You cannot challenge racism, on this level, by being nice to and reaching out to white supremacists. Their entire ideology revolves around dehumanizing us. It just does. not. work.
You cannot fight fascism by prioritizing the feelings of fascists and letting them think they’re safe around you. You don’t “get them on your side”. Because treating them kindly and respecting them, gives them your silent approval and access to those of you who are way more vulnerable than you are and who cannot afford to feel safe enough to “debate” with these monsters.
Our humanity is not a question or a debate topic, and by giving these people a platform you legitimize their views and help spread them to a larger audience.
Then… How did it work for this guy?
They shot him in the fucking head.
Say that shit again!
They shot him in the fucking head.
They shot him in the fucking head.
They shot him in the fucking head.
They shot him in the fucking head.
The idea that MLK was ‘nice’ to white supremacists is also just historical revisionism @kuurihaunt.
He was sent death threats. The FBI considered him dangerous. People assaulted and murdered many of his followers. White America thought he was too confrontational and not appeasing enough to the sensibilities of whites. He was considered disruptive and an “outside agitator.” He was not a beloved man. He was hated and despised.
His protests came with the risk of being brutalized or killed by police or vigilantes. He decried the white moderate for caring more about order than justice. He refused to condemn riots, ‘the language of the unheard,’ because of how violent America was to Black people. Despite their differences, Malcolm X offered him protection and self-defense. Even though he was committed to nonviolent resistance, which meant breaking the law, disrupting traffic and yes – willingly opening yourself to being brutalized, he was more complicated than you give him credit.
The United States hated him and for his troubles he was killed.
He was not the caricature of nonviolence you think he was. Read a fucking book.
It worked for Nelson Mandela,
Didn’t it? If he hadn’t forgiven people (which shows he was such a good man, because I wouldn’t have forgiven those people if I were him), apartheid would never have ended
Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for being part of an anti-apartheid militant communist organization.
this post gets sadder and sadder tbh
… Okay, I know that we’ve spent a lot of effort remaking MLK into an inoffensive “feel-good” figure who beat racism by just being so gosh-darned nice, but who’s clueless enough to think Nelson Fucking Mandela stopped Apartheid by being friendly at it?
Hey, FYI–if you sign up for that free credit monitoring, set a Google reminder to go cancel it this time next year or else Equifax will apparently require a credit card to begin the free protection and beging automatically charging you for it after the year is up. It looks like the service currently runs $20/month/person, which is a lot to begin with, but will add up real fast if you sign up multiple members of your household.
I don’t begrudge anyone wanting to use the service, and I don’t even begrudge Equifax for offering the service for a fee after a year, but it is sleazy as heck to make it an opt-out rather than opt-in when they’re ostensibly offering this as a service to help correct a wrong, not an enticement to try their service.
(I’m not even going to get into the arbitration clauses, because at this point I just assume all companies use them regardless of how utteely sleazy they are).
1920s crime lord Tilly Devine was born on this day in 1900. She and fellow crime boss Kate Leigh fought for years in one of history’s most amazing feuds.
Their story was also covered on an Australian TV show, Underbelly: Razor, which was, to quote one reader, “trashy beyond measure.” You can catch a clip of it on YouTube here.
That particular building was also the legacy of bad ‘70s architectural experiments. Well before I got there, they’d had to add wall partitions for classrooms. Because it started out with a totally open plan pod design, with space for something like 10 classes all run together around an atrium in each pod (with multiple pods around another atrium).
But, there wasn’t that much they could do about the totally windowless design. So yeah, there was absolutely no way to even open the windows and let some of the concentrated smoke out. (That was also the only school I went to with even badly working AC. Because no windows, and it started out just a big sweatbox before they had to add the AC for health and safety reasons. Extra glad I wasn’t there the first few years after it was built…)
May not have been able to breathe during forest fire season, but by golly students weren’t going to be staring out the windows! 🙄
Besides the destruction, I really feel for all the people with breathing problems in areas affected by the wildfires out West.
It’s gotten rough enough back home a number of times, with seemingly half of WV on fire again and prevailing wind patterns funneling a bunch of the smoke straight down into the New River Valley. Which is prone to fun inversion layers anyway.
A few weeks one fall when I was in high school was the worst time I can remember, especially with the school’s shitty HVAC system actually concentrating the smoke inside the building 😵 With significant asthma problems from it, of course, and I was hardly the only one who couldn’t breathe. It was bad enough everywhere else. That school shouldn’t have stayed open, and I’m amazed in retrospect that nobody’s parents kept them out for their safety that I knew of. (And people no doubt would have been talking about it, not wanting to be there wheezing and choking either.) Guess they didn’t believe the air quality could really be that much worse inside the school if it was staying open. Because kids 😐 But, all of those forest fire seasons look like sparkling clean air, compared to large chunks of the Western US right now. It’s scary to think about from a distance, and I do wish there were something we could do to help people there on the ground.
Bass Reeves was so dedicated to the law, he even arrested his own son Bennie for the murder of his wife. Bennie was sentenced to life in prison. With over 3000 arrests, 14 kills, went his entire 32 year career in law enforcement without being shot once.
He was assigned to bring in the notorious female outlaw Belle Starr. Once she got wind who was after her she turned herself into the federal court.
Reeves was one of a few Marshalls who would venture into Indian territory *oklahoma*. After the age of 67 he retired in 1907. He enjoyed his short lived retirement as a police officer in Muskogee Oklahoma, his assigned beat had 0 crime reported until he died at the age of 71 of Bright’s disease.
He was one of the true gun slingers of the west.
I would expect nothing less from a man with such a magnificent mustache
I love the story of Bass Reeves!
One of his famous tactics was, if he was captured or in danger by a criminal he was hunting down, he would ask them to read a letter from his wife before they killed him. He used their distraction to free himself and get the upper hand.
He was also a freed slave. George Reeves, his owner and reason for his surname, took Bass with him to fight in the Civil War. However, George became violently angry after Bass beat him at a card game, and Bass was forced to fight him (or kill, on some accounts) in self defense.
After running away and entering Native American territory, Bass learned how to speak the languages of the ‘Five Civilized Tribes’ (Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muskogee, Seminole). This part of his life is where he mastered marksmanship. He got married and had a family after the Emancipation Proclamation was declared, and then later became a Marshal, going on the adventures listed above (and many more… Another famous criminal that Bass captured was Bob Dozier.)
He was the very first black US Marshal. May we never forget him, as history would suffer to lose such an outstanding figure.
sometimes I get so jealous of other people’s social skills. like damn. they can talk to people?? and people like them?? look at all those people who like them. wtf. illegal
A few months ago in Belgrade, Serbia a Romani couple reported that their car was stolen and instead of helping them the police accused them of insurance fraud, interrogated them, out them through a polygraph test, detained them and tortured the Romani husband for 13 hours, at one point even putting a bag over his head and aiming a gun at him. The police threatened to imprison the couple and told them that they had a car waiting to take away their kids. They didn’t allow the couple to call their lawyer either – saying they “had no right” and only after those 13 hours of torture and abuse the police let them go after making them sign documents they weren’t even given the time to read first. The husband sought medical treatment and was diagnosed with physical injuries to his face & body, as well as a post-traumatic stress disorder.
Thankfully, with the support of the European Roma Rights Center (ERRC) the couple managed to file a civil discrimination suit against the police, however the outcome of this is still unknown.
Remember that this is the reality we live in next time you make a suggestion that Romani should just go to the police and “ask for protection” because this isn’t a real option for us and never has been. This is why we all need to work together to get justice for the discriminated as well, because we all should know by now that the law only makes racism and discrimination illegal on paper, however in practice it is still happening and officers continue to let it slide and even join in it.
Much of the UK’s system of laws and “unwritten constitution” derives from EU law, so with Brexit inexorably advancing, the UK has to pass a whole raft of parallel legislation that will replace the EU laws with UK versions, lest there be a “legal black hole” the day after Brexit.
But it’s not as simple as crossing out “EU” and inserting “UK” in existing legislation. The “Great Repeal Bill” is the largest piece of legislation ever put before Parliament, which has to not only translate the rules into UK legislation – it also has to set out which UK (not EU) institutions are in charge of enforcing those rules and what enforcement powers they’ll have.
There’s no time to make such a piece of legislation complete (at least, not according to Theresa May and her government). Instead, the government plans to rely on “Henry VIII clauses” that allow minister to just make up laws, without getting them voted in by Parliament. In effect, the Tories are asking Parliament to write them a blank cheque whose details they can fill in later.
At stake are “a mindboggling array of laws, from human rights and environmental protections through to financial regulation and consumer law.”
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
You must be logged in to post a comment.