All I Saw On Australia Day Was Police Aggression; How About You?
The 26 January 2012 incident where Australia’s Prime Minister Gillard was dragged away by security forces to a car and speeded away has been portrayed by the media as an attack or riot on Australia Day.
Selective scenes have been used to give people the impression of a violent mob threatening the Prime Minister and the opposition leader. When the video footage failed to display evidence of such violence, they then replaced some video footage with photo images of the Prime Minister dragged almost on the ground by the security officer to create the right atmosphere to justify their narration.
The police said that they will not charge anybody over the incident, and some writers begin to compare the Australia Day incident with the 2005 racially motivated Cronulla Riot; and then believe that it is unfair not to arrest the “rioters” over the incident.
The truth is that while the protesters may be noisy by chanting…
A Black Man’s View of Schroedinger’s Rapist
Crommunist writes at the Freethought Blogs:
This morning I made a reference to the fact that men are often assumed to be potential rapists as an example of how sexism negatively affects men as well as women. The argument, commonly referred to as “Schroedinger’s Rapist”, goes something like this: because you can’t know for sure if the stranger approaching you in a dark alley or other unsafe place is a rapist or not, it is generally a good idea to be on your guard. Men can enhance their interactions with women by being aware of this mindset, and adjusting their own behaviour accordingly.
I have often heard from people making an anti-feminist argument that Schroedinger’s Rapist is profoundly sexist and unfair. After all, most men do not rape – why should every man be treated like a rapist? Isn’t that discrimination? How can you claim to be opposed to sexism, yet promote a fundamentally…
Hacked Emails Show Closer Ties Between Ron Paul And Neo-Nazis, Anonymous Claims
The hackers group Anonymous has hacked and defaced the website of the American Third Position Party, a Neo-Nazi organization attempting to foment a “white revolution”. Anonymous says emails reveal that Ron Paul regularly holds conference calls with A3P’s board of directors, and that members hold key posts in Ron Paul’s campaign. Is this a smear job based on guilt by association, or outright lies? Or an ugly side of Ron Paul revealed? The International Business Times reports:
Members of the nationalist American Third Position Party (A3P), whose website was defaced by Anonymous, organised Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul’s meetings and campaigns, according emails hacked by the collective. Chairman of the British National Party (BNP) Nick Griffin also took part in meetings with Paul and other representatives of A3P.
“According to these messages, Ron Paul has regularly met with many A3P members, even engaging in conference calls with their board of directors,” read a…
Low Intelligence & Conservative Beliefs Linked To Prejudice & Racism
It took a team of crack scientists to reach this shocking conclusion, reported at Live Science via Yahoo News:
There’s no gentle way to put it: People who give in to racism and prejudice may simply be dumb, according to a new study that is bound to stir public controversy.
The research finds that children with low intelligence are more likely to hold prejudiced attitudes as adults. These findings point to a vicious cycle, according to lead researcher Gordon Hodson, a psychologist at Brock University in Ontario.
Low-intelligence adults tend to gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies, the study found. Those ideologies, in turn, stress hierarchy and resistance to change, attitudes that can contribute to prejudice, Hodson wrote in an email to LiveScience.
“Prejudice is extremely complex and multifaceted, making it critical that any factors contributing to bias are uncovered and understood,” he said.
Controversy ahead
The findings combine three hot-button topics.“They’ve pulled off the trifecta of controversial…
I Am A Racist. Deal With It.
Saumya Arya Haas writes at the Good Men Project:
We never think we’re the problem.
When a Kentucky church briefly banned interracial couples, the (sad) punchline was that the church leader who pushed for the ban stated ”I am not racist” .
What? How can you ban interracial couples and not recognize or admit that this is a racist action? What reality does this guy live in?
He lives in the same reality the rest of us do: an internal reality.
♦◊♦
In our own stories, we are beleaguered heroes with complicated histories. We seldom see ourselves as the aggressor or oppressor. When we act against other people, we aren’t able to see it in the context of a greater social issue. Our actions seem reasonable. We are not acting out of racism or sexism. We have our reasons.
Sometimes, we are simply outraged by injustice. Other times, what we are most ashamed of in ourselves is what…
Was 14-Year-Old Executed By South Carolina Innocent?
The saddest part is that I’m not 100 percent certain that something like this could never happen again today. Raw Story writes:
Over 67 years after 14-year-old George Junius Stinney Jr. was put to death by the state of South Carolina, he may soon be cleared of the crime that people familiar with the case say he never could have committed.
A lawyer and an activist both told Raw Story recently that new evidence will show that the black boy could not have possibly murdered two white girls, 11-year-old Betty June Binnicker and seven-year-old Mary Emma Thames.
Stinney, the youngest person to receive the death penalty in the last 100 years, was executed on June 16, 1944. At five feet one inch and only 95 pounds, the straps of the electric chair did not fit the boy. His feet could not touch the floor. As he was hit with the first 2,400-volt surge of…
Photos Of Child Slaves, 1863
Via How To Be A Retronaut, scans of a series of collectible cards, sold to raise awareness of the anti-slavery cause, with photos of slave children whom abolitionists had brought North and freed. It’s an interesting glimpse into how widely “blackness” could be defined in the slave-era South:
‘Slave children, freed and brought North by abolitionists to emphasize the plight of slaves. The proceeds from sale of the photographs were to be used to educate freed slaves who had come under the jurisdiction of the Union Army in the New Orleans area. A caption on one of these photographs points out that the children had been turned out of a hotel in Philadelphia because of their “color.”’
The Racism of the Reptilians
Many comments in ‘Elite Reptilians Like Eating Our Brains Cold,’ much to my surprise, jumped to the defense of David Icke and ilk, claiming that there is no racist agenda behind the reptilian one.
Here’s an article from Wes Unruh on Modern Mythology, demonstrating quite the opposite:
Years ago, my first thoughts upon encountering the ‘reptilian agenda‘ (or reptilian mythic framework) was to think of it as A Case of Conscience meets Darker Then You Think, although the more obvious mythic maps you as a media consumer might be familiar with are Land of the Lost plus V. Imagine a race of lizard men who are always watching from the edges of society, like predators, feeding on misery. The reptilian narrative has it that an intergalactic race, the Draconis, has been interbreeding with humans since ancient times, and those bloodlines are responsible for manipulating events throughout history. And these reptilians and half-humans need to eat people to maintain their human…
New Study Reveals Whites Feel More Discriminated Against Than Minorities
In my newspaper, the headline would have been “Whites Feel Racism Is Worse For Whites Than Minorities; Minorities Stare Open-Mouthed In Stunned Silence.” A new study on perceived racism coming from Harvard Business School and Tufts University has yielded surprising results. Whites are reporting that they feel racism is “worse for white people than black people” in modern western society, despite statistics showing that social inequality between ethnicities is still rampant and still very much in the favor of white people. So if the actual racism is still directed at minorities, why are whites suddenly feeling so discriminated against? (More on the Telegraph)
Is Anders Behring Breivik A Dominionist?
Leah L. Burton writes on PoliticusUSA:
In regards to Dominionist linkages to the bloody slaughter in Norway, here are our findings so far:
a) In particular, with a video manifesto (which has been linked on YouTube until it was pulled there, and which has since shown up on LiveLeak) the shooter makes some very specific references that show he has familiarity with, and probably shares terminology with (if not overtly sharing intel with) “Christian patriot” militia groups in the US (including material that has been posted on racist and far right-wing forums in the US, use of particular catch phrases associated with the “Christian Patriot” movement in the US, and others). I’ve just spent nine hours typing up an extensive analysis of the video; he is clearly connected with religious-nationalist groups in Europe and in the US. The degree of references to material originating in the US, in fact, indicate he has…
Evidence of Murdoch’s Newspapers Distorting News to Fuel Racism
Media disinformation and negativity against non-Western cultures in Australia is a terminal disease spreading into the bloodstream of the mainstream media industry in Australia. The following incident demonstrated how easy it is to demonize a Chinese restaurant in Melbourne through the manipulation of news using the techniques of factual omission, misleading heading, misleading bullet-point-highlight, misleading bold-highlight and the editorializing of content using a series of subjective and strong wordings to sell the personal opinion of the journalist or editor as news.
How did Murdoch’s Newspapers demonise a Chinese Restaurant in Melbourne?
Can you tell the problem with the following report by the Herald Sun?
St Kilda Chinese restaurant food bill handed to man in ambulance
By Jessica Craven From: Herald Sun April 26, 2011 7:21PM
- Man suffered seizure while dining at Chinese restaurant
- Man given bill as he was being loaded into ambulance
- Restaurant manager said someone had to pay for meal
A CHINESE restaurant that slapped a customer…
North Carolina To Compensate Thousands Of Forced-Sterilization Victims
The North Carolina Eugenics Board was created in 1933 and operated for decades with little public scrutiny. It used rudimentary IQ tests and gossip from neighbors to justify sterilization of young girls from poor families.
Many people don’t realize that portions of the U.S. South had eugenics programs that operated through the 1970s. NPR reports on some horrifying fairly-recent history:
Barely 40 years ago, it wasn’t uncommon for a single mother on welfare, or a patient in a mental hospital in North Carolina, to be sterilized against her will.
But North Carolina wasn’t alone: More than half of states in the U.S. had eugenics laws, some of which persisted into the 1970s.
North Carolina is now considering compensating its sterilization victims. A state panel heard from some of them Wednesday. They were mostly poor and uneducated — both black and white — and often just girls when it happened.
Elaine Riddick says she was sterilized at…
For Women, Darker Skin Tone Means Longer Prison Sentences
Racial bias in our criminal justice system isn’t a binary matter, with different treatment for blacks versus whites — rather, a new study suggests that it is a sliding scale, in which severity of punishment increases proportionally as skin color becomes darker. Via the Root:
Villanova researchers studied more than 12,000 cases of African-American women imprisoned in North Carolina and found that women with lighter skin tones received more-lenient sentences and served less time than women with darker skin tones.
The researchers found that light-skinned women were sentenced to approximately 12 percent less time behind bars than their darker-skinned counterparts. Women with light skin also served 11 percent less time than darker women.
The study took into account the type of crimes the women committed and each woman’s criminal history to generate apples-to-apples comparisons. The work builds on previous studies by Stanford University, the University of Colorado at Boulder and other institutions, which…
Would You Buy A License Plate With A Confederate Flag On It?
If you live in Texas, you might have that choice quite soon. CBSDFW.com reports:
Would you buy a license plate with a Confederate flag on it? State officials are looking at possibly launching a new Texas state license plate honoring veterans of the War Between the States.
Mr. Hilary Shelton, with the NAACP in Washington, D.C., said that the Civil War may not be something we want to celebrate.
“When many look at that history, we think about it in terms of secession, that is we were seceding from the Union in the southern parts of the country,” explained Shelton. “Many would view that, quite frankly, as treason, because they meant to actually destroy the existing governmental structure. But when we dig deeper, the issue becomes even more offensive to many African Americans and those that sought freedom for those of darker skin in our country.”…
Are The Smurfs Racist, Sexist Fascists?
Meaghan Murphy writes on Fox News:
Sacre bleu! The Smurfs may not be as innocent as they look.
The tribe of little blue creatures who live peacefully among the mushrooms are “steeped in Stalinism and Nazism,” according to a French sociologist.
“Collective work always focuses on self-sufficiency for food and energy,” Antoine Buéno states in Le Petit Livre Bleu (The Little Blue Book). “The Smurfs do not have private property; their leader is Papa Smurf who shows very authoritarian and paternalistic characteristics.”
Buéno also makes the connection that the little blue men’s biggest enemy, the magician Gargamel, seems to have a Jewish background — citing similarities to the anti-Semitic images of the World War II era.
The French writer also claims that the Smurfs do not just resemble Nazis, but sexist Nazis to boot! Smurfette—traditionally the only woman living in the Smurf’s village — allegedly meets the Aryan ideal of beauty with her blonde hair and refined…
Is Tony Kushner The New Helen Thomas?
Playwright Tony Kushner. Photos: Timothy Herrigan/Courtney Hamilton (CC)
Playwright Tony Kushner. Photos: Timothy Herrigan/Courtney Hamilton (CC)
Jewish Playwright has honorary degree restored by City University of New York after it had been stripped because he was labeled too critical of Israel.
First, it was Helen Thomas.
After the veteran White House correspondent spoke inelegantly once about her feelings about Israel—and apologized, but to no effect—she was blackballed at the instigation of strident Israeli supporters and her career achievement-standing journalism awards were stripped. She became persona non-grate with many media outlets joining in the denunciations of a colleague they honored for decades.
Many at the time suspected the wrath was especially severe because she is an Arab-American. Right-wing provocateur Ann Coulter even asked if “that Arab” should be allowed near the President.
Now a new flap driven by some of the same issues involves a Jewish Pulitzer Prize winning playwright and a leading academic institution in New York.
His name, Tony Kushner, best known for the…
Texas Teacher To 9th Grade Student: “I Bet You’re Grieving About Your Uncle (Bin Laden)”
ABC 13 reports:
HOUSTON (KTRK) — The death of Osama bin Laden is related to an investigation of a teacher at Clear Brook High School. The teacher is accused of making a racially insensitive comment to a student in front of the entire class.
A Friendswood mom says she was offended by what her daughter says happened Monday in ninth grade algebra.
She said, “The teacher told the student that ‘I bet you’re grieving.’ And she basically looked at him and said what are you talking about? And he said I heard about your uncle’s death and she said wow, because she understood that he was referring about Osama bin Laden being killed and was racially profiling her.”…
Department Of Justice Declares New Orleans Police Force “A Threat To The Safety Of The Public”
“Police in the US now rival criminals, and exceed terrorists as the greatest threat to the American public.”
Yes, there are bad cops everywhere, but the corrupt, racist, and violent New Orleans police department — in which officers engage in rape, arson, kidnapping, bank robberies, and murder, and citizens are arrested for little or no reason, held without charges for months, and routinely brutalized and tortured — is a different matter altogether. It is little exaggeration to say that the NOPD has become a criminal gang terrorizing the city’s residents. The New Statesman reports:
Something terrible lies at the heart of New Orleans – a rampant, widespread and apparently uncontrollable brutality on the part of its police force and its prison service. The horrors of its criminal justice system from decades before Hurricane Katrina and up to now lie somewhere between, with little exaggeration, Candide and Stalin’s Gulags.
Spit on the sidewalk here, and you may…
Why Do White People Stink On Twitter?
Paul Carr asks the question that most Twitter followers have been pondering all day (at TechCrunch):
“What Does It Say About The Wisdom Of The Crowd That “White People Stink” Has Been Trending On Twitter For Almost 24 Hours?”
And helpfully supplies the answer:
“Everything.”
