Yeah, it’s a reference to Indian (as in Asian) assassins. No racial context to do with black people, though.
This marginalizing of words is getting ridiculous. “Thug” cannot be used to refer to blacks (except if you’re Obama I guess) because it’s racist. “Polarizing, calculating, disingenuous, insincere, ambitious, inevitable, entitled, over confident, secretive, out of touch” cannot be used when describing Hillary Clinton (and I guess women in general) because it’s sexist. What’s next?
Well, the original skinheads were Jamaicans (blacks). For some reason, when I hear “thug”, I do not normally hear a racial overtone, but it depends on who is saying it.
My goal is to show you what the man really thought rather than the crystallized, pop-culture notion of the man. What y’all do with that information is, frankly, up to y’alls.
(Yes, yes I’m rewatching The Wire, why do you ask ?)
My secondary goal is to vent some minor personal frustration with middle class white guys whitesplaining (I’m coining that BTW, bitches) MLK to po’ black folk who don’t know no better. Hence the .gif.
But mostly it’s historian gonna history.
And I struggle to find words to describe Terr that are more accurate than “braindead asswipe”.
Riots are basically temper tantrums. They achieve little and they solve nothing.
And on the subject of “stop resisting”…
It’s the constant assumption that the only possible meaning of a statement is the one the listener contrives to be the worst possible meaning, regardless of context or likelihood, that is wearying. “Thug” is no more racist than “hooligan”, despite the origin of the word being an attack on certain Irish people.
When people care more about the word used to describe someone’s bad actions than those actions and their effect, it’s a clear sign that they’ve lost the argument. Same with crying “racism” at every point, as though that’s relevant to whether or not something is right. For example, it’s a crime to murder someone even if you don’t care about their race. It’s not a crime to kill someone in self defence, even if having killed that person you’re glad another <insert racial term of choice here> is dead.
I’d disagree with that, quite strongly. Apartheid was order, the Ancien Régime was all about order. Apartheid South Africa, Saddam’s Iraq, British India, French Indochina, and, yes, Nazi Germany were by all accounts, extremely orderly places.
How you’d get from those coercive, orderly but thoroughly unjust states to orderly justice *without *throwing these previous “orders” into disarray in the process, I’ll let you tell me.
Reminds me of the Russian joke about a guy who was arrested for saying “Leonid is a moron”. When interrogated, he claimed that he was talking about his friend Leonid. “Don’t lie” said the interrogator, “we know very well when you said “moron” you could only have been referring to Comrade Brezhnev!”
Yeah, there’s far too strong a tendency to thought police people here… And I guess they don’t see the joke.
People only see what they want to see. For example
Ain’t that a hoot?
One could ponder if there was organized violence, a declaration, and only then oppressed people started shooting and killing their oppressors, then it would be OK.
All successful states are orderly places. You don’t bring about peace and high quality of life via a state of affairs where the government has no ability to control the population, people can ignore whatever law they like without consequences, and looting, arson, and lynch mobs are acceptable reactions to someone doing something you don’t like.
It’s interesting how from August to now, we’ve gone from denying that rioting is occurring (it’s just some outside agitators causing trouble, the media is exaggerating it, the police are causing all the trouble by being militaristic) to insisting that rioting is good and necessary for justice to occur.
I, personally, think they’re doing it all wrong. I’d be heading to the affluent neighborhoods where people actually have the clout to affect policy. Get those people nervous and then you’ll see change.
Well, as I asked Steophan, I’d like you to please explain to me how a subjugated population is supposed to go peacefully and well-orderly from a state of orderly, coercive, systematic injustice to a state of orderly justice (whatever one may mean by that) without inciting disorder somewhere along the line ; or to provide historical examples of that happening anywhere, at any point.
BTW, I’m not saying the current rioting in Baltimore is constructive, or conducive to such social changes ; but since you guys seem to have taken the absolutist position that *no *deliberate disorder is justifiable ever…
ETA : that was in response to **Smapti **obviously.
Perhaps if the “change” you’re looking for is “riot cops are now allowed to use live ammo”…
What does that have to do with present day, democratic countries? Even if it’s justified in the case of overthrowing tyranny (which wasn’t the case in the American Revolution, it was simply a change in which group of wealthy landowners called the shots), that has nothing to do with anything happening in the present day in the US.
It’s pluralistic, smapti.
You don’t get it. It ain’t about one guy, it’s about police departments that have been brutalizing individual blacks and systematically oppressing black communities for decades now. That does justify counterviolence.
No, it’s not. There is no “systematic brutalizing of blacks and black communities” happening here. That’s a fantasy put forward by race-baiters and by people who find it easier to blame The Man for everything that’s wrong in their lives instead of looking at their own actions.
Blacks in the British Empire became emancipated without violence. India gained its independence without violence. Gays in this country have, by and large, gained equality without violence. Violence is not inherently necessary to bring about social change, and more often than not it is counterproductive.
It isn’t.