, sought to “compel black loyalty” during World War I and investigate “negro radicalism” in the 1920s.

In the 1940s and 1950s, the FBI amassed 140,000 pages of documents as part of its investigation of what it called “foreign inspired agitation among American Negroes.” That didn’t even include its files on individual black “subversives” such as civil rights activist Ella Baker, the renowned scholar W.E.B. Du Bois, and the singer and actor Paul Robeson.

And from the late 1930s through the 1970s, the FBI and the House Un-American Activities Committee, through official reports like “The American Negro and the Communist Party,” popularized the notion among conservatives that communists were always trying to use the struggle against racial segregation as a “front” for the “subversion” of individual American liberty.

Focus on King

As Martin Luther King ascended in prominence in the late 1950s and 1960s, it was inevitable that the FBI would investigate him, like it did every other civil rights movement activist, for what it called “communist influence in racial matters.”

King did consult with former members of the Communist Party, among many others. One of his advisers – Stanley Levison – maintained closer ties to the party than he admitted to King, and the FBI knew it.

But it was the civil rights movement’s growing influence that inspired Hoover to become increasingly alarmed about these connections.

Two days after King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, William Sullivan, the FBI’s director of intelligence, famously responded by writing, “We must mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro and national security.”

In late 1963, FBI leaders met to discuss ways of “neutralizing King as an effective Negro leader and developing evidence concerning King’s continued dependence on communists for guidance and direction.”

One of those ways for “developing evidence” involved bugging hotel rooms and other places to record King’s conversations with colleagues.

The recordings did not provide evidence of “communist influence” on the civil rights movement. Instead, they recorded King’s extramarital affairs. FBI officials, who already planned to “neutralize” King before they recorded his infidelities, shifted the rationale for their campaign to “morality” without missing a beat.

‘Obscene file’

Perhaps surprising to a 21st century reader, policing sexuality had long been part of the FBI’s mission.

The agency had a history of selectively enforcing the Mann Act, the 1910 law that aimed to stem interstate transport of “any woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose.” The FBI did this by prosecuting African American men for traveling across state lines with white women. Its “sex deviates” investigation from 1951 through the 1970s produced over 300,000 pages of files as part of what one historian has called “a war on gays.”

FBI agents regularly collected “obscene” materials as part of their investigations, which were then deposited in an “Obscene File” that contained thousands of books, photographs and films by the mid-1960s.

And longtime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s “Personal and Confidential” files contained what Attorney General Edward Levi described to Congress in 1975 as 48 folders on “public figures and prominent persons… Presidents, executive branch employees and 17 individuals who were members of Congress.”

It wasn’t clear, however, how the FBI could circulate information about King’s affairs without also raising questions as to why the FBI was bugging King’s hotel rooms in the first place. When FBI Assistant Director Courtney Evans recommended in September 1964 that the tapes be destroyed, Hoover overruled him.

Instead, in late 1964, following the passage of the Civil Rights Act and King’s award of the Nobel Peace Prize, the FBI sent excerpts of the recordings to King’s wife, Coretta, along with a letter that encouraged King to commit suicide to avoid having exposure of his extramarital affairs ruin his life.

The stunt failed. In his autobiography, civil rights leader Andrew Young described his and Coretta and Martin Luther King’s responses to the tape that accompanied what he called the “sick letter”: “It was a very poor quality recording. … There was no question in our minds that this scurrilous material was coming from the FBI … few people had the capability of bugging hotel rooms except the FBI.”

Undeterred, the FBI continued to bug King’s hotel rooms from 1965 to 1968, and occasionally circulated memos to the attorney general about the results of the recordings, including both political and sexual topics.

But the FBI didn’t release the tapes themselves, because doing so may have generated the same suspicions raised by the one sent to King.

Context matters

The preservation of the FBI’s tapes so that they could someday come to light was a political decision made through acts of omission.

When J. Edgar Hoover died in 1972, his secretary Helen Gandy destroyed the FBI’s “Personal and Confidential” files on public officials and celebrities. At the same time, according to Athan Theoharis’ “The FBI: A Comprehensive Reference Guide,” Acting Director Mark Felt incorporated the Bureau’s “Official and Confidential” files into the FBI’s central records system, subject to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. Files on King’s private life were placed in this latter set of records rather than destroyed, and some were transferred to the National Archives in 2005.

Litigation by Bernard Lee from King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference sought to compel destruction of the recordings and transcripts. But the judge in the case, John Lewis Smith Jr., rejected the request, and instead ordered them sealed for 50 years until 2027.

People will rightly debate the trustworthiness of FBI sources, and Garrow’s interpretation of them. No figure, no matter how revered, should be immune from scrutiny over their potential support for violence against women.

But those weighing the evidence and its veracity should not forget that the tapes being used to facilitate this discussion were created and preserved with the goal of destroying Martin Luther King’s reputation. The FBI’s intent was to demoralize and fragment the coalition of supporters King brought together in his life, the people who find common purpose by honoring his memory.

In this respect, revealing these materials could be considered “Hoover’s revenge.”

While we are at it, let's see how the "war against drugs" was just also a political tool against so called radicals, black people and eventually hippies. All seemingly dangerous people who are opposing the status quo of the US empire, or in reality the dominance of the military industrial complex. The system always has to have the dangerous boogeymen opposing it.

As Mark said later it was the Muslims. Then the Chinese. There's always a patsy to be found!

Do you realize who else used that card? It was the jews!

Now there's a rhetoric of anti-semitism rising in America too and Klanye wasn't helping with that at all... Der ewige Jude.

Some of these tactics appeal very strongly to the base human insticts and the root chakra, which is based on survival, fear and separation when imbalanced. My tribe, your tribe, othering. "Us vs them". Let the hate or love flow? Every man makes that decision for himself.

How a racist hate-monger masterminded America’s War on Drugs

In 1931, Henry Smith Williams walked into Harry Anslinger’s Washington, D.C., office to plead for his brother’s life. Anslinger and his agents had locked up every drug user they could find, including Williams’s brother, Edgar. Williams was a doctor and had written extensively on the need for humane treatment of addicts. He had spoken vehemently against Anslinger’s brutal tactics, but, confronted by the man himself — slicked back black hair, with a falcon-like visage, a thick neck, and an imposing frame — Williams was suddenly deflated. He half-heartedly made a few points about his brother not deserving such treatment; then he left. After he was out the door, Anslinger mocked him, calling him hysterical. “Doctors,” he said knowingly, “cannot treat addicts even if they wish to.” He called instead for “tough judges not afraid to throw killer-pushers into prison and throw away the key.”

With this unforgiving mentality, Anslinger ruled over the Federal Narcotics Bureau (a precursor to the DEA) for more than three decades — a formative period that shaped the United States’ drug policy for years to come. As John C. McWilliams explained in his book about Anslinger, The Protectors, “Anslinger was the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.” During this time, he implemented stringent drug laws and unreasonably long prison sentences that would give rise to America’s prison-industrial complex. Because of Anslinger, millions of lives were swept up in the drug war’s dragnet, if they weren’t outright ended. But Anslinger’s wasn’t so much a war on drugs as it was a war on culture, an attempt to squelch the radical freedom of the Jazz Age for people of color. Anslinger was a xenophobe with no capacity for intellectual nuance, and his racist views informed his work to devastating effect. But he couldn’t have done it, nor reigned as long as he did, without a cast of complicit politicians who shared his bigoted vision for what America should be.

Anslinger’s zeal for law and order manifested early. He was born in Altoona, Pennsylvania, in 1892 to Swiss German parents. His father struggled to find work as a barber and got hired by the Pennsylvania Railroad, which was where Anslinger got his first job in the eighth grade. He eventually rose through the ranks by investigating wrongful death claims. His work was characterized by a distaste for anything extrajudicial, and a nose for fraud. This attitude proved useful when he pivoted to Prohibition enforcement. In the early 1920s, he worked for the government, chasing rum runners in the Bahamas. In 1930, he was appointed to helm the newly minted Federal Bureau of Narcotics by President Hoover. An astute judge of Washington’s ways, he quickly aligned himself with influential politicians, Washington insiders, and the pharmaceutical industry, whose support saw him through a series of scandals in the coming years. Congressman John Cochran of Missouri praised him, saying he “deserved a medal of honor.”

During the early parts of his career, Anslinger seemed little concerned about marijuana, known by most as cannabis. But when Prohibition ended, it looked as though Anslinger might be out of a job, so he sought a new threat to the American way, essentially manufacturing a drug war. As Johann Hari explains in his book Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, Anslinger’s office was focused on cocaine and heroin, but there were relatively small numbers of users. In order to ensure a promising future for his bureau, “he needed more,” Hari writes. Marijuana was Anslinger’s golden ticket. He used his office to trumpet the association between weed and violence, so that it could be criminalized. “You smoke a joint and you’re likely to kill your brother,” he was known to have said. McWilliams explains that in this effort, “Anslinger appealed to many organizations whose members were predominantly white Protestant.”

From the beginning, Anslinger conflated drug use, race, and music. “Reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men,” he was quoted as saying. “There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the U.S., and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing result from marijuana use. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others.”

Over the coming years, Anslinger would have a decisive hand in all of the country’s drug legislation, including the Boggs Act of 1951, which required mandatory sentencing and various state laws further criminalizing drug use. According to McWilliams, Anslinger was considered the preeminent expert on drugs in America. He remained at the helm of the Federal Narcotics Bureau until the Kennedy administration, but his ideas were swiftly adopted by successive administrations — always disproportionately to the detriment of people of color.

In 1971, Nixon declared his “war on drugs.” His aide and Watergate co-conspirator John Ehrlichman later revealed the effort’s nefarious motivations in Harper’s:

The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people … We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.

During the eighties, Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign was paired with race-based media hysteria about crack. Over the course of the next 20 years, the number of drug offenders in U.S. prisons multiplied twelvefold. This draconian mantle was picked up by George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton and remained the status quo until Barack Obama, who began pardoning or commuting drug offenders’ sentences and approaching the opioid crisis as a public health issue rather than a carceral one. But with the election of Donald Trump and his appointment of Jeff Sessions as attorney general, Anslinger’s legacy appears alive and well. This administration has attempted to block the legalization and decriminalization of marijuana, urged police to be tough on drug crime, and called for harsher sentencing. As Sessions said in 2016, “Good people don’t smoke marijuana.”

A great deal of evil can occur when people who are in authority disapprove of certain sectors of the populace.

J Edgar Hoover was such a person.

I'm not prepared to link him to MLK's assassination because there's no direct evidence, but Hoover did his best to try and prevent the Civil Rights movement, and he used unethical methods to target those he opposed.

I look back at some of our nation's history and it takes my breath away with the depth of cruelty, unfairness, and yes, racism.

It's up to us to shift the mindset away from those antiquated ideas and toward an inclusive world where we're all judged on our acts rather than our race, age, religion, or nation of origin.

[T Smith]

Posted by Wind (here)

Posted by DNA (here)
Not to rain on your parades here but recent FBI released tapes show MLK to have had dozens of affairs and at least once to have laughed during a forced rape while being recorded by the FBI.

The link doesn't work, but I've heard about that before and I wouldn't put any value on what FBI said. So be careful when believing something, it just might be bs. Would you trust intel from CIA for that matter?

"The FBI’s attempt to discredit Martin Luther King Jr – new details of which are only just emerging some 55 years later – was a mammoth operation involving undercover informants, wiretapped phones and bugged hotel rooms.

J Edgar Hoover, the bureau’s notorious director, believed the material gathered by his agents in the Sixties exposed the civil rights leader as a “notorious liar” and “one of the lowest characters in the country”.

“At that time there was an ethic in the US that prominent men’s private affairs didn’t qualify as news. That was what also protected JFK.”

I haven’t looked too deep into this, but I wouldn’t doubt it. MLK and his message was an enemy of the State, and still is. The disparaging information wouldn’t have been as effective a tool to use against him in the ethos of the 60s, but much more so today. In today’s world, there would be no need to assassinate MLK given the current technology and tools that dominate mind space, i.e., it would be just as easy to assassinate his character and cancel him entirely. Circa 2023, MLK would be a little known Baptist minister from Montgomery, AL, a threat to no one, espousing ideals of love and unity to a limited flock. To the extent those ideals did expand beyond its corral, the necessary technology would be applied such that he would be reviled and hated and despised; the very same people who love and revere him today would detest and loathe him…. So to the extent that MLK’s message is beginning to resurface in the alternative narrative, I’m not surprised at all the FBI declassified this information and is tempering the public with it. Whether it’s true or not is irrelevant.

I won’t expand too much more on this, just something to chew on.

[Mark]

Y'all.

I am going to respond to all of your comments and deeper thoughts this weekend, when I have time. I am very busy for the rest of this week, but I did want to say this.

I see no need for my further participation on this thread.

There is NOTHING that has been written in the latest commentary that causes my internal sense of knowing and decades of study to rise in response. Fundamentally, those with whom I speak now are aligned with what I know to be true, given the state of our more or less collective conditioning and susceptibility to modern media disinformation tactics. I am gratified and thankful to be in such company, to share understanding and hone my own perspectives that I cannot experience in this current life and, therefore, rely upon other, true and faithful witnesses, to share their experiences and perspectives so that I CAN SEE MYSELF from people who share an internal sense of fundamental human unity and the desire to move beyond that which has separated us in the past.

That's all. Please continue on with your regularly scheduled programming. Talk soon.

[Mark]

Posted by T Smith (here)
Suppose the middle man not only has an agenda, but is also an adept social engineer who can fashion whatever reality he wants at the end of the queue, as an artist with a paint brush. And yes, this is an art form…. Suppose the middleman’s craft is done largely unbeknownst to those who may think they understand reality or, worse, believe they are “in the know” because of higher education or because of other subtle influences of the artist’s brush.

Goethe’s famous quote comes to mind here, “…none are more hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free…”

Yes, that is so true and not only applies to those who undergo the process of higher education, but also those who seek to educate themselves through their own personal efforts, the autodidacts who learn by seeking out information themselves. There is institutional fake news that's put out by the masters of media, by the universities, by grade schools, middle schools and high schools. There's fake information put out on the daily newscasts, on the podcasts so many are so fond of because they mirror their own views, by ourselves, to others, when we don't want to believe something and share our opinion with other people knowing that what we believe may not be objectively true, but it is what we want to believe about ourselves and the world.

Fake news, mistaken ideas and perceptions are rife in our world, hence the eastern invocation of Illusion as a description for Maya, perhaps, in part. Who can know what is real or true, when all we see is interpreted through such subjective lenses as those we employ to interpret all we encounter?

I do cosign tho', all you state is so in regards to the way of the world. I just don't know how it can be changed without some fundamental transformation of human perception. Any and every system tends toward entropy and reset eventually. Perhaps that is just the Sign of the Times and These Things Must Be. I don't know.

Posted by T Smith (here)
Fair enough. But why do we accept this? A society run by elites who want to kill us? What?

Haven't the elites always been afraid of the hoi polloi? They needed them, back in the day, for primary food production and to be the cogs that run the machinery of whatever society might have been for them.

The advent of AI and the dawn of bipedal, humanoid machinery and commercial and industrial robots seems to have shifted things on its face, but these are still nascent and tentative innovations, not yet ready for prime time.

Posted by T Smith (here)
Shouldn’t we humans, as a unified race, strive to govern ourselves and speak out against any societal structure organized otherwise? Or, if that society is throwing my tribe some crumbs, or serving my interests in some way (perhaps at the expense of others), or if it appears to be bettering my narrative, one that serves my identity, best not rock the boat? (This observation goes for all colors and creeds BTW—I’m not just pointing at one group in particular, even those who openly embrace identity politics, or oddly embrace zero-sum only when they are are in bed with the positive integer). It’s always perplexing to me that those who fancy themselves the most progressive in society also fall back on, “cuz it’s just the way it is and always has been!” when they see no other use for “progress” to further their cause. This seems nothing but a reflection of interest-group politics to me. And, giving the benefit of the doubt, if those groups do embrace progressive values, then they’re under the influence of an interesting case of cognitive dissonance, IMO.

Hellz yes! We should be into that, the whole governing ourselves schtick. And perhaps we have been, in the past. Have you read the book "The Dawn of Everything", by David Graeber and David Wengrow? It talks about the evidence of past civilizations that existed for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years that were not based upon the models we are familiar with. That did not use commerce and money the way that we do, that did not necessarily experience the same kinds of inequalities and inequities that we find so base and fundamental to the expression of our current civilization. I've just begun reading the book, but already my idea of what is possible has been challenged!

The questions we must answer, then, include, how does a unified human race govern itself without institutional structures that control nepotism, greed and the predominance of psychopathy among its working members?

Not sure what you are referring to when you speak to progressives saying 'this is just the way it is and always has been', unless they are speaking about the controlling and dominant societal mores. Please expound with an example.

Posted by T Smith (here)
`There may be some who scramble to find an enemy in changing times. But if this is so, are these folks really the backward minded folks portrayed by Barack Obama “clinging to their guns and bibles?” Are all the questions abound, e.g., whose behind the change? Who do we fight to stop it? To whom do we assign the blame?, etc.—and, by implication—really the questions of the desperate, those in disbelief who will do what they must to preserve their White Privilege in a changing society? I imagine yes, there may be some gun-toting racists who would make BO proud to have uttered those words, and yes, I grant this dynamic does manifest in society, albeit at the periphery, and not just among blacks and whites but among all colors and creeds. The truth is, it is more likely folks in search of an enemy amid the rapidly evolving narrative you describe simply don’t fully comprehend what is happening. In other words, they are not aware enough to understand the narrative as it unfolds let alone articulate enough to defend themselves against a fabricated narrative pejoratively ascribed to them, one which renders them mute and fearful to talk about for fear of being labeled racist. Or, one that disqualifies them altogether from having an opinion or taking a stance because of their Whiteness. I, for one, have no problem at all with the shift—or in the changing narrative…I welcome it—but, in the name of individualism, not collectivism.

There it is. Nothing more, nothing less.

I would agree with all of that. You see the same issues all over the world on every continent and in every government. There is a lot of ignorance, but critical decisions are being made at a collective level despite that reality. Why? Because they must. Because we do go on, whether we know everything we should or not. Everybody, from Obama to Trump and all in between, who splits us and divides based upon simplistic memetics is a part of the problem and not the solution.

Posted by T Smith (here)
I wouldn’t necessarily conflate the two. I would categorize them as unlikely bedfellows, forced together by political compromise and socioeconomic necessity (not too unlike much of our politics today) and by the sociocultural consciousness of the era. So yes, there were sociocultural proclivities of White Supremacy and racism at the beginnings of the nation—there is no argument here—but just as I wouldn’t conflate, say, the practice of the chaste courtship with the ideals of freedom, liberty, and prosperity (but rather with sociocultural reality undergirding colonial America) I certainly wouldn’t conflate White Supremacy and/or racism with the ideals of freedom, liberty, and prosperity.

You may not, but many others have and currently are.

Posted by T Smith (here)
In other words, racist proclivities were condoned by, but not inherent to, the founding nation.

They actually were. But the British started it, organizing owners and workers by race, deliberately, after the multiracial uprising called Bacon's Rebellion. This was in the late 1600s and well institutionalized by the times of the Continental Congress, then the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, a hundred years later.

Posted by T Smith (here)
The institution of slavery, for example, was among the most divisive and contentious of debates among the Founding Fathers, and in fact was a potential roadblock to ratifying the Constitution itself, namely because of a powerful and influential political faction dependent on the slave trade forced a compromise. But there were other heavyweights of the Enlightenment, the anti-Federalists, e.g. Madison, King, Morris et. al, who well understood the inherent contradiction between liberty and freedom and the institution of slavery, and who spoke our fervently against the immorality and incompatibility of the institution of slavery with the ideals of liberty and freedom.

Spoke out. I'd argue, for posterity's sake. But did not want to destroy an economic system that was not only working but promised to continue to provide wealth for the entire nation. Because it was not just the south that benefited from slavery, but the north as well.

Posted by Mark (here)

Posted by T Smith (here)
In other words, if America embraces liberty, freedom, and prosperity--and ultimately to government by and for the people, it's really embracing a pernicious and regressive ideology characteristic of its racist roots, to a government by and for Racist/Sexist White Males.

I don't think this is actually so. The problem is, though, that perspective is institutionalized. And always has been. Many people believe it needs to shift as the population demographics shift as well.

Posted by T Smith (here)
The perspective may be institutionalized, but it is ill-founded, IMO. And the changing narrative only seems to galvanize that perspective, which makes me suspect of its ulterior motives. There seems to be an underlying, hidden agenda to the narrative, something other than the advancement of positive change, which incessantly demonizes liberty and freedom (hmmm…) all in the name of change, which I suspect is but a big fat giant Trojan Horse. To which I say, beware of social engineers bearing gifts!

It is ill-founded indeed and flawed fundamentally, which is why it is shifting now, as all things must, that do not comport with societal evolution. Our society is evolving to become more of what the founders envisioned, I'm sure, faaaaar in the future and after many ideological and perhaps material battles that they, thankfully for them I'm sure, would not be alive to participate in or see coming directly. All societies are engineered. And guided deliberately, from the Amazonian tribes still trying to keep their ways to Chinese fascism and our Western Democracies.

Posted by Mark (here)
To go down the road to stop that would be to embrace supremacy philosophies that have not worked out well for those who've attempted them.

Posted by T Smith (here)
I’m puzzled by this. I’ve failed to infer any philosophy espousing ideals of supremacy from any of the writings by Enlightenment philosophers who inspired the Constitution, e.g. John Locke, Charles Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau et. al. In fact, I’ve read all these philosophers specifically to the contrary. What am I missing? I suppose there may be supremacy tendencies among those who have embraced these philosophies and/or have been inspired by them in the formation of governments… But in the ideals themselves? Curious to hear your take on this; I’m truly puzzled. And as such, I find myself continually coming back to same conclusion. I’m lookin’ down at a baby emerged in some nasty, dirty bath water…. which way to go to sanitize the tub?

I'm talking about the Nazis here. Sorry I should have said so directly. A supremacist philosophy and a dangerously racist ideology that threatened the majority of the inhabitants of this planet.

Posted by T Smith (here)
But my question to those who lean toward the Hobbsian bent: if human beings are so evil and wicked and cannot be left to their own devices, who watches the evil watchers? Who manages them with a heavy hand? Who puts them under lock and key, chain and ball?

Hm. Good questions. Perhps here is where we defer to the ultimate reality and the laws of karma, the non-corporeal beings of a higher ethical state and the seemingly remorseless workings of laws higher than those we write for ourselves.

Posted by T Smith (here)
For only the most evil and wicked among us, those will do virtually anything or whatever it takes to reach the top of the social order in order to rule over the rest of us, including lying, cheating, stealing, and killing for it; how is that we so readily abdicate our freedom and lives to but a handful of these wicked, wicked humans? How is it we allow the most evil and wicked among us to force the rest of us wicked subordinates to do their bidding? Hmmm…. sounds a lot like the world in which we live today. I’ll stick with Rousseau, thank you. The model man is the independent farmer, free of superiors, and self-governing…

They don't necessarily see justice themselves, it seems. It looks like karma works across the generations and down through families, within which souls seem to incarnate, time and time again, according to Eastern (Asian) and Southern (African) understandings of its workings. The bible has quite a few statements about it, people are cursed unto the 7th generation and such. What our forefathers and mothers did, seems to reverberate down through time until it finally reaches those of us who can only look around themselves and say, huh? Why me????

That seems to be the way of it.

I often wonder, in that vein, what black Americans did to bring us into the situation that my ancestors and those of us currently living experience. Sure, things are much, much better, and the controller's desire to control has expanded in the attempt to enslave those whom it previously coopted, in earlier generations, and made part of the psychopathic state mechanism of racial enslavement. Whatever it was, must have been an offense directly against God. But our time of direct and open servitude seem to be ending. What time it is now, only God knows. Or the Multiverse, or Source, or Creator, or whichever of the myriad terms we humans give it is preferable to whomever.

Posted by T Smith (here)
This wasn’t always so. There was a time when the highly educated leaned conservative and voted Republican. So, to what do we attribute the shift? Better quality of education? Or lesser quality? Or just evolving societal attitudes in general? In any case, the underlying implication of your observation is the more ignorant one is, the more apt she or he is to vote Republican.

Ignorant just means not knowing. We are all ignorant. Every single one of us.

I don't think that has anything to do with it. People make choices and often choose to stay with their tribe and accept their tribes' mores. Sometimes that means not going to college because it is liberal and those people suck and the information they believe is all lies.

Common, universal education is not an old idea it is a new idea, begun really in the late 1800s and codified and industrialized to serve the new workers in factories and give them a basic liberal arts education, where you learn a little about a lot. It's never been designed to educate a population toward any kind of freedom. That wasn't the college that white men and some women began going to after WWII and the GI Bill, that was a commercial, industrial education designed to make them part of the machinery. A pact that was made, the last great pact, before it was all torn down and apart in the late 1960s, then shipped overseas beginning in the late 1980s with Bush's NWO and Clinton's NAFTA in the 90s. They're all on the same side, remember? The side that's not ours.

Posted by T Smith (here)
But if this is true, the flip side must also be true. The more indoctrinated one is, the more apt she or he is to vote Democrat. I would argue higher education was co-opted by a collectivist Statist agenda with the advent of the Department of Education Organization Act (1979)—and I’m well aware many on the left applaud this as progress—so it comes as no surprise to me at all that shortly after the formation of the Department of Education the majority who call themselves Liberal began voting in lockstep with the Statist agenda. And of course, this may be preferable to the prior ethos of higher education that subtly perpetuated systemic racism and White Supremacy, as the argument goes, but either way, it seems to me the mediated experience of higher education churns out voters via programming and conditioning and teaches folks what to think as opposed to how to think.

No. They teach you critical thinking in college. They teach it moreso in Grad School and you choose to become part of the machinery of state, or not. That's where the acceptance and wealth lie, you understand. You can and many do choose to go the other way. Many blacks and browns who got educations and could not enter the system had to make their own way and many of them wrote masterpieces critiquing the system. When I was a Senior in Geography Studies in my Undergrad, my thesis was on the Marshall Plan and how the then American-led coalition basically raped Africa to pay for the rebuilding of Europe. How so many raw materials were exported to become finished goods that then became the basis of the industrial dominance of the West and the continued predatory, rapine behavior that has resulted in the dire straits we now find ourselves in.

My education on how to research and access to the Stacks, the many, many books written by whites documenting events as they occurred, was how I was able to find such information. You can't find a word on anything I just said online today. I found it all reading books that were just documenting the reality of their day. Now, those things are kept offline. Who has been and is responsible for that kind of censorship?

We have to each, at some point, accept our conditioning and programming. Many do and some do not. The many who do are motivated by their own desires and fears, whatever they may be.

Posted by T Smith (here)
LOL. I am hardly into Critical Theory—as I believe you are likely aware—but with no offense to those who subscribe, I’m certainly a critic of it. And I’d be a fool not to acknowledge the growing influence of postmodernism in every power center of society.

Critical theory IS postmodernism. That is where it came out of and what it reflects. A critic of the project of "Modernity". This is a definition of Postmodernism:

a late-20th-century style and concept in the arts, architecture, and criticism that represents a departure from modernism and has at its heart a general distrust of grand theories and ideologies as well as a problematical relationship with any notion of “art.”.

And what is Modernity? Here is a definition:

What are the 4 key characteristics of modernity?
It is the progress of the four dimensions of modernity I.e. industrialism, capitalism, administrative power and military power into the international division of labor, world capitalist economy, nation-state system, and world military power respectively that make modernity global (Giddens, 1990).

Modernity is, in essence, the foundation and expression of White Supremacy as it evolved and became the expression of Western European ideological modalities and ways of being, as an unconscious collective. I was in grad school in the 90s, when it evolved into what has become almost a separate entity in the minds of those who do not know what they are talking about when they critique Critical Theory.

We are engaging in Postmodern and Critical Theory debate right now. In fact, that is much of what we do here. I think people get upset about Critical Race Theory because it is a discussion about things that are fundamental to their ways of lives and that they are not used to thinking about critically.

It's kind of funny, when you think about it. So much ado about nothing. It's all just talk. That leads to change that the majority population of the US, conservative and liberal, do not want.

Posted by T Smith (here)
I’m again puzzled. We keep circling back to a bigger picture that renders the fearful masses, or by implication, the White majority, to a collective in frenzied pushback against the steady advances of people of color. Is this really true? Is this really what is happening here? I can't speak for others, but I’ve stated as clearly as I can, and many times, that indeed, I concur with the observation of pushback, but it is not against the advancement of any minority, group, or identity. I am in pushback against collectivism, which caresses the hands of all of the various interest groups--especially the downtrodden and marginalized--while promising hope and change, and ultimately, the emancipation from the "White Man" (FKA "The Man"). Nice trick!

Ok, I see where you're coming from. But I also see another 'trick' here. By stating that it is a system, collectivism, i.e. communism, that is being pushed back against, any and all groups that, by definition, are collective in nature, are automatically included among that systemic rejection! That's people, my man. That's black people, people who want to unionize, people who are gay, who want any kind of change that goes against the status quo!

And it is a collective that is railing against other collectives! A collective that refuses to define itself as such and hides behind meaningless terms like "individualism". When everybody within a collective call themselves and their ideas individualist, is it just a bunch of individuals who act like a collective or is it a collective itself?

I dunno. It seems like a sleight-of-hand to me, that allows people to say they're against an ideology when how it works out practically and materially, is that they just want the status quo to continue and they get to 'say' they are against a system, thereby deflecting their complicity in the repression of entire peoples.

Because they are individuals. And they didn't do the bad things themselves, personally, right?

Or am I wrong, here? Or is it indeed using an 'idea' as a subterfuge and deflection from the recognition of the manifest and undeniable reality we and all of our ancestors have collectively co-created and inhabited?

Posted by Brenya (here)
It's up to us to shift the mindset away from those antiquated ideas and toward an inclusive world where we're all judged on our acts rather than our race, age, religion, or nation of origin.

100%. I believe we are engaging in this work here and now. It is all so vast and incomprehensible, people working, living, all over the world to shift these narratives. All of the little acts we do daily, the small things that we think don't matter, do. We just must continue; we cannot stop and I don't believe that we will. People of conscience and good will exist all over the world and we may not receive the media attention, but it all counts. Thank you for your individual contributions to this collective effort.

[T Smith]

Hi Mark,

Really good discussion going here. I appreciate your perspective and do agree with much of it. At the end of the day, I think we're analyzing the same beast from a slightly different angle--and admittedly from different life experiences--but we are for the most part on the same page with our analysis of the issues. A few thoughts:

Posted by Mark (here)

Fake news, mistaken ideas and perceptions are rife in our world, hence the eastern invocation of Illusion as a description for Maya, perhaps, in part. Who can know what is real or true, when all we see is interpreted through such subjective lenses as those we employ to interpret all we encounter?

I do cosign tho', all you state is so in regards to the way of the world. I just don't know how it can be changed without some fundamental transformation of human perception. Any and every system tends toward entropy and reset eventually. Perhaps that is just the Sign of the Times and These Things Must Be. I don't know.

This is indeed the way of the world and it would be naive to believe otherwise. Plato's Allegory of the Cave also comes to mind.

What I'd like to see more from higher education, though, and from societal institutions in general, is to teach students how to think, not what to think. Call me a sucker for the Socratic method--and I realize this may be a naive assertion (perhaps even a radical one); who wants a herd of plebs who can think for themselves? Who knows what kind of mischief and injustice the hoi polloi might make of the world? In any case, a world full of free thinking humans would certainly make for an unruly mess for the controllers of perception.

I also realize some will vehemently disagree with this brand of idealism. Some truths and perceptions are above question and necessary to indoctrinate into the hearts and minds of the young as a cornerstone to becoming a functioning cog of society. I'm sure there is an appropriate line to draw there; it just seems the trend in higher education these days leans more to the latter--if only subtly--which, IMHO, is a trend in the wrong direction relative to progress. Just a personal perspective/opinion.

Posted by Mark (here)

Have you read the book "The Dawn of Everything", by David Graeber and David Wengrow? It talks about the evidence of past civilizations that existed for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years that were not based upon the models we are familiar with. That did not use commerce and money the way that we do, that did not necessarily experience the same kinds of inequalities and inequities that we find so base and fundamental to the expression of our current civilization. I've just begun reading the book, but already my idea of what is possible has been challenged!

I haven't read it, but I will seek it out...

Posted by Mark (here)

The questions we must answer, then, include, how does a unified human race govern itself without institutional structures that control nepotism, greed and the predominance of psychopathy among its working members?

This is indeed the question. And perhaps the very crux of our discussion. It seems to me we can render this entire discussion down to one simple question: is liberty and freedom conducive to justice for all? We again circle back to Hobbs vs. Rousseau. If we indeed strive to create a society in which we are all free to do and prosper as we will in the pursuit of happiness, can such a society exist without creating injustice, institutionalized psychopathy, and oppression of the week and marginalized? Considering all this, is self governance even possible? Some say no. Either overtly, or by implication given their embrace of certain ideologies.

The American system of self governance is a novel experiment in attempt to answer some of these lingering questions, something the progressive aristocrat and French sociologist Alexis de Tocqueville pondered at length, but without resolution. And it would seem his observations at the turn of the 18th century are as relevant today as they were then, as the jury is still out. That institutions of Western Civilization, created by European White men, were founded on liberty and freedom that have not been kind to various groups marginalized at the periphery of society, seems to be the major critique and argument against liberty, freedom, and self governance. Hence the urge to tear down the structure of Western Civilization itself, including its very foundation, in attempt to rebuild in the image of personal identity.

It would derail our conversation to go further in depth on this, but I would argue it is impossible for liberty and freedom to coexist in a society founded on personal identity.

Posted by Mark (here)

Posted by T Smith (here)
...I certainly wouldn’t conflate White Supremacy and/or racism with the ideals of freedom, liberty, and prosperity.

You may not, but many others have and currently are.

Okay, I'll bite Engineering society around personal identity is antithetical to liberty and freedom insofar as such a society would require massive social engineering programs, restrictions, and management to ensure some groups advance while others are held back, to promote equality and social justice among some at the expense of others (all subjective determinations) or to satisfy whatever objective du jour suits its evolving demands--and, as DNA and others have pointed out, this brand of engineering condones and necessitates punitive measures based on identity and race, encourages racism, and divides society into limitless interest factions hostile of others. The end result? Social injustice is thus condoned in the name of social justice.

Posted by Mark (here)

It is ill-founded indeed and flawed fundamentally, which is why it is shifting now, as all things must, that do not comport with societal evolution.

I think we can all agree the sociocultural government of Colonial America was flawed... not so sure I would go so far to say it was flawed fundamentally. The U.S. Constitution was designed as a living, breathing document, room for growth and evolution. But today it is not the nation's founding sociocultural flaws under attack (many of which our evolving society has addressed), in as much as it is an attack on its foundation. Its 1st, 2nd, 4th amendments -- essentially all the Bill of Rights -- teetering on collapse; which raises the question: is the Constitution ill-founded, as you imply above? Or just ill-developed? Are we really talking societal evolution or genetic modification?

Posted by Mark (here)

Many blacks and browns who got educations and could not enter the system had to make their own way and many of them wrote masterpieces critiquing the system. When I was a Senior in Geography Studies in my Undergrad, my thesis was on the Marshall Plan and how the then American-led coalition basically raped Africa to pay for the rebuilding of Europe. How so many raw materials were exported to become finished goods that then became the basis of the industrial dominance of the West and the continued predatory, rapine behavior that has resulted in the dire straits we now find ourselves in.

Critique of the system is always necessary. Especially when a path of integration into the system is not available to all. But I do wonder if such critique best describes an ill-developed system or an ill-founded system?

Posted by Mark (here)

My education on how to research and access to the Stacks, the many, many books written by whites documenting events as they occurred, was how I was able to find such information. You can't find a word on anything I just said online today. I found it all reading books that were just documenting the reality of their day. Now, those things are kept offline. Who has been and is responsible for that kind of censorship?

Fair enough. There is also plenty of material in those same stacks from Douglass, Baldwin, du Bois, Cox, Ellison, and others--maybe not so much from the early American colonial era, but certainly beginning in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century with the evolving prominence of the Frankfurt school and its critique on modernity. Here is an example of evolution, no?

Regardless, imagine the genetically modified version, where, if various social engineers had their way, and in their best (and most noble) assessment, determined it was necessary to physically remove from the stacks any information from which you and I gleaned our education, e.g., various historical perspectives from scholars, sociologists, and historians not aligned with the social objectives du jour, be they authored by scholars red, yellow, black, or white? Is this not what is subtly happening in the world of education today? And if not explicitly in higher education, then trending toward that end and certainly on the Internet and in the milieu of social media? I would argue it's not just critical theory where arguments are being censored (which is the point I believe you were trying to make, but please correct me if I'm wrong); censorship is a systemic problem, and a development not at all in line with progress. Again, my humble assessment.

Posted by Mark (here)

Posted by T Smith (here)
LOL. I am hardly into Critical Theory—as I believe you are likely aware—but with no offense to those who subscribe, I’m certainly a critic of it. And I’d be a fool not to acknowledge the growing influence of postmodernism in every power center of society.

Critical theory IS postmodernism. That is where it came out of and what it reflects. A critic of the project of "Modernity". This is a definition of Postmodernism:

Yup. We're on the same page there, both with definitions of modernity and postmodernism. And, to be as blunt as possible, I respectfully think Theodor Adorno et. al (and future generational thinkers from the Frankfurt School) are fundamentally wrong in their critique of Western society insofar as they argue some iteration of Marxism is the way to foster human freedom and happiness. Please don't misunderstand. Marx was a brilliant philosopher, and there is certainly room for criticism of Western society and modernity; but some dialectic with Marx isn't the best approach for society to foster human freedom or happiness, IMO. And in fact, this was the main roadblock to Frankfurt thinkers and their criticism of capitalism, as it was apparent the "working classes" of Western societies, which they were hoping to recruit to the cause, were way too apathetic to embrace their own plight. In other words, the so-called proletariat was too fat and too prosperous from the "oppressive capitalist system" supposedly keeping them down, and the so-called down-trodden described by Marx contrarily had adopted a consumerist worldview of abundance and possession. The Frankfurt school, in effect--at least among the ranks of its founding thinkers--was critiquing a so-called caste system that wasn't (or at the very least one the masses wouldn't acknowledge), so they instead aligned themselves with the interests of the marginalized, ethnic minorities who had not yet integrated into the system due to its sociocultural flaws. This is how Marxist ideology exploits organizations like BLM, for example, and exploits the notion of oppression to sell its brand.

Posted by Mark (here)

Modernity is, in essence, the foundation and expression of White Supremacy as it evolved and became the expression of Western European ideological modalities and ways of being, as an unconscious collective.

At risk of over simplifying the problem, is this not just another Marxist iteration of class conflict?

Posted by Mark (here)

I dunno. It seems like a sleight-of-hand to me, that allows people to say they're against an ideology when how it works out practically and materially, is that they just want the status quo to continue and they get to 'say' they are against a system, thereby deflecting their complicity in the repression of entire peoples.

Can't deny it looks that way. I am, in fact, explicitly speaking out against an ideology. But let's consider a little deeper. When speaking out against cultural Marxism, for example, or against identity politics, is my underlying motive only because I want the status quo to continue? Isn't that overly simplistic? Could it be that I only want liberty and prosperity to continue? For all? And if liberty and prosperity are not currently available to all, at present, as the critics of modernity argue, then might I at the very least be arguing for the opportunity for liberty and prosperity to remain available to all, in whatever societal evolution we might collectively imagine or create?

Also, it it possible--just possible--the postmodern system that promises equality and happiness to the marginalized might be far more repressive and enslaving to entire peoples--all peoples--than that of the status quo?

There are no right or wrong answers to these questions. Just ideas--or critiques--of the prevalent thought underlying present day Critical Theory.

[ExomatrixTV]

I noticed that the vast majority of my old left leaning (classic) liberals "friends of friends" network in The Netherlands 🇳🇱 do not even know that Native people of most countries in the whole world did have slaves too and sold humans to other humans BEFORE (and during) the Caucasian people came from Europe in the 1500s & 1600s.

• Now why is this important to know? <<< rhetorical question ... and why is it that most liberals (even classic liberals) never ever bring this up? ... Why?

Am not claiming "slavery" is good ... that is not the point and would be very stupid of me ... the point is that most do not realize how common it was for thousands of years throughout human history. And guess who decided to stop slavery the way it was for 1000s of years and make slavery official a criminal act through new laws?

ps. I was raised by classical (socialists) liberal parents & relatives most of my life, and my old friends network were too. Knowing how they think and act helps me better understand certain psychological mechanism of behavior ... like having multiple (often self-imposed) "blind spots".

cheers,
John 🦜🦋🌳

[arwen]

All big companies in the US now require "DEI" training for employees, but studies say that often BACKFIRES. (8 minutes)

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=D2KX8wXzc78

[ExomatrixTV]

Posted by ExomatrixTV (here)
I noticed that the vast majority of my old left leaning (classic) liberals "friends of friends" network in The Netherlands 🇳🇱 do not even know that Native people of most countries in the whole world did have slaves and sold humans to other humans BEFORE (and during) the Caucasian people came from Europe in the 1500s & 1600s.

• Now why is this important to know? <<< rhetorical question ... and why is it that most liberals (even classic liberals) never ever bring this up? ... Why?

Am not claiming "slavery" is good ... that is not the point and would be very stupid of me ... the point is that most do not realize how common it was for thousands of years throughout human history. And guess who decided to stop slavery the way it was for 1000s of years and make slavery official a criminal act through new laws?

ps. I was raised by classical (socialists) liberal parents & relatives most of my life, and my old friends network were too. Knowing how they think and act helps me better understand certain psychological mechanism of behavior ... like having multiple (often self-imposed) "blind spots".

cheers,
John 🦜🦋🌳

• The David Knight Show - Apr. 3rd Replay

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=zVUZoTKW6qc

[Ernie Nemeth]

https://www.louderwithcrowder.com/tr...eck-show-notes

second hour with Nick Deperno, comedian
knock-down funny
this is the 'joke' that racism has become
really funny
Crowder does some excellent imitations...
highlights how far this crazy leftist idea has gone
fact: jokes are the best way to ease racial tension

[DNA]

This is what I'm seeing right now.
A media empire attacking white people non stop and this fueling rage, contempt and seemingly enabling the worst actionable offenses against white people.

[rgray222]

Thomas Sowell is one of my heroes, he is a man that can always bring an intelligent meaningful look at any difficult situation. I think sometimes we need to step back and look at the larger picture of slavery, reparations, and racism in general. In the second video he looks at the new mantra of equity versus equality.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=t8280aUatvA

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=8WYi-64MejU

[Franny]

Yeonmi Park, who escaped from North Korea remarks on the similarities between US forced racism and NK class struggle. AKA Marxism.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=WucuTSlEAy0

[rgray222]

I had to stop and think about posting this because I thought some might view it as racist but after careful thought, it is truly about choice.

[Ernie Nemeth]

Thanks, rgray222.

I was thinking about an idea that began with me trying to understand my attitude regarding the war in Gaza.

The deeper I delved, the more the attitude seemed to harden in its resolve. The best I could get to a rational conclusion was that it is not fair.
Why not fair I could not determine. Instead, I explained it to myself as a matter of justice.
Somehow, justice is at issue here. And somehow, I had decided that justice had not been done in the war.

It still didn't make sense until I remembered that justice is blind, meaning that justice does not 'see' skin color, financial status, social standing, political or religious affiliation, or any other personal defining characteristics not pertinent to the case at hand. Instead, justice focuses strictly on the facts brought forward and judges on the merits of the case thus presented. Sentencing is another matter where now it is sometimes, or always, acceptable to consider the individual's prior circumstances and any other input that could alter the usual sentence in the name of justice.


Justice is no longer blind.
Justice grew a set of peepers during the '#metoo' movement that destroyed so many lives on the basis of public opinion alone.

Covid caused justice to look the other way, the vax made justice do a double-take, and the elections found justice with 20-20 vision!

What happens when justice looks the defendant up and down?
No more judicial process, no more impartial hearings, no more standing for those who have been wronged.


'White Supremacy', as a slogan, is racist. To begin a movement based on that premise requires the movement to be racist. Any use of skin color as an argument for a specific character trait is by definition racist.
When a government website discusses issues relevant to POC (persons of color, meaning every color but white) - that is the epitome of racism.


All of these issues reduce to the fact that justice is no longer blind, because if it were many of these movements, wars, and corrupted handling of critical cases would never have been tolerated.


That brings me back to what bothers me so much. Not just the war - that is just the proverbial stick that broke the camel's back.

What is bothering me is the continuous onslaught against justice. Because what is justice, really? Isn't it just a mixture of common sense and fairness?

Can justice be racist without compromise?


Is justice just an idea?
Or is justice not even the issue?


Maybe it's the 'systemic corruption' rampant in all our institutions that has performed radical eye surgery on our justice system...

[Miller]

Not sure what you're getting at Ernie; The very one-sided "war" is ongoing and unlikely to stop unless Israel calls a ceasefire. There's still much conjecture, lies and propaganda surrounding all issues without any real confirmed evidence, apart from innocent civilians getting massacred in Gaza which we are witnessing daily with our own eyes. Justice for whom?

[Ernie Nemeth]

Justice for all of us.

We are having our minds raped. These atrocious acts of evil are a violence against everyone.

It is literally racism, no matter which side one takes. Hamas is the only non-race issue, predicated upon a racist attitude.


The justice is not dropping the ball on the real issues much closer to home. Far larger numbers of fellow citizens are being murdered and subjected to violence and racism. No one is raising the battle cry for them. They are far more important because they are us - we are next otherwise. But instead our hearts and minds are wrenched out of its rightful focus and delivered to an area half a world away.

We are just as vulnerable and in just as much danger.

The justice is for us. Because only then can we help them.

[Miller]

I agree with what you say Ernie and if I'm on any side then it's the side of innocent civilians and children. That nobody in charge/with any influence is taking any notice of the vast majority of the public shows that there's no justice for any of us, that we're all really regarded as collateral damage by our leaders. The collective effect of it all is catastrophic, and justice, if there is any, will be a long time coming I fear.