Shodan: **Tom **asked for a cite that people had been forced to live together in communities of mixed race when they really didn’t want to do so. You came along and said you couldn’t give a cite for that, but had a cite for something else. IOW, you got nothing in relation to the topic that had been under discussion. Any of us can come along with a cite for something that no one asked for in the first place. At best, that is moving the goal posts.
**LP **didn’t make some vague statement about “integration”, but a specific statement about a specific form of integration, and that statement was factually incorrect. Everyone knows about forced busing, so you brought absolutely nothing to the debate except an attempt to change the subject.
The topic was integration. Contrary to what tomndebb (and LP) state, integration does not refer to people being forced to live together in the same neighborhoods. It refers to things like forced busing. Hence the cites. If you want to talk about integration at all, you can’t use tomndebb’s strawman definitions - they are wrong, and meaningless. He himself says that integration has never meant people being forced to live somewhere (unless you want to define “white flight” in that way).
You can’t just dismiss the problems of integration by saying, well, we are going to use the term in a way no one ever does. “No one is forced to move; therefore there are no problems”? Please. That’s just trying to define the problem away.
Indeed - I thought Swiftboating a candidate with ad hominem attacks was soooo 2004.
Obama flatly denounced Wright’s comments. He further was not even present when they were uttered. He further denounced the comments over a year ago. What else do you want? Obama should bow out now? Or would hari-kiri be more appropriate?
McCain sought the advice and sponsorship of Hagee; he only disavowed Hagee’s comments when forced to and that but recently; he is also a lifelong Episcopalian but changed his denomination to Southern Baptist in the last 2 years. McCain is nothing but a religious opportunist, and whilst he won’t ever have a ‘Wright’ problem as he changes his religion to suit his political necessities his party is rife with even worse specimens of humanity than Wright who get a pass because they’re part of one of the “mainstream approved religions” ™ (i.e. Southern Baptist) of the Religious Wing of the Republican Party.
But that’s not the point and you know it - Hagee is the latest in a string of radical Christians who have been embraced and embedded into the Conservative movement in America - Falwell and Robertson are both prime examples of this, and Conservatives kissed both of their rings for generations. Are you actually trying to deny this?
That works as well as my more traditional imagery, showing the Falwell and Robertson with huge gold rings sitting in huge gold thrones having the rich and powerful on bended knee, though, so whatever blows your hair back I guess.
The specific part of Wright’s diatribe regarding America’s roles in the events surrounding 9/11 is honest, reasoned dissent. One that has been made by plenty of people on both sides of the political aisle. That is the speech that most have deemed “anti-American”. While the idea was put forth bombastically, it doesn’t mean the sentiment being expressed isn’t a fair critique.
Nonsense. First, you are ignoring the context. As mentioned here :
It is not intellectually honest to say he called on God to damn America. Doing so ignores the context and obvious intent. And yes, of course, lies are not honest.
No, you are claiming it says something it does not say. Not to mention the whole point was that minorities have been used as guinea pigs for medical experiments (in this case, wrt BC). Do you doubt this has ever happened, or do you just not like the random example I picked? But, let me defend the cite a tiny bit. First, the author states this is experimental because there (AFAIK) no animal testing done.
Yes, as your cites detail, the procedure has proven to be rather safe. Even though your won sites admit that the “risk of low birth weight, preterm delivery, or mid-trimester spontaneous abortion in a pregnancy following… a vacuum aspiration abortion… is not significantly higher than the risk of adverse outcomes of a first pregnancy carried to term”. I cannot view exactly how they define “significant”. It also states no definite conclusions can be drawn about having multiple abortions. The author in my cite, rightly or wrongly, feels that the fact that the safety of this procedure was discovered preforming it on people (a disproportionate amount of whom are minorities) rather than animals, is abhorrent. I’ve seen nothing to suggest that this part is factually inaccurate. Yes, there is a good outcome here, but it could have been different. If you have some cite stating that the procedure was proved to be safe prior to being performed on people, I would be happy to see it. Or even more germane to the point, if you would like to posit that Blacks have not been used as medical guinea pigs, I would love to hear you defend that position. I don’t want to get into a debate about abortion safety or a parsing of the language in what amounts to basically a throwaway site.
Again, you miss the point. If I told you a fantastic story, what exactly is it within you, within our relationship, within the context, subtext, and details that determines whether you believe me? If I told you a story about a virgin birth, a Texas-sized asteroid coming to destroy Earth, or the Y2K bug, what determines whether or not you believe? One’s cynicism, rationality, fragility, and trustfulness are built over time and are subject to a multitude of things. Focusing on the factual inaccuracy of Wright’s beliefs is a small part of it. What you should be focusing on is why Black people are eating it up. Why does he believe it? What is it that makes this message stick? Obviously some of the believers will fall into the “Nigerian-scam” contingent; those who will believe almost anything if it is sold by a confidence-inspiring charlatan. But many others are otherwise rational, intelligent people. They believe because it falls into an overall narrative we’ve created that which functions as a distortive lens through which we view things. If this country didn’t have a history of racism, it’s harder to sell he newest iteration of it. If the government didn’t have a history of secrecy and subterfuge, it’s harder to swallow the latest story of such things. It also easy to gin up these things in people who are fundamental broken. What we need to focus on is why/how these people are broken, and how to collectively divorce ourselves from this narrative which prevents up from seeing the dynamism of the situation.
[QUOTE=Shodan]
And Obama sat there for twenty years and drank it all in. Now he wants to claim that he never knew anything about what his mentor was preaching.
[QUOTE]
Cite? Show me any evidence of anything as controversial as what has come out being said while Obama was in attendance. Any evidence that Obama “drank it in”? Give me any evidence he espouses any of the beliefs Wright has publicly spoken about.
I’m not, nor have I ever, argued that this AIDS is being “used” to kill Black people. All I was trying to do was to get you to understand why people believe these things. You can dismiss them as ignorant if you’d like, but I’d rather people understand where they are coming from in order to prevent further miscommunication and miseducation.
Do you honestly think I was suggesting there is a “cure” for HIV?
You are being dishonest here. There is a great difference in medical trials given with the consent of the patient and the utmost care for their safety and concern, and what went on in things like the Tuskeegee experiment. Secondly, my point wrt to insurance companies is that they often consider cutting edge (read: expensive) procedures to be “experimental” when they are not. That’s why “experimental” was in quotes.
OK. Since you don’t really get it. Let’s play this out on your terms. What is to be done about people like Wright? How are we, as rational people, supposed to respond? Should we condemn it, and hope it goes away? Why do you think he, and others believe these things?
The post you responded to was not about “integration”, but about people being forced to live where they don’t want to live. I don’t see that **LP **necessarily defined integration that way, but merely pointed out that form of integration as if it were actual policy, when it is not.
Who said that? Your quote isn’t even a good paraphrase. In fact, **Tom **responded to your goal post moving cites by explicitly acknowledging the bad policy that consisted of forced busing. In addition to moving the goalposts, you are now arguing against a strawman position.
Waitaminnit – What “problems of integration”? So far in this thread, only LonesomePolecat has even hinted there are any; and he hasn’t really spelled out what he’s talking about. Nor have you.
Are you referring mainly to America’s ongoing support for Israel? That seems to be the primary area of our intervention, before 9/11. Of course there was Gulf War I, but there was widespread support for that action in and out of the middle east.
Isreal is only the smallest part of the picture. Lots of dislike among the more radical elements of Wahabism for US Soldiers setting foot on holy ground in Saudi, which was Osama’s actual justification for 9-11.
The beefs many Arabs have against US intervention in the ME go back a lot further, of course - we took down Mossadegh to keep Iran safe for British Petroleum and bye the bye helped the Shah of Iran set up the most hated and reviled secret police in the region, sold guns to Saddam to kill the Ayatollah’s boys and sold guns to the Ayatollah to kill Saddam’s boys, and propped up the House of Saud (who aren’t really all that liked by a lot of Saudis or Arabs) for lots of years with tanks and guns.
Not saying we’re as bad as Osama says, but we’re quite easily cast into the roll of bad guy in black hat for a mostly ignorant populace who read nothing but the Q’uran.
The support of the Saudi government, and the stationing of troops in that country had to be as much of an issue as the I/P conflict. Also, our support for the Egyptian government. Both of those governments are considered illegitimate by al Qaeda, and remember that organization was founded primarily by Saudis (like ObL) and Egyptians (like Zawahiri).
I recall what you say about OJ. it was very interesting to see that. I agree that we need to look at all the dynamics. Obama’s speech today really drove that home.
Though, it seems like we’ve been outvoted about the topic of this thread. It has been successfully hijacked.
While, as you say, it is an “easy step” to think that anything which is not accidental is the fault of powerful people, it is also a very foolish step. And unfortunately, to return to the OP, it is not an uncommon step for African-Americans (and other folks as well) to take.
I understand the desire to believe that it’s all something cooked up by evil overlords, but that’s not the case. For whatever twisted and all-too-human reasons, racism has existed since the dawn of man. We’ve always hated the “other” folks, however we might define “other” at any instant.
Racism is a problem of the people themselves, not something imposed from above by powerful people. I live where I do (Solomon Islands) in part because I despise racism, and the US (for all of the progress made in my lifetime, from the Civil Rights movement on) is still a racist country. Here, the color of the people in the office I work in ranges from very, very black to dark brown to light brown to white, and nobody gives a sh*t about people’s color. It’s not paradise, there’s still lots of problems, but as far as racism goes it’s a decided step above the US.
Indeed it is, to assume that anything is; but not to suspect that some things may be. E.g., the Southern “Bourbon aristocracy” did not create racism in the South, but they did, between the Civil War and the civil rights movement, take full advantage of it whenever they could to pit the white poor against the black, hold down wages, and forestall the emergence of any unified labor movement; it’s not implausible that their particular interest in segregation, and their being the kind of people who were in a position to determine public policy, effectively preserved the system longer than it otherwise would have survived.
In general, people in power will take advantage of any way to maintain and extend their power. But let’s suppose the Bourbon Aristocrats tried to do it on the basis of, say, hair color rather than skin color. They would have failed miserably. Why?
Because all that they are doing is playing off of the hostility and racism and suspicion of their constituency. They take advantage of the problem, they exacerbate the problem, but they are not the cause of the problem. The problem is the hostility and racism and suspicion which, unfortunately, is far too common even in 2008.
Thus, it is foolish to think that the racism is the fault of the Bourbon Aristocracy. They could have been wiped out entirely, but the underlying racism would have gone merrily on.
It was Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” which has brought us to this situation-by enshrining racial differences, it made the hatreds and suspicions (exhibited by the Rev. Wright) possible to flourish. By keeping the countless government “programs” (intended to alleviate segregation)-like school busing, quotas, affirmative action alive, it has fostered these attitudes.
The late Barry Goldwater was right-the Great Society has borne poisonous fruit.
If a character like Rev. Wright spews out lies and falsehoods, how does that benefit anyone? His flock-who now believe that they are not to blame for anything that happens to them? I guess I thought that Obama was a man of some character-but after listening to this jackass (Rev. Wright-and his enthusiastic applause), i am having second thoughts.
