Muslim pleading with me to stop hurting people with cartoons then threatens me, calls me a wimp, insinuates that I fuck other mens wives and am on drugs, and quits facebook…
Remember, this guy contacted me, after purposefully looking for offensive images.
I got the following e-mail on facebook, from someone I don’t know, regarding my dumb Mohammed cartoon.
When you attack black people,they call it Racism. When you attack Jewish people,they call it Anti-semetism. When you attack women, they call it Sexism. When you attack homosexuality,they call it Intolerance. When you attack your country,they call it Treason. When you attack a religious sect,they callit Hate speech. But when you attack the Prophet Peace Be Upon Him,they want to call it freedom of speech.
why do you feel you HAVE to join in a effort JUST to hurt muslims? Could you not draw animal porn or something less disturbing and hurtfull? Must you really go to this effort to make my day all horrible? I don’t even know you, why are you doing this? Did I do some mistake, I cried myself to sleep thinking about Muhammad. You take lots of liberties, hurting millions of people, and you probably don’t even care… You probably think I deserve it for some reason… Just so you can have the freedom to do this more!!
Hope you had your fun, altho I can not see what kind of fun that would make me do this to other people, I can’t see how you are other than wicked.
So I replied:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/mar/24/marie-mason-speaks-from-jail
At about 9pm on New Year’s Eve 1999, the couple entered an office in the Institute of International Agriculture at Michigan State University and doused it with petrol.
The arson, by Mason’s own account, was botched. A fireball set her hair on fire, forcing the couple to run before she even managed to write her slogan, “No GMO”.
The next day, the pair set fire to a logging camp. She has also admitted to burning boats belonging to the owner of a mink farm.
When asked whether the fires might have terrified staff and students at the university, she said: “It was intended as an enlightenment moment that people would see what is going on beneath the surface.”
Atheists and skeptics (some of them) have been having fun with the annual “War on Christmas”. I can understand the delight in attacking such a mainstream tradition, but personally I participate in the holiday using the name Christmas. I don’t say “Yule” or some other stand-in verbiage when I’m referring to the traditions that my family has celebrated all my life. I was raised in a secular home. We did not invoke the name of Jesus, and the angel tree-topper represented as real a creature to me as Santa Claus and his magical reindeer. It was a fun time of the year to spend with family, get presents, and eat seasonal foods. Above the average atheist or skeptic, I consider myself anti-Christian. Santa isn’t in the bible. Reindeer aren’t in the bible. Christmas isn’t in the bible. Readers of this blog are probably aware of the pagan roots of the holiday, and that’s nice – but that’s not why I “do” Christmas either. I’m not an ancient pagan. I don’t have kids, and if I did I may possibly consider using a different name for the holiday, so they can carry on the harmless traditions using a non-Christian name. But I don’t, and I’m not fooling myself, so it doesn’t matter what I call it.
Kwanzaa would certainly NOT be the name I used, if I called it something else. Kwanzaa is the invention of a racist, Black Nationalist turned Marxist criminal. Why any president has mentioned it in their addresses is beyond me, why there are commercials mentioning it and products in mainstream stores for it is appalling, that a postal stamp was made for it should be a national disgrace. Kwanzaa was born out of a hatred for America and whites – this is not hyperbole, it’s clear. More than that, the founder Ron Karenga has spent time in jail for torturing two black women in unspeakable ways. Okay, that was hyperbole – one can speak of the ways he did it:
“Deborah Jones, who once was given the title of an African queen, said she and Gail Davis were whipped with an electrical cord and beaten with a karate baton after being ordered to remove their clothes. She testified that a hot soldering iron was placed in Miss Davis’ mouth and placed against Miss Davis’ face and that one of her own big toes was tightened in a vise. Karenga, head of US, also put detergent and running hoses in their mouths, she said”
Kwanzaa claims it is not a religious holiday, and Ron Karenga, (aka Maulana Karenga, born Ronald McKinley Everett) has claimed it is a Secular Humanist holiday. I do not disagree entirely. It’s not JUST Secular Humanism, it’s also ethnocentrism/ethnonationalism. These latter two are not part of Secular Humanist philosophy and are easily argued to run counter to the worldview. I can’t see Michael Shermer or Daniel Dennet being amenable to the tenets of Kwanzaa or supportive of it’s founder, but I haven’t read anything by them on the subject (if you know of any comments by prominent Secular Humanists in regard to Kwanzaa – point me to them).
Maybe you’ve seen information on the origins of Kwanzaa before, the 7 principals are found all over the place. Every single one of them is about collectivism in some form or another. It is clear that Kwanzaa, as a non-religious holiday is explicitly about racial collectivism. Now, if you’re a radical black separatist, or a racial separatist of any stripe, you should encourage Kwanzaa. If you are an egoist and meritocrat, Kwanzaa represents a good deal of what is vile in the world.
Christmas, as most celebrate it in America, is barely about collectivism or the divinity of Christ anymore. This is not to say that Christianity isn’t collectivist, it certainly is, but the holiday has largely parted ways with the religion, much like the word xerox becoming independent of the company that owns the name. There are enough secular carols and movies and ornaments that one could have a blowout Hoarders rivaling decorating binge without once evoking the rotting corpse of the chump from Nazarene. Yes, you do mention his name in the word Christmas, and that is unfortunate, but for all the blinking lights, presents, fruitcake (yes, I’m one of the perverted, disturbed ones who love to eat fruitcake), and fat men in red suits, saying a dead gods name every once in a while is no skin off my back. I still say “goddamn” and “Jesus Fucking Christ” when stub my toe or twist my ankle. I assure you, neither one of those epithets has any supernatural meaning to them.
Now one may argue that Kwanzaa is celebrated by blacks in America in the same fashion – parroting the words but essentially using it as an excuse to sing and dance, eat good food, exchange gifts and spend time with family. This may be the case, in many instances, but the key difference in my eyes is that Christmas is a culturally universal holiday for Americans who have been here for any number of generations and does not explicitly entail reciting pledges of black enthonationalism and communism.
Two of Ron Karenga’s peers in his United Slaves group (a rival of the Black Panthers) put together a collection of quotes from Ron Karenga appropriately titled “The Quotable Karenga”.
The introduction by contains the following lines. I have not pulled them out of context, they are direct statements of belief and the context supports the claims.
- There is no such thing as individualism, we’re all Black.
- Values are not abstract. Values are superior to reason.
- Cultural background transcends education.
- If we could get a nigger to see how worthless, unimportant, ignorant and weak he is by himself, then we will have made a contribution.
- I reject individualism for I am of all Black men.
- U(nited)S(laves) organization seeks to create a superior people.
- The fact that we are Black is our ultimate reality.
- Thinking Black is thinking collective minded. You must put the Nation first and yourself last.
- The Seven-fold path of the Blackness is to Think Black, Talk Black, Act Black, Create Black, Buy Black, Vote Black, and Live Black.
Wikipedia states that the first Kwanzaa took place in December of 1967, the same year as the booklet quoted above. I think comparing the “Seven-fold Path” above to the “Seven Principals of Kwanzaa” is fair, as they were both formulated by the same man, at the same time:
* Umoja (Unity) To strive for and to maintain unity in the family, community, nation and race.
* Kujichagulia (Self-Determination) To define ourselves, name ourselves, create for ourselves and speak for ourselves.
* Ujima (Collective Work and Responsibility) To build and maintain our community together and make our brothers’ and sisters’ problems our problems and to solve them together.
* Ujamaa (Cooperative Economics) To build and maintain our own stores, shops and other businesses and to profit from them together.
* Nia (Purpose) To make our collective vocation the building and developing of our community in order to restore our people to their traditional greatness.
* Kuumba (Creativity) To do always as much as we can, in the way we can, in order to leave our community more beautiful and beneficial than we inherited it.
* Imani (Faith) To believe with all our heart in our people, our parents, our teachers, our leaders and the righteousness and victory of our struggle.
One article on the sordid history of Kwanzaa quotes Karenga from a 1978 Washington Post article:
“People think it’s African, but it’s not,” he said about his holiday in an interview quoted in the Washington Post. “I came up with Kwanzaa because black people in this country wouldn’t celebrate it if they knew it was American. Also, I put it around Christmas because I knew that’s when a lot of bloods would be partying.”
That Karenga used an East African language (Swahili) for his holiday when African Americans are largely from West Africa is also pointed out in the same article. It makes no sense. As a fabricated holiday that is supposedly celebrated by millions (estimates put it between 1-3 mil.) of blacks in America, it is less structurally sound than the constructed language of Klingon.
In 1967, when “The Quotable Karenga” was published, there was an increasing hostility between black revolutionary groups. The United Slaves had a heated rivalry with the Black Panthers, and where there was money and influence to be had, there was bitter hostility. The Black Studies Center at UCLA was being founded and US was fighting with BP over who would control it. It wasn’t good enough that Blacks had a department, of course, it had to be “OUR Blacks”. They started carrying guns on campus, not to defend themselves from white devils, but to intimidate one another. They were carrying the street violence onto the University Campus, a natural extension of the violent racist collectivism espoused by the Black Power Movement of the time.
This, of course, came to a head when two of Karenga’s United Slaves shot and killed two leaders of the LA Black Panthers (Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter and John Huggins) in a hallway of the Campbell Hall building on January 17, 1969… yes, the one that 30-50 UCLA students recently “occupied” to protest tuition hikes. They proclaimed that the bankrupt state raising tuition was racist. “You see regents, I see racists.” was one rallying cry from the mobs of student protesters. It might be interesting to note that the two US members imprisoned for the murders of rival black “activists” escaped from prison a few years later.
Karenga’s Kwanzaa works on a racist assumption that communalism is an inherently black way of life, but Karenga is hardly to be credited with the widespread promotion of this awful fabrication. That blame lies on the heads of do-gooders – the folks who know what’s better for everyone else, whether you like it or not. That blacks as a group vote for one party 85-95% of the time, it shows a lack of diversity of political opinion, and admittedly doesn’t do much to dispel Karenga’s proposition..
The heavy promotion of Kwanzaa is ultimately a condescending move toward American blacks by liberal white Americans. As a racial minority of 12% of the population, blacks are capable of passing no laws on the national scene without the support of whites. At such a fraction, it is only in pockets of racially gerrymandered voting districts and the rare black majority city such as Baltimore or Detroit that they have a real collective political power.
It is my contention that, at least since the 1960′s, a growing portion of whites (mostly liberals) have been concerned not with encouraging American blacks and minorities in general to further integrate with American culture, but with the belief that blacks have a culture separate to that of whites, and that encouraging our differences will make for a more prosperous black community. Multiculturalism and diversity is stressed above a united community. When there is a failure, such as with the black/white academic gap, it’s attributed to whites inability to understand that blacks have special needs and have a unique experience that we cannot comprehend.
This is the paternalism of the current state of racial relations. It is the media organizations and leftist cultural tastemakers desperate to be “inclusive” and “multicultural” that have promoted a racist and Marxist holiday to a people that are largely uninterested in it. In the misguided belief that black authenticity can only be found in expressions of ethnic exclusivity. They view the Christian religiosity of blacks in the same way as Karenga – as the evidence of oppression by whites, the imposition of a foreign religion through force on a once “noble savage” (see Pinker, “The Blank Slate”). White Americans, they believe, are born with blood on their hands, the new original sin that cannot be washed away is the “legacy of slavery”. Through slavery and “white supremacy” we have destroyed the souls of blacks by replacing their animism with a Middle Eastern religion that has been filtered through the lens of European civilization (that Christianity is equally as “foreign” to Europeans is not part of the equation).
That American blacks are more Christian by self-identification (85% compared to whites at 78%), doesn’t seem to dissuade whites from identifying Kwanzaa as the “black Christmas”, again, pure paternalism.
Those pushing this “more authentic” holiday tradition for blacks are merely pandering to radicals, and is sincere as the promotion of Santaria or Voodoo as “authenically black”. Though Christianity is the religion of slaves, it has been magically transmogrified by advocates of “social justice” into the religion of the slave-master.
I do not advocate that whites have been an unmitigated force of good in the world, primarily because I do not hold a collectivist view of the world. I do believe that American blacks with ancestry going back generations are not Africans, they are Americans, and sh0uld be treated as such. As a group, they reject Kwanzaa, and many are hostile to it. Again, blacks as a group are more Christian than whites, and pushing Kwanzaa because a few black radicals promote it as “authentically black” makes less sense than promoting Festivus as an “authentic” secular holiday.
The only other reason that the “cultural elites”, political leaders and media talking heads can have in promoting Kwanzaa, besides paternalism, is that they sincerely want to promote black radicalism, Marxism, and separatism. This may indeed be the “real” or “hidden motivation”, but one that can only be speculated upon. I believe that it this is true, in reality it is just for a small portion of whites pushing Kwanzaa. The rest are polishing good-guy badges, making overt gestures of how egalitarian they are. I guess it makes a better show of “inclusiveness” when those you’re including are more different than you are. Advocating Kwanzaa is divisive.
If one is a sincere advocate of racial “diversity”, Kwanzaa is antithetical to it. If you want black Americans to be “included” in American life, you don’t encourage their adopting a set of beliefs that separates them from other Americans. The more black Americans are made to feel and act differently from white Americans, the more tension, violence and antipathy there will be between the two. It was viewing blacks as soulless beasts that cannot feel pain that allowed many to enslave them or defend slavery as if they were merely beasts of the field.
Ultimately, as with my War against Christmas post. I am not advocating a war on Kwanzaa. I’m advocating that it’s ignored, as it should be. If you want to sincerely express your acceptance and compassion for blacks in America, wish them a Merry Christmas – that’s the holiday they celebrate, just like 95% of all Americans, believers or not. If you want to be safe, if you let your fear of offending a tiny minority guide your actions, say “Happy Holidays”. All “Happy Kwanzaa” says is “I see you as different from me, I want to accentuate that, whether you like it or not”.
‘To end, I leave you with a poem by another black power leader, Eldridge Cleaver. It was published in his jail-house memoirs “Soul on Ice” in 1970. I believe it paints a perfect picture of the intellectual milieu that Kwanzaa springs from.
To A White Girl
I love you
Because you’re white,
Not because you’re charming
Or bright.
Your whiteness
Is a silky thread
Snaking through my thoughts
In redhot patterns
Of lust and desire.I hate you
Because you’re white.
Your white meat
Is nightmare food.
White is
The skin of Evil.
You’re my Moby Dick,
White Witch,
Symbol of the rope and hanging tree,
Of the burning cross.
Loving you thus
And hating you so,
My heart is torn in two.
Crucified.
*I first read this poem in a paperback edition of the book, but found it online to save myself from transcribing it. Curiously the “i” in Dick was replaced with an asterisk, one can only assume the poster didn’t understand that in that context it doesn’t refer to a penis.
** Also, the first line of the next paragraph of “Soul on Ice” begins with the sentence “I became a rapist.” He continues to explain that he practiced by raping black women, only so that he could refine his skills in order to then rape white women as an act of insurrection. “It delighted me that I was defying and trampling on the white man’s law, upon his system of values, and that I was defiling his women…”
Moron at Huffington Post wants a) people to stop saying “Merry Christmas” to her and b) to inject more of other religions into the holiday season. In short, Christmas is oppressing her, but Kwanzaa would be enlightening.
I’m clearly not pro-Christian, but in many ways – NEITHER IS CHRISTMAS. In 2009, the American version of Santa Claus was a fuckin’ Coca-Cola advertising illustration, and the central identifying decoration – the decorated tree was a pagan holdover. In so many ways, the word “Christ” in Christmas is now like what happened with the much loved tree – it’s a holdover from Christianity.
The reason Christians need to put up banners on their houses that say “Jesus is the reason for the Season” is because most people HAVE forgotten, and good for all of us non-Christians they have.
Here’s my Christmas tree. It doesn’t have anything to do with the storybook character Jesus.
Here’s a little secret. There’s an angel on top… it’s the same one my mother had wanted to get rid of for ages but I wouldn’t allow her to. It was the one I remember putting at the top of the tree my whole life. Decorating the tree was always a big deal in my house. I remember my dad lifting me up when I was a tiny Kevin, and after my parents split, I would stand on a wobbly stool and perch her on top of the evergreen with my mom and my sister around. It always went on last. My sister ended up dying about 13 years ago, on my 21st birthday. Messy drunken one-car crash. I’d been a self-confirmed atheist for quite a few years at that point. I remember the first Christmas she wasn’t there, how emotional it was for my mother, how sad of a time it was. I didn’t invest that little angel tree-topper with any magical powers, but it was there every single year. The tree and that angel, like so many family traditions, bring back to mind good and bad times. I want all those memories to come back to me, and the new ones, too. Now I have a wife, and we bought our own tree, and we’ve put it up for the third year. The Christmas that my wife and I got married, my mom gave me that angel in a little box. I’m sure part of her was happy to get a more fashionable and up-to-date topper, but another part – the important meaningful one, was passing along that little package of memories, good and bad, of our family.
To me, that goddamn paper angel, with her tossled fake hair, over 30 years old – means more than 99% of anything else inanimate in the room when it sits atop our garish pink tree. I don’t talk to it, or bow to it, burn incense, light candles… it’s not supernatural, has no religious meaning. But it and my tree have strong, secular meaning.
If Abby caught a glimpse of my Christmas decor, my little aging angel, maybe she’d feel offended and oppressed – but my holiday isn’t about her, it’s about me and my family- she can go fuck herself.
Abby L. Ferber thinks is just awful – it’s like the Holocaust all over again, Christians planning pogroms with their reindeer death sleighs and doesn’t Santa coming down the chimney remind you of gas chambers!? Okay, she doesn’t actually mention the holocaust.
Sorry to be such a scrooge, but let me tell you about my day…
I woke up and turned on my favorite morning show. I learned new recipes for the favorite holiday drink–egg nog; tips on how to decorate for the holidays on a budget by trimming the mantel and staircase with wreaths, green swags, and small lights; followed by the best toys to buy for kids this holiday season.
I then read my local newspaper, which featured a big story about how the Colorado governor’s mansion has been decorated for the holidays, accompanied by a large photo of the Christmas tree. Every section in the newspaper featured Christmas-themed ads.
I then drove to work, flipping through the car radio dial to find music that was not Christmas-themed. I entered my office building, where a large Christmas tree sat in the lobby. Due to concerns raised a few years back about the heavy focus on Christmas, the tree has now been renamed “The Giving Tree.” It is decorated by ornaments made by children at the campus day care center, with requests for donations as a part of our annual Holiday Service Project. I wonder how Jewish, Muslim, and other non-Christian students feel each time they enter the building…
I would know – because I’m non-Christian and I hear/see all the same. What do I do? Ipod is better than radio, websites are better than newspapers, and Hulu, DVDs and .avi files are better than TV. I do like Egg Nog, but I don’t drink alcohol, so no booze in it. Should I be offended that they put booze in it because I don’t drink? Should I be offended that they’re donating to a charity I don’t support? Seems like renaming it a “Giving Tree”, they’re already “giving in” to complainers like Abby. What do Muslim students feel??? Really??? Probably the same as Christian students in a predominantly Muslim country with a Secular government – they feel out of place, because they’re a minority. Minorities will ALWAYS feel like they’re outside of the mainstream, because they ARE.
When I walk outside to the mailbox that evening, my neighbors’ homes twinkle with colorful Christmas lights and reindeers. I leaf through the day’s mail, which includes numerous ads such as the one from my local car dealer, offering special prices on oil changes for the holidays. The entire mailing is red and green, with images of red bows and candy canes.
What’s your fucking point? I bet the local car dealer has a “special deal” for any occasion they think will pull in enough extra customers to pay for the mailer and put a few extra bucks in the ol’ piggybank. If you’d come from some tribe in Africa, you’d be boggled that your neighbors don’t live in mud huts. What’s your fucking point!?
So you see, while it may not seem like a big deal that someone wishes me a “Merry Christmas,” and I genuinely appreciate the good will and cheer being offered, for non-Christians like myself, this time of year can be anything but merry (24% of the U.S. population of about 304 million do not define themselves as Christian).
So, what you’re saying is that you can’t be happy at the same time others are, if you can’t be happy for the same reason they’re being happy? What kind of miserable cur are you? Oh yeah, one that would write this stupid shit.
And the Christmas mood is impossible to ignore or avoid. In the workplace, schools, shops, radio, newspapers, television, movies, private and public spaces are all Christmas themed from mid-November through the end of December. Lately I have been mortified to discover myself humming Christmas songs as I walk across campus. I bet I can sing the words to more than a few dozen Christmas tunes. I ask my Christian readers, how many Chanukah songs can you recite? And it is not insignificant. Not only is it all-pervasive, all day long, when I do the math, I discover that is adds up to about ten years of my life that I live in this exclusionary Christian culture. (If I live to be eighty, one and half months per year of that time adds up to ten years over a lifetime!)
Oh boo-hoo… I find the absolute worst songs running through my head _year round_ – perfectly secular popular garbage that I overhear rom the noise pollution of every day life. I’m just as offended by it as she is by the chorus of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” bobbling about the noggin. I just don’t assume I’m so important that I shouldn’t be exposed to it because I happen to not like it.
Lemme check that math real quick. Let’s assume that you are exposed to Christmas music in your non-Christian house and non-Christian car for two hours a day (including television and radio, this is a lot more than I’m exposed to, but I’m being generous). I doubt that she is exposed to Christmas music while she is working (see her bio at end of post), so we’ll add on 15 minutes at work that she hears it on average (and that’s being generous again). If she spends a full 8 hours a day outside her house on weekends in places that she is forced to listen to holiday tunes, then that brings us a total of 27.25 hours a week. 27.25 hours x 6 weeks = 163.5 hours for the season. This is a total of 6.8125 days of the year. If she lived to be 80, and spent each one hearing that average number, and assuming she remembers the first few years, she’d have accumulated 545 days of Christmas music, or 1.493 years. A FAR cry from the decade. Pure fucking drivel.
BTW, I hope it wasn’t “White Christmas” by Irving Berlin, a secular Jew.
Save the high-horse for when you need it to tilt against a real opponent – like when the government (not your lousy office party) is basing federal law on the Bible.
I have started talking about this issue with some of my Jewish friends and family members. One friend complained to me about her workplace tree-trimming party. When I suggested she talk to someone about it, she responded with fear, “I am not going to be the person who took away Christmas!” Unfortunately that is the way it is often seen. As if non-Christians who complain are trying to take away Christmas. Suddenly Christians become seen as persecuted. But the question is not how do we stop the celebrations, but instead, how do we create a more inclusive culture, a climate where everybody feels included? I don’t have the answer, but I can think of many ideas. As a starting point, it would be wonderful if organizations had meetings or discussions to brainstorm ideas about how to make their environments feel religiously inclusive. Simply demonstrating that this is an issue worth thinking about is one step to making people feel more included.
Won’t happen, there’s always a complainer (ahem, Abby!) – always someone being “left out” no matter how far one bends over. What percentage of the population is is acceptable to discriminate against – at some point you have to. Cars aren’t designed for little people or giants…you’ll never make everyone happy, and more times than not compromising just makes everyone miserable. At some point, you’ve got to discriminate – that’s life.
The Jewish holiday gets LOTS of play this time of the year, but Jews compromise only 2.5% of the total population. Would Abby be happy with two and a half percent of the decor being Jewish? 10-15% can be secular/non-religious? If it was representational, would that make her happy – I doubt it. What about the office workers who want NO celebrations? How does one compromise with that? Paid vacation day? Not an inclusive move….
Wait, how many Jews are non-religious, quite a significant portion, that’d knock that 2.5% figure down even lower… maybe they’d get half a menorah.
My point – it’s already probably disproportionately inclusive. I’ve never had a work/office Christmas party that wasn’t thouroughly secular, aside from mentions of Jeebus in the lyrics of background music here and there. No preaching, no big crucifixes, no prayer.
Some workplaces and schools take the minimal step of including items like menorahs and kinaras in their holiday displays. But in writing this, I started to think about all the people in this country whose religions have unwisely failed to schedule a major holiday in December. Because of Christmas, December has become defined as THE holiday season. Even within Judaism, Chanukah is only of minor significance, yet it has become the most widely known and recognized Jewish holiday because it falls close to Christmas on the calendar.
You’ll have a tough time with some Jewish run businesses as well – I and friends have worked at quite a few that deck the office with Christmas decor. My current job – me and a religious Jewish (reformed, plus some screamingly retarded new-age beliefs) boss – no bonus, no party, no problem with me. I get the day off, that’s it. Would I like a lazy day where I was given food? Sure.
And you’re complaining that Chanukah is now a “widely known and recognized Jewish holiday”? Really? Okay, how about people forget it alltogether, or mention it 2.5% of the time.
Oh, and a “kinara”?A fucking KINARA?!?!
There MAY be a million or two people who celebrate that Marxist woman-torturing racist holiday, that’d be less than 1% of the US population. Good luck figuring out how to decorate .6% of your party Afro-centric.
Don’t push for more religion during school plays, push for more FUN. Christ is not FUN, reindeer and candy canes ARE. Snow and snowmen are fun, wreaths and tinsel are fun. Though our government was founded on a secular document, it’s run by Christians. They have their holidays, you have yours, or none at all. Here’s the rub, it’s getting less and less Jesusy, and it works to everyone’s advantage. You don’t want to celebrate it, fine, great, but believe you me – if you come out against it – that’ll cause them to react, and it’ll become a LOT LESS SECULAR.
Here’s the bigger rub though:
This is what Shirley Steinberg and Joe Kincheloe call “Christonormativity.” It means that Christianity is the normative culture in the US, and we are oblivious to what that means for non-Christians. Experiencing the overwhelming sense of exclusion I feel at this time of year, I try to use this insight to understand what it feels like for LGBT people in this heteronormative culture of ours. Or for people of color in this predominantly white culture. It gives me some insight into what they experience all year round. And just as most Christians are oblivious to how non-Christians feel this time of year, my privilege allows me to be oblivious to how it feels to not be white and heterosexual.
So, my hope this holiday season is that we will all take a few minutes to stop and think about what it means to have privilege, as well as what it means to strive to be inclusive. Not everyone is made to feel that this is the “most wonderful time of the year.”
Christianity and heterosexuality ARE the norm in the US. Again… Minorities will ALWAYS feel like they’re outside of the mainstream, because they ARE. Your entire blog has shown that the mainstream HAS bent over for non-Christians, example after example a Christmas tree has been renamed something else, decorations from other religions are present, clearly you are then full of shit when you say that Christians are oblivious.
You’re upset because you’ve been given a seat at a Christmas dinner you don’t want anything to do with. You’re an idiot. Christmas isn’t run by the government, and they can’t save you from it. It’s run by the culture, and the majority celebrate it. What you REALLY seem to want is for Christians to stop being Christians, so stop personally expressing cultural and religious traditions in their private businesses and playing Christmas music on their private radio stations. You can’t be happy when others are, if they’re happy for a reason you don’t like. I think you’re just a miserable person who complains about everything that doesn’t feed your precious fragile little ego.
There’s a BIG FUCKING DIFFERENCE between separation of church and state, and trying to stop a majority population from expressing their culture and heritage. Christmas has come a long way baby, and your blathering is only giving ammunition to the Christian blowhards who are trying to put Jesus back into Christmas.
—
Well, what kind of lady is Abby, besides a lousy complainer? Oh… she’s a professional victim of white male oppression… her bio:
As a Professor of Sociology, and Women’s Studies and Ethnic Studies, all of my work is committed to advancing social justice. My first book was White Man Falling: Race, Gender and White Supremacy and most recently I co-edited Sex, Gender, and Sexuality: The New Basics. I direct The Matrix Center for the Advancement of Social Equity and Inclusion, work with the national White Privilege Conference, and co-founded and co-facilitate the Knapsack Institute, a national curriculum transformation project.
I guess Santa Claus is just another dead white male rapist. For a professional complainer, she sure does do a piss poor job of it.
A blurb about Peter Singer’s book “In Defense of Animals” on Amazon.com begins: “Paul McCartney once said that if slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian.”
I hate The Beatles, and John Lennon, and to a lesser degree Paul McCartney. This aside, my version of that quote would be “If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would have a better understanding of the cruelty inherent in life, and it would be more difficult to convince people that life should be fair.”
I need to work on that… it’s not there yet.
I’ve been wanting to read Singer. I haven’t read more than some articles and seen a few videos and interviews. I feel he’s wrong, and I’m interested to read his argument… it’s just not as compelling as some of the other things I want to read, so I haven’t picked it up.
About a week ago someone on facebook asked the question “Are circuses morally objectionable?”
I made the response (quoting another response):
“…but circuses are not known for ethical treatment of non-humans.”
I don’t think they’re particularly known for the ethical treatment of humans either. It’s one of those situations where you can get bogged down by the ethics, wrestle with the implications, maybe come to the conclusion that ultimately it’s harmful that humans reproduce at all and advocate for the extinction of life on the planet.
Or go to the circus.
Each is an appealing way to spend an evening. Only one results in seeing monkeys in funny hats.
Someone e-mailed me “You were kidding, right?”
Augh… here’s one of those things… I find it really hard not to respond to certain topics. I find it impossible in most cases to be moderate, even when I’m trying to moderate. I’m a cynic and a boor, fine, but you have the ability not to read this, and she DID contact ME.
I responded:
Had to check what you were referring to…
Circuses.No, I really wasn’t. I was barely being flippant.
Living a fulfilling, considered, fully ethical life is probably impossible.Sometimes you have to compromise, and compromise usually means nobody is happy with the results.
I recently read “Better Never to Have Been”… it’s an anti-natalist work that uses arguments that readers of animal rights books would be familiar with. The theory is that “it’s always a harm to bring a life into the world”.I can’t counter his logic with logical counter-arguments. He’s a professional in the field of ethics, if all things were equal, he’s got more time to think about it. I’ve got a job and other shit.
So, let’s say logically, rationally, ethically, he’s right – just for the argument.
Should we not have children? Should all human life cease to be?These are miserable, brain and gut wrenching things to spend any time pondering. It can lead to ponderous thoughts and disturbing consequences. The nature of evil, of rampant brutality and treachery in nature…
I read and consider, I try to be honest and a good person to those in my life that I care for, and not to be intentionally harmful to those outside that circle.
For all of this, I could look away from the road for one second… coffee could spill, an elderly woman could fall on the sidewalk and I want to see if she’s alright, and I careen into a minivan and kill a family.
If you’re in a lifeboat that will hold a maximum of 12 people, and dozens are swimming and grabbing on to the sides of the boat to save themselves, are you willing to lift up an axe and chop their hands off, so that they don’t capsize the crowded boat causing everyone to die?
If a city spends $2 million rescuing a child who has fallen down a well, would you be willing to cover the well and divert the funds to vaccinations that may save dozens or hundreds or thousands of lives?
I am serious, and wouldn’t it be nice to just go to the circus…
It ain’t poetry, and I’d edit it a number of different ways, but it says basically what I want it to say.
I’m driving to work one day last week, as I do every day, and this day I see a cat run out under the van in front of me and get mangled. I’m horrified by this and my thoughts were “I need to finish it off.” I needed to swerve the wheel of my car toward the animal that I just saw be twisted and magled by the wheels of the speeding van in front of me in hopes that I would smash its skull and kill it instantly. In the few seconds I had to bridge the gap between my current position and where the cat was still rolling from the impact, I saw its battered body twitching and bleeding profusely and a massive evisceration to the abdomen that was spilling out its entrails. I was horrified and my guts turned and I wanted to recoil and pull over but I knew that it couldn’t be saved, I couldn’t slam my breaks at that speed with all this traffic and what I needed to do was to stop it from suffering and being run over by a series of cars until it died from the repeated smashing or someone dealt a deathblow.
I couldn’t do it. I failed to do the only thing that would have helped.
I cursed cars and overpopulation and the whole goddamn world. I couldn’t have saved the life of that cat, but I didn’t do the one thing that probably should have been done to stop the suffering.
I looked in my rear view, it jerked and bled and was still dying. It disappeared under the car behind me and I sullenly, wincingly looked back at the road ahead, cursed humanity and gloomily made it through the day. I probably would have felt worse if I’d done it, even though I would have stopped the suffering of that poor animal.
When I got home and I sat down and the daily ritual of my own cat welcoming me home by standing on my lap and demanding my full attention until he’s tired of me commences like every other day. He doesn’t know about the dead relative, and if he did, would he care?
Life is just not that simple, and it certainly ain’t fair. Not eating meat or wearing a leather belt or abstaining from going to see the trained monkeys may make you feel better, but it doesn’t mean you’re not going to commit unspeakable suffering on someone or something at some point in your life. It certainly won’t stop unspeakable suffering from being committed upon you.
You’ve got to have some principals, some ethical framework, but unless they’re really fucking vague (or contradictory), you’re going to have to break a few to get through life. Tough shit. We’re poorly constructed meat-machines. What we think of as “I” is an illusion created by the brain. You lie to yourself every day, but you don’t know it.
I consider myself a skeptic, and pro-science and reason… but sometimes my gut overrides my brain. I can’t build an argument against the anti-natalist, but I disagree with him. Where I disagree with Singer, I probably can’t mount a logical counter, but I can’t forsee anyone convincing me to stop eating meat.
Am I less of a skeptic? Do I have a “faith”? Am I “anti-science”?
Be a “good person”, whatever you can figure that out to be. Be reflective and considerate, but don’t think you’re absolutely right. Reason and logic will get your far, but you’re not made for it. You’re made to run on lies and irrational impulses. You can’t get away from it. I can’t get away from it. You can only struggle and maybe at the end of the day you didn’t fuck up and hurt someone you didn’t mean to. If it’s a good day, you did something nice for someone you care about.
I don’t want cats to die.
I don’t want to be the cause of a cat dying.
I don’t want to see someone else be the cause of a cat’s death.
I don’t want to see a cat suffer a prolonged miserable and suffering death.
What’s ethical when a cat is in the road ahead of you, half dead?
Can you make the call in 3 seconds? Can you act on that?
The girl didn’t write back. I’m not holding my breath.
Unless you are a person of color, you are a terrible racist. You can’t help it. You were a racist at birth and your entire life is structured around being a racist, especially if you deny being a racist. Those are the worst.
I don’t want to tip my hat with all the reasons why in one post. Frankly, that’d take too long and be flushed away into the ether too quickly. No, like your vile racism, this will be ongoing and painful excursion into how terrible you are for being born a flawed, degenerate, scheming whitey.
Just what is Environmental Racism? Let this privileged white academic oppressor, Daniel Faber (Editorial Board Member of Capitalism, Nature, Socialism: A Journal of Socialist Ecology, Fall 1988-present) hip you to it:
If you are a racist, you may be thinking:
“Well, there’s that whole ‘correlation is not causation’ thing, do companies pick predominantly black neighborhoods to locate industrial and manufacturing plants in because they want to poison/oppress minorities? Could it be that they need cheap land for large buildings near ports and means of mass transport, and cheap land means cheap housing, and poor people who live in cities tend to live in those areas?”
And you’re a racist. We learn from Wikipedia that:
Environmental racism refers to intentional or unintentional racial discrimination in the enforcement of environmental rules and regulations, the intentional or unintentional targeting of minority communities[1] for the siting of polluting industries, or the exclusion of minority groups from public and private boards, commissions, and regulatory bodies. The term was coined and defined by the former Reverend Dr. Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr. [2] Environmental justice is the movement to reverse environmental racism.[3][4]
Intent has nothing to do with it. Your racism is like manslaughter, but EJ proponants just may refer to it as genocide. Why? Because you’re a RACIST, that’s why!
Actual documentary proof of Environmental Racism:
Don’t believe me? That’s okay, I’m white and therefore I am probably lying to you and committing genocide today. Trust an unbiased source: the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit
They’ve set forth the principals of the EJ movement… some are as follows:
I typed in the words "unicorn environmentalism wizard" into a google search. This was the second image that came up. The was only one other image on the page would have made any sense, but I think it was a unicorn fucking some dude, I decided not to look to hard.
1) Environmental Justice affirms the sacredness of Mother Earth, ecological unity and the interdependence of all species, and the right to be free from ecological destruction.
(what? are you fucking kidding me? What about planet unicorns or green wizards?)
6) Environmental Justice demands the cessation of the production of all toxins, hazardous wastes, and radioactive materials, and that all past and current producers be held strictly accountable to the people for detoxification and the containment at the point of production.
(okay, we’ll turn off the nuclear power plants now. We’ll continue to focus on more earthly fuels, like coal. Mother earth makes coal, she’d want us to use it – it’s GREEN! Oh wait… Uranium is natural too. Oh, and no more glow in the dark watch dials. How do we stop all that background radiation? Can we block out the stars at night, the sun at day? Oh, and stop most forms of modern medicine – radiation EVERYWHERE in hospitals. Shit, hospitals are so racist.)
7) Environmental Justice demands the right to participate as equal partners at every level of decision-making, including needs assessment, planning, implementation, enforcement and evaluation.
(to hell with this representative government. It doesn’t matter that Americans are largely ignorant about science, the middle school drop-out should have the same say on matters of science and policy as the scientists! It’s fair that way. Oh, and can we PLEASE put intelligent design to a vote so that whole issue can be resolved?!)
10) Environmental Justice considers governmental acts of environmental injustice a violation of international law, the Universal Declaration On Human Rights, and the United Nations Convention on Genocide.
(yeah, there’s that genocide reference – I’m very racist for not believing that the pollution from city busses is equal to the intentional wholesale murder of ethnic or religious groups. For this, I’m sorry.)
11) Environmental Justice must recognize a special legal and natural relationship of Native Peoples to the U.S. government through treaties, agreements, compacts, and covenants affirming sovereignty and self-determination.
(Unless you’re a Native Peoples, you’re not that natural. It’s a fact.)
12) Environmental Justice affirms the need for urban and rural ecological policies to clean up and rebuild our cities and rural areas in balance with nature, honoring the cultural integrity of all our communities, and provided fair access for all to the full range of resources.
(I’m trying to get my head around what would entail “rebuild(ing) our cities and rural areas in balance with nature”. This is very vague, but I’d imagine once we got rid of all radiation, things would revert quite quickly to a more “natural state”. I understand “cultural integrity of all our communities”. Neighborhoods of color need to be protected from interlopers of non-color, or other colors?? Anyway, keep the Chinese in their neighborhood, the blacks in theirs, the hispanics in theirs. You racist whites are segregationists, the people of color merely want to retain the cultural integrity of our communities. There’s a difference, racist!)
13) Environmental Justice calls for the strict enforcement of principles of informed consent, and a halt to the testing of experimental reproductive and medical procedures and vaccinations on people of color.
(Don’t test your white devil medicines on people of color. Your white science can stay in your white communities, people of color don’t need it.)
14) Environmental Justice opposes the destructive operations of multi-national corporations.
(Okay… here’s where it gets tricky. We’re one-world AND one-people. We are different, and white people are bad. We want open borders because no human is illegal, but not to big companies, they need to not cross the borders because then they’re a multi-national. Having people of different nations working together in a company is bad, if that company makes a profit of any kind. So, in summery…. oh fuck it… this is retarded socialist bullshit… seriously. Fuck these assholes. )
15) Environmental Justice opposes military occupation, repression and exploitation of lands, peoples and cultures, and other life forms.
(come the fuck on… okay… fine, get American troops out of all other countries. Bring ‘em home. I’m fine with that. When there is a REAL genocide, as ACTUALLY occurs where people are murdered by the hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands or millions… we’ll just watch on TV. That’ll allow foriegn news agencies to make some cash selling their footage of machete wielding tribal warlords, religious nuts blowing each other up with bombs up their ass, and general mayhem on people who live in agrarian levels of civilization to US news agencies.)
17) Environmental Justice requires that we, as individuals, make personal and consumer choices to consume as little of Mother Earth’s resources and to produce as little waste as possible; and make the conscious decision to challenge and reprioritize our lifestyles to insure the health of the natural world for present and future generations.
(That’s fine. Please start doing that yourselves. Unless you’re like PETA, who kills animals by the hundreds, Al Gore, who uses as much electricity as 28 million Ugandans… or… augh…. I’m done…)
What is the social impact of framing every argument you make one of “people of color” vs. white people?
What does it do when you use caricatures of white men that would make Julius Streicher proud?
What happens when, during the economic and political rise of “people of color”, your local slumlord is black. The CEO of the company that’s dumping toxic waste is Hispanic, the race riots become more and more “people of color” vs. “people of color”?
Ahh mass transit… multi-cultural and socialist utopia on wheels… they get subsidized by the government because they’re unprofitable. That means that if you have a job and pay taxes, you’re paying twice (three times if you count actually having to ride in them as a form of punishment)! If you don’t use it by walking, riding a bike or driving, you’re being punished only once. You’re almost stealing from the poor!
Below is a google search that will show a trend of places around the world who feel that shit gets so bad they’ve got to give women their own buses to save them from predation:
http://www.google.com/search?q=women+only+busses
Oh, and the wikipedia page for Women-only Passenger Car had this great line in it:
“Women-only cars have received positive reaction from some men and some women. Women cited safety from gropers, as well as not having to tolerate various smells.“
Luckily it’s women talking about men, so it’s not racist or sexist.
This brings me to one last rhetorical question:
We are told that “haters” will employ dehumanizing language to set a group apart from them in order to make it “easier” to see them as the “other”, and therefore easier to hate.
If you can watch this video and NOT think these are fucking savage animals, instead of schoolchildren – I don’t understand you. More importantly, I don’t want you to have any say in matters of policing or schooling. YOU are a bigger problem than these delinquents, because you will only ever make excuses for them. It is not “society” rioting after school. It is not “lowered expectations” beating one another over the head with 2x4s.
My hypothesis of hieghtened black criminality is not based on this one episode, though. Look at the data. It’s all over the place.
Desperate impact is only fussed over when non-Asian* minorities can be cast as some victim. The disparate impact of black criminality is rarely, if ever discussed honestly.
A boy was killed in an after school riot.
I don’t know how many times I’ve heard this kind of behavoir written off and excused because of “low self esteem”. It’s not only pathetic – it’s dead wrong. Young black males have higher levels of self-esteem than most other groups. They think far too much of themselves and have a greater level of impulsiveness and lowered concerned for long-term consequences.
I’m not attributing a causal factor here, but the rot is found in the schools and homes of black majority areas. The rhetoric of “white racism” seems to be at a high point, but possibly not the apex. Whites are not a crime-free lot, but when it comes to inter-racial and intra-racial crime, there is one group that stands far above any other. To call anyone who points this out a “racist” is to show you care more about opinion than fact.
But I’ll refrain from calling these schoolchildren uncivilized monsters, once the left stops tarring anyone who discusses racial disparities in crime a racist.
*It is unfortunate that many Asian racial advocacy groups are now playing the race-card lottery, even feeding on their own to position themselves as victims of social injustice.
UPDATE (related):
A reader writes regarding the video of the gang fight in a Chicago school in which a 16-year-old passerby was killed.
This is where I grew up.
What’s sad is, the crime was a lot higher when I was in elementary school (900 murders a year versus 400 murders a year today).
However, the media attention is greater today since:
1. this crime happens on the south side of chicago
2. Barack Obama lives on the south side of chicagoThe Drudge Report and Rush Limbaugh are sending the message to Obama and Rahm “fix your house before you try to fix mine”.
This is actually the neighborhood Barack Obama “organized” as a community organizer. If you read his books, he talks about helping people in the Altgeld Gardens community, and one of the gangs in this fight lived in the Altgeld Gardens community.
Obama’s career consists largely of Failing Upward. It’s nice work if you can get it. (That said, Obama’s lightweightness compares favorably to our last President’s, who would have lost in a Presidential election in which the only other candidates were his siblings and the only voters his parents.)
UPDATE (unrelated):
Unrelated (in a direct way, but indirectly, yeah….) to the case above is the following story from small community who are getting what they voted for:
IN-fucking-SANITY
