The America you grew up in was during a brief window of time in which we thought we were doing a lot better against racism and bigotry than we actually were.
I blame some of my previous naivete about racism in law enforcement on this window. Growing up in the '80s and early '90s, what I learned in school is that racism was something that used to happen. It was a silly idea that was never based on anything, we as a society all agreed it was wrong, and the people who used to believe such things now realized they were wrong. How can the cops possibly be treating blacks unfairly when surely they realize, like any rational person would, that we’re all equal?
Turns out that it never went away - it just stopped being socially acceptable to be open about it, and the election of a biracial president followed by the election of an open bigot emboldened those people to start saying the quiet part loud.
Yep, this exactly.
In the 80s there were still overt racists, but they tended to be socially marginalized. Movies always depicted the Nazis as the bad guys. Maybe if we’d kept that up a bit longer, forcing these attitudes to hide, we could have eventually stopped them, but as you say, the Obama Derangement Syndrome gave them a whole new, public, life. We’re not quite as bad as the sixties and earlier, because at least some of the population internalized the message of racism being bad, but alas, not quite enough of the population.
Marge Greene has introduced a resolution to award Kyle Rittenhouse a Congressional Gold Medal.
The suspension of State’s Attorney Andrew Warren by Ron DeSantis is on trial, and DeSantis counsel Ryan Newman was asked to define “woke”, since that was what they were accusing Warren of. Newman said, “it would be the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them.”
I’m sure he’ll fit right in with…George fucking Washington.
On the one hand, he’s correct, but on the other hand, he thinks that having that belief is a bad thing.
Well right: he would be implying that those “systemic injustices” are fictional and so addressing them would amount to causing damage by fixing a thing that is not broken. Or at least depicting that as his client’s position.
Rittenhouse isn’t a murderer. He wasn’t convicted, and many believe he was acting in self defense.
Many people think Nazis were good people.
Many people are stupid fucking morons.
5 posts were split to a new topic: Hercules and gospel truth
(Bolding mine).
Jesus, she’s not even a member of his nuclear family, and she’s trying that. What a stuck-up prissy princess.
When I was working at Blockbuster in 2009, I had the displeasure of serving under an assistant manager named Jae, a thoroughly horrible person to be around. Incidentally, she was Black, and I’m White.
One day, she got into a disagreement with a White customer, in which she was 100% in the right. The customer sneered and said, “Just because one of your people is president now–”
And I spoke up. “You can cut that shit out, right now.” Disagree with the person, yes. I won’t rush to Jae’s defense, of all people. But you do NOT bring race into it.
(Sorry for the multiple posts in a row.)
Rittenhouse didn’t belong there. He spoke earlier, on camera, about his desire to go and shoot up some protestors (a piece of evidence which, incidentally, never made it in front of the jury, because the judge was biased), left the state, put himself in a position where he’d have to use his gun in self-defense, and killed people, and I don’t care if he was convicted or not, he’s a murderer. O.J. Simpson wasn’t convicted, either, and he’s also a murderer. But O.J. didn’t have the plausible deniability of self-defense.
Technically true. But he’s an idiot whose extremely poor choices, unjustifiably supported by local law enforcement, led to him being in the situation where he killed a man. What else did he plan to do with the gun he was carrying?
There’s nothing remotely laudatory about him. He may not be a criminal but at best he’s pitiable; at worst, despicable.
About that sheriff … I don’t want to go deep enough into Freedumb’s Facebook page to find it but Google says this is on there somewhere: “Re-Elect Sheriff Ronnie Fields 2022”. 
This is the fundamental problem with a lot of the debates about guns and their use in the US. There’s an awful lot of people who don’t seem to see any problem with people who “put himself in a position where he’d have to use his gun in self-defense”, and then use their guns.
“Hey, he had a legal right to put himself in a position where he’d have to use his gun in self-defense! There’s nothing wrong with that!”
Some people just really want to have the right to be an asshole, even if that puts themselves and others at risk.
I’m always reminded of the scene in Pulp Fiction where Vincent is telling Lance that someone keyed his car. He says “Boy, I wish I could’ve caught him doing it. I’d have given anything to catch that asshole doing it. It’d been worth him doing it just so I could’ve caught him doing it.”
When you’d rather hurt someone for doing something than avoid the need for it in the first place, you’re the asshole.
Butch (Bruce Willis) keyed the car.