I get what he’s going for, but we are not all Muslim. That’s not the point. The point is that it doesn’t matter. The point is that we’re all human, and as such, have certain rights that all civilized governments respect. I’m no more Muslim than I am Zoroastrian, but that doesn’t prevent me from treating Muslims and Zoroastrians and everyone else as individuals. I don’t need to see myself as Islamic or anything else in order to do that.
Equality isn’t about applying every label to yourself. That’s presumptive and, to the extent it’s taken seriously, it renders the labels meaningless. Equality is about seeing past labels to whatever facets of the individual actually matter in a given context. And, and I mean this in the nicest way possible, Islam usually doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter in immigration, it usually doesn’t matter in the workplace, and so on. It’s evidence of a complete lack of understanding of conditional probability to try and use it as a proxy for terroristic leanings. Equality is focusing on what matters.
Cursor down on this page to see a map that accurately reflects political leanings across the USA.
The Electoral College grouping of Red States vs Blue States is relevant to the Presidential election but simplistic when considering real voting patterns. Look at all those Dark Blue cities, surrounded by Angry Red suburbs. Our Border counties are Light Blue–reflecting the sparse population & mostly Tejano population. Also note the Blue Swath through the Deep South–that’s the Black Belt, left over from slavery days. Do the Northern Secession Advocates* really* want to abandon the Democrats with darker skin? And all the Urban Southerners of whatever color? (We’ve got some nutso Texans but Secessionists are a very tiny fringe group.)
(I left off your whimsical link. But even a blind pig (not you) can find an occasional acorn.)
I took his statement in the spirit of ‘I Am Charlie Hebdo’ or the story of King Christian X of Denmark promising to wear a Yellow Star if the Jews of Denmark were forced to do so.
[QUOTE=Martin Niemöller]
When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.
When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.
When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.
When they came for the Jews,
I remained silent;
I wasn’t a Jew.
When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.
[/QUOTE]
Wyoming is definitely not part of the Bible-belt. While there are many True Believers here, the nearly libertarian individualist spirit makes it not nearly as in-your-face as it is in the South. Frothing-at-the-mouth anti-Islamic bigotry isn’t hard to find, but I am not assaulted daily by messages that Jesus is my true and only savior. It’s not an easy place to harbor even remotely liberal social values, but thankfully a fairly easy place to be an atheist.
Nothing strange about that except that Putin is even more ruthless than I had thought. If, hypothetically, the US were to elect as its president a completely incompetent blowhard, who benefits? If the US were to elect as its president a comical orange-maned marmoset who it made it the laughingstock of the world, who benefits?
I can just imagine the scene in the Kremlin. “I told them Trump was obviously brilliant and talented,” says Putin, almost falling out of his chair with laughter.
“But then you said, only the wise American voters can make the final decision about this most excellent man,” one of his aides reminds him, at which point Putin actually does fall out of his chair, rolling on the floor with laughter and kicking his little legs.
Is Putin so different, with his barechested horseback pics and so on? I mean, Trump is way savvier, more of a business success, etc., than Dubya f’rinstance…
Putin is similar in his macho aspects, and he’s also similar in appealing to nationalism for his own purposes, in his case to promote an imperialist agenda harking back to the glory days of the USSR – his motto might as well be “Make Russia great again”. But there the similarities end. He differs from Trump in being a political master strategist both at home and internationally, instead of an embarrassing buffoon. One might picture Putin as the archetypical evil villain stroking a white cat, but it’s hard to picture Trump as anything other than an orange monkey shrieking in the background and throwing feces.
As for Dubya, my dog is savvier than Dubya. Trump is a lot like Sarah Palin – really dumb when it comes to processing ideas, but with an instinctive fox-like cunning when it comes to self-promotion. Dubya didn’t even have that much, but it doesn’t equate to intelligence.
Trump is cringe-inducingly insecure and gauche, but he strikes me as far more intelligent and knowledgeable than Palin. He started as a garden variety millionaire, made himself a billionaire, then maintained and grew a celebrity status for decades. And he did graduate from an Ivy, while Palin bounced around at some third-rate colleges.
Depending on how you calculate Trump’s net worth, This is probably not the case. If you accept Forbes’ valuation of his net worth and not his own, the net effect of decades of Trump’s business ventures is to make himself about half as rich as he would have been if he’d handed his cash to a private wealth manager and taken up underwater basket-weaving.
[QUOTE=Forbes]
However, the article also shows that if Trump had merely invested that $500 million in the S&P 500 (500 of the largest companies in the US), he would have averaged an 11.86% annual return and ended up with $20 billion.
[/QUOTE]
… or even more if you include earned revenue from underwater basket weaving.
I guess most of the S&P 500 had the advantage that they didn’t have to endure a string of bankruptcies.
So I suppose this means that the average S&P 500 executive – basically a crowd of venial dumbasses who regularly get kicked out the door on golden parachutes – is about five times smarter than The Donald in the one and only area in which The Donald claims expertise.
He’s taking the wrong message from the poem you quoted, even so: The point of the poem isn’t that we should self-apply every label, it’s that we shouldn’t need people to be wearing any label at all in order to empathize with them.
