Chomsky on America and it's "exceptionalism"

[Doc]

the strongest element involved with rascism is comfort zones and familiarity, its lots easier for some people to deal with a known cultural ruleset with known cultural expectations.

It's also why these people view all the targets of their fear and hatred as belonging to a similarly uniform mass of stereotypes. It's easier to just lump people together and apply a single ruleset.

You are both right.

[Zack Morris]

The assertion that America is a fundamentally racist nation (with the unstated premise being that this racism invalidates us morally and politically) is the old Soviet line and nothing more.

The spectacle of African diplomats being denied service near DC by white business owners was 100% good old-fashioned Americana. The Soviets didn't invent that.

Even at its nastiest and most degrading, racism against blacks (or anybody else for that matter) is not close to being a founding principle. The liberation and rule by the middle classes was always at the heart of endeavor. Whether that has been successful or not is one matter, but there is a great Rousseauvian streak going through the Founders- do not give quarter to the upper and lower classes alike. Avarice and sloth (in the older sense of the word) is at the heart of things here.

Racial inequality is codified in our oft-mythologized founding legal document. The colonization of the New World was a brutish affair that helped forge attitudes of cultural and racial superiority over savages who God had marked for destruction.

And the Confederacy stood for nothing if not white supremacy and chattel slavery.

[Zack Morris]

The assertion that America is a fundamentally racist nation

the proof is that american blacks from a slavery background do badly, the counter proof is that every other immigrant race seems todo ok or even thrive.

Really, is that so? Other races are thriving? What is your definition of "thriving"? Economic and educational attainment? Then yes, you could say that East and South Asian immigrants, who benefit from selection bias, are thriving. But are they thriving in politics? Are they intermarrying at equivalent rates? Are they depicted favorably in popular culture? Are they condescended to and assumed to be outsiders, even when having lived here for generations?

its beyond absurd, its beyond stupid, the same people who spend their whole lives blathering on about american rascism also proudly state that asians and so forth do better than whites in american institutions. contradictory stupidity without a single braincell involved

Again, depends on what you mean by "better". Asians are racists' favorite example, the "model minority". But just because Asians are believed to be more intelligent by some does not mean that negative stereotypes about their culture, their personalities, or even their intellects (for example, with regards to their "creative" ability or "verbal intelligence") do not abound. Positive stereotypes give racists something to hide behind while simultaneously allowing them to propagate the discredited idea that intelligence varies among races. If Asians are "smarter", then surely blacks and Hispanics can be "dumber".

Asians in the US -- and likely also in Australia and Western Europe -- deal with problems that you've probably never even contemplated, White Man. For starters, consider how Asian women are fetishized and hypersexualized. Don't believe me? Speak with any female Asian American, or Asian Australian.

[Doc]

The assertion that America is a fundamentally racist nation (with the unstated premise being that this racism invalidates us morally and politically) is the old Soviet line and nothing more.

The spectacle of African diplomats being denied service near DC by white business owners was 100% good old-fashioned Americana. The Soviets didn't invent that.

Even at its nastiest and most degrading, racism against blacks (or anybody else for that matter) is not close to being a founding principle. The liberation and rule by the middle classes was always at the heart of endeavor. Whether that has been successful or not is one matter, but there is a great Rousseauvian streak going through the Founders- do not give quarter to the upper and lower classes alike. Avarice and sloth (in the older sense of the word) is at the heart of things here.

Racial inequality is codified in our oft-mythologized founding legal document. The colonization of the New World was a brutish affair that helped forge attitudes of cultural and racial superiority over savages who God had marked for destruction.

And the Confederacy stood for nothing if not white supremacy and chattel slavery.

Which was about money.(as well as the colonization of the world not just the Americas by Europeans) Until slavery paid off due to the cotton gin, there were not so many slaves. The whole Jim Crow thing was about the former plantation owners trying to get back the wealth they lost because they lost the war. There is no economic "need" for slaves today. Time to move on.

[Zack Morris]

That "whole Jim Crow thing" lasted until the 1960's -- well within living memory -- and the deeply-ingrained racist attitudes that sustained it for so long did not simply evaporate within one or two generations. White Southerners hated and feared the black underclass they had created and had no intention of admitting them to their society as equals, hence segregation enforced through decades of terrorism.

The more one learns about this, the more hollow our founding ideals ring. That's why you and your people are so eager to bury this. It's just so unpleasant to grapple with. Let's pretend it doesn't matter anymore -- no skin off your back, after all!

[Doc]

That "whole Jim Crow thing" lasted until the 1960's -- well within living memory -- and the deeply-ingrained racist attitudes that sustained it for so long did not simply evaporate within one or two generations. White Southerners hated and feared the black underclass they had created and had no intention of admitting them to their society as equals, hence segregation enforced through decades of terrorism.

I agree.

The more one learns about this, the more hollow our founding ideals ring. That's why you and your people are so eager to bury this. It's just so unpleasant to grapple with. Let's pretend it doesn't matter anymore -- no skin off your back, after all!

Not what I said at all. Go back and read it again. I said the economic reason for Slavery and Jim Crow no longer exists. Meaning there is really no reason no motivation, outside of ignorance for it to matter. Like I said several times before there is no such thing as "race" That is honestly my view and it is backed up by science.

[Zack Morris]

Not what I said at all. Go back and read it again. I said the economic reason for Slavery and Jim Crow no longer exists. Meaning there is really no reason no motivation, outside of ignorance for it to matter. Like I said several times before there is no such thing as "race" That is honestly my view and it is backed up by science.

I agree there is no economic reason (although it was not long ago that even whites in Northern states saw blacks migrating from the South and taking up factory jobs as a threat to their livelihood) for lingering racism. And of course there is no scientific basis for the social construct of "race", but that doesn't mean that it isn't a deeply rooted and pervasive idea here in America and abroad.

And just because it is rooted in ignorance and abstract, amorphous notions of identity does not mean it will fade away if we stop acknowledging it. Religious conflict, for example, is similarly rooted in ignorance. So is homeopathy. Neither seem to be going away.

[Typhoon]

The assertion that America is a fundamentally racist nation

the proof is that american blacks from a slavery background do badly, the counter proof is that every other immigrant race seems todo ok or even thrive.

Really, is that so? Other races are thriving? What is your definition of "thriving"? Economic and educational attainment? Then yes, you could say that East and South Asian immigrants, who benefit from selection bias, are thriving. But are they thriving in politics? Are they intermarrying at equivalent rates? Are they depicted favorably in popular culture? Are they condescended to and assumed to be outsiders, even when having lived here for generations?

its beyond absurd, its beyond stupid, the same people who spend their whole lives blathering on about american rascism also proudly state that asians and so forth do better than whites in american institutions. contradictory stupidity without a single braincell involved

Again, depends on what you mean by "better". Asians are racists' favorite example, the "model minority". But just because Asians are believed to be more intelligent by some does not mean that negative stereotypes about their culture, their personalities, or even their intellects (for example, with regards to their "creative" ability or "verbal intelligence") do not abound. Positive stereotypes give racists something to hide behind while simultaneously allowing them to propagate the discredited idea that intelligence varies among races. If Asians are "smarter", then surely blacks and Hispanics can be "dumber".

Asians in the US -- and likely also in Australia and Western Europe -- deal with problems that you've probably never even contemplated, White Man. For starters, consider how Asian women are fetishized and hypersexualized. Don't believe me? Speak with any female Asian American, or Asian Australian.

Living in the USA, I could never decide what was more annoying: racism and stereotyping or hypersensitivity to racism and stereotyping.

[Parodite]

Living in the USA, I could never decide what was more annoying: racism and stereotyping or hypersensitivity to racism and stereotyping.

Col thou arth the best.

[Zack Morris]

Living in the USA, I could never decide what was more annoying: racism and stereotyping or hypersensitivity to racism and stereotyping.

Both are extremely annoying. But it's an issue that needs to be dealt with. I should point out that Japan, as with many ethnically homogeneous countries, does not have to deal with the latter because the effects of the former are so strong that Japanese rarely question their own racism and keep minorities out, thereby bypassing the issue of hypersensitivity altogether.

Heterogeneous societies do not have that "luxury", so please excuse the inconvenience: we're trying to build a better tomorrow.

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

I'll start here

.

Would anyone disagree that sex plays a primary role in racism and so many rationalizations surrounding racialist thinking is merely energy spent creating and justifying a preferred sexual hierarchy? It sounds so patently stupid but how many manifestos do we get endlessly explaining the root of racism as everything but this? The best you get is an idea that various mating conditions are symptomatic of racism; but who looks at it as a root cause; well, why not? Racism is present under different economic conditions, different cults, and different degrees of severity; it is a very subjective prejudice and the one objective constant in all of it is that one group polices sexual mores.

.

"NapLajoieonSteroids", you touch a subject that I did not want 2B the initiator

Argument could be made, why racism towards Blacks in America and not towards Latino, or other ethnics/races ? ?

Read that at slavery times, lynching and racism was due to white man's fear of "white woman" sexually attracted to Black man

IMO, this has some validity .. fact that white woman sexually attracted to black man pretty much proven

In France, French Black man have the most beautiful girls, pretty much all French girls crave French Black man .. French Black man could pretty much have sex with any French girl he would want

but

French girls, hate French North Africans (Arabs) .. French girls would not date French North Africans (Arabs)

IMO, there is some valid point to the point that sex plays a role in racism


.

Well, I don't think it's merely sex or attraction- humans are pretty good at being over all of the map with that while rationalizing it all away- but the anxiety attached to the sexual economy, to the mating rituals and mores. It's the difference between how the proclivities of sailors at port are a source of derision or comedy; but a whole fleet with different behaviors is distressing. Going back to the antebellum South, you have a situation where it wasn't unusual for the plantation owners to practice something that could be best described as concubinage in the best scenarios. This coerced concubinage, as read in ex-slave accounts, is often cited as the the principal reason they believe the institution lasted as long as it did. And it wasn't just a male thing: Captain Richard J. Hinton, an abolitionist commander in the Civil War, "I have never found a bright-looking colored man, whose confidences I have won… who has not told me of instances where he has been compelled, either by his mistress, or by white women of the same class, to have connexion with them." What is the mating climate in the Jim Crow south? I get the impression a lot of time and effort spent on policing who puts their private areas where. I've seen a 60% figure for accusations of sexual impropriety accounting for lynching, and a third of those lynched suffering castration and other bodily mutilations.(Though I've also seen it estimated at a much lower 30% by those who argue the issue is otherwise.)

A sense of sexual dishonor and a violation of the mating rules that needs to be rectified instigates very intense situations. Honor killings and vengeance killings are a pretty consistent thing in the record books, right? Economics may start wars and conflicts, and they even exacerbate social disease and discord, but it takes a whole lot more to get a mob to hang the guy who is taking the money than the guy who is accused of touching someone's daughter outside the customary contexts.

Now, I think noddy hit on something with "cultural ruleset." We use these rulesets to keep in check out mimetic desires and the crises they cause. Racialist thinking is an ossified ruleset meant to avoid an original conflict of mating differences and erotic impulses. And these impulses; ephemeral, fragile and constantly shifting as they are- like the farcical characterization of blacks as Bucks (sexually threatening) and Jezebels (sexually deviant) while also being brainless, virginal, childish Sambos at the very same time- are not easy to control or produce a tranquil "ruleset" for; so the scapegoating mechanism quickly become so useless and detached from reality that there is never a floor to how enveloping or dehumanizing the situation can become. And of course, over time, the original purpose of the whole ruleset is forgotten or discarded.

The breakdown goes like this:

Don't sleep with X because they have different mores than us
to
Don't sleep with X; but if you do, it doesn't count in the same way because they are different from us
to
X is different and something other than us.

[YMix]

Even at its nastiest and most degrading, racism against blacks (or anybody else for that matter) is not close to being a founding principle. The liberation and rule by the middle classes was always at the heart of endeavor.

That's New England, not the South.

Many years later, John Randolph of Roanoke summarized his ancestral creed in a sentence: “I am an aristocrat,” he declared, “I love liberty; I hate equality.”

- Albion's Seed, David Hackett Fischer

Which was about money.(as well as the colonization of the world not just the Americas by Europeans)

Not just money.

The development of slavery in Virginia was a complex process—one that cannot be explained simply by an economic imperative. A system of plantation agriculture resting upon slave labor was not the only road to riches for Virginia’s royalist elite. With a little imagination, one may discern a road not taken in southern history. In purely material terms, Virginia might have flourished as did her northern neighbors, solely by complex speculations in land and trade, and by an expansive system of freehold farming. But Virginia’s ruling elite had other aims in mind. For its social purposes, it required an underclass that would remain firmly fixed in its condition of subordination. The culture of the English countryside could not be reproduced in the New World without this rural proletariat. In short, slavery in Virginia had a cultural imperative. Bertram Wyatt-Brown writes, “ … the South was not founded to create slavery; slavery was recruited to perpetuate the South.”

But this solution created another set of problems. The harsh reality of slavery undercut the cultural ideal that it was meant to serve. The result was an elaborate set of subterfuges, in which Virginia planters tried to convince themselves, if no one else, that their peculiar system was little different from that which had existed in rural England. As early as 1727, William Byrd II wrote to the Earl of Orrery, “Our poor negroes are freemen in comparison of the slaves who till your ungenerous soil; at least if slavery consists in scarcity, and hard work.”

Other subterfuges were also resorted to. A slave was rarely called a slave in the American south by his master. Slaves were referred to as “my people,” “my hands,” “my workers,” almost anything but “my slaves.” They were made to dress like English farm workers, to play English folk games, to speak an English country dialect, and to observe the ordinary rituals of English life in a charade that Virginia planters organized with great care.

In the end, these fictions failed to convince even their creators. William Byrd, in a more candid mood, confessed to the Earl of Egmont in 1736 that slavery was a great evil. It was typical of him (and others of his rank) to believe that it was hateful not so much because of its effect on the slave but because of what it did to their masters. “They blow up the pride, and ruin the industry of our white people,” he wrote, “ … another unhappy effect of my negroes is the necessity of being severe.”

William Byrd, in company with many large planters, came to favor a parliamentary prohibition of the slave trade. But this was after his status as a country gentleman was secure. If slavery was not quite what Virginians really wanted, it carried them closer to their conservative utopia than any alternative which lay within reach.

- Albion's Seed, David Hackett Fischer

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

[quote="Doc née NapLajoieOnSteroids"] Even at its nastiest and most degrading, racism against blacks (or anybody else for that matter) is not close to being a founding principle. The liberation and rule by the middle classes was always at the heart of endeavor.

That's New England, not the South.

Many years later, John Randolph of Roanoke summarized his ancestral creed in a sentence: “I am an aristocrat,” he declared, “I love liberty; I hate equality.”

- Albion's Seed, David Hackett Fischer

Doc didn't say that bit, I did. And it was in context of the foundation of the United States as a whole, not just the opinion of the antebellum south.

We all seem to have digessed to a discussion of the antebellum+Jim Crow south, in my case (and I think all of us here really) it is not to minimize the North's racial issues, but to first hammer out opinions on the area where racial issues were most blatant and are one of the stronger bits of evidence for Chomsky's assertion that racism is a founding principle of the whole nation.

That the revolutionary north compromised with the cavalier southerners is well known and could very well support Chomsky's line of thinking. But to get there, we got to start with what exactly was going on down south, what the revolutionaries compromised with, and if it suggests anything about the stated intentions of guys like Franklin for a middle class kingdom with lots of leg room.

[Doc]

Even at its nastiest and most degrading, racism against blacks (or anybody else for that matter) is not close to being a founding principle. The liberation and rule by the middle classes was always at the heart of endeavor.

That's New England, not the South.

Many years later, John Randolph of Roanoke summarized his ancestral creed in a sentence: “I am an aristocrat,” he declared, “I love liberty; I hate equality.”

- Albion's Seed, David Hackett Fischer

Which was about money.(as well as the colonization of the world not just the Americas by Europeans)

Not just money.

The development of slavery in Virginia was a complex process—one that cannot be explained simply by an economic imperative. A system of plantation agriculture resting upon slave labor was not the only road to riches for Virginia’s royalist elite. With a little imagination, one may discern a road not taken in southern history. In purely material terms, Virginia might have flourished as did her northern neighbors, solely by complex speculations in land and trade, and by an expansive system of freehold farming. But Virginia’s ruling elite had other aims in mind. For its social purposes, it required an underclass that would remain firmly fixed in its condition of subordination. The culture of the English countryside could not be reproduced in the New World without this rural proletariat. In short, slavery in Virginia had a cultural imperative. Bertram Wyatt-Brown writes, “ … the South was not founded to create slavery; slavery was recruited to perpetuate the South.”

But this solution created another set of problems. The harsh reality of slavery undercut the cultural ideal that it was meant to serve. The result was an elaborate set of subterfuges, in which Virginia planters tried to convince themselves, if no one else, that their peculiar system was little different from that which had existed in rural England. As early as 1727, William Byrd II wrote to the Earl of Orrery, “Our poor negroes are freemen in comparison of the slaves who till your ungenerous soil; at least if slavery consists in scarcity, and hard work.”

Other subterfuges were also resorted to. A slave was rarely called a slave in the American south by his master. Slaves were referred to as “my people,” “my hands,” “my workers,” almost anything but “my slaves.” They were made to dress like English farm workers, to play English folk games, to speak an English country dialect, and to observe the ordinary rituals of English life in a charade that Virginia planters organized with great care.

In the end, these fictions failed to convince even their creators. William Byrd, in a more candid mood, confessed to the Earl of Egmont in 1736 that slavery was a great evil. It was typical of him (and others of his rank) to believe that it was hateful not so much because of its effect on the slave but because of what it did to their masters. “They blow up the pride, and ruin the industry of our white people,” he wrote, “ … another unhappy effect of my negroes is the necessity of being severe.”

William Byrd, in company with many large planters, came to favor a parliamentary prohibition of the slave trade. But this was after his status as a country gentleman was secure. If slavery was not quite what Virginians really wanted, it carried them closer to their conservative utopia than any alternative which lay within reach.

- Albion's Seed, David Hackett Fischer

It was about Money Ymx. Until the cotton gin created the need for cheap labor slavery was relatively small in comparison before that. Your quote is from the pre cotton gin south.


http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part3/3narr6.html

Growth and Entrenchment of Slavery

This Ginn, if turned with horses or by water, two persons will clean as much cotton in one Day as a Hundred persons could cleane in the same time
- Eli Whitney, inventor of the cotton gin

Although there was some hope immediately after the Revolution that the ideals of independence and equality would extend to the black American population, this hope died with the invention of the cotton gin in 1793. With the gin (short for engine), raw cotton could be quickly cleaned; Suddenly cotton became a profitable crop, transforming the southern economy and changing the dynamics of slavery. The first federal census of 1790 counted 697,897 slaves; by 1810, there were 1.2 million slaves, a 70 percent increase.

Slavery spread from the seaboard to some of the new western territories and states as new cotton fields were planted, and by 1830 it thrived in more than half the continent. Within 10 years after the cotton gin was put into use, the value of the total United States crop leaped from $150,000 to more than $8 million. This success of this plantation crop made it much more difficult for slaves to purchase their freedom or obtain it through the good will of their masters. Cotton became the foundation for the developing textile industry in New England, spurring the industrial revolution which transformed America in the 19th century.

Progress has different meanings for different people. And for people of African descent, the cotton gin was not progress. It was a further entrenchment of enslavement. And for African Americans, the Industrial Revolution, those technological advances in the textile industry, did not mean progress. It meant slavery.
- Margaret Washington, historian

From 1790 to 1810, close to 100,000 slaves moved to the new cotton lands to the south and west. From 1810 until the Civil War, 100,000 slaves were forced westward each decade -- a half million in total. As cotton cultivation spread, slaveholders in the tobacco belt, whose crop was no longer profitable, made huge profits by selling their slaves. This domestic slave trade devastated black families. American-born slaves were torn from the plantations they had known all their lives, placed in shackles and force-marched hundreds of miles away from their loved ones.

[Simple Minded]

Living in the USA, I could never decide what was more annoying: racism and stereotyping or hypersensitivity to racism and stereotyping.

amen.

It is a bizarre business model, kind of a cross between a religious cult and some dragon slayer video game. Breeding dragons and demons so one can get hired as either a dragon slayer, or an exorcist is good work if you can get it.

Racism, gun control, and abortion are the few reliable cash cows for both parties....... and several dozen talking heads....... each is a recession proof form of proselytizing.

Buy American!

"The word 'racism' is like ketchup. It can be put on practically anything - and demanding evidence makes you a 'racist.'" - Thomas Sowell

[Doc]

Not what I said at all. Go back and read it again. I said the economic reason for Slavery and Jim Crow no longer exists. Meaning there is really no reason no motivation, outside of ignorance for it to matter. Like I said several times before there is no such thing as "race" That is honestly my view and it is backed up by science.

I agree there is no economic reason (although it was not long ago that even whites in Northern states saw blacks migrating from the South and taking up factory jobs as a threat to their livelihood) for lingering racism. And of course there is no scientific basis for the social construct of "race", but that doesn't mean that it isn't a deeply rooted and pervasive idea here in America and abroad.

And just because it is rooted in ignorance and abstract, amorphous notions of identity does not mean it will fade away if we stop acknowledging it. Religious conflict, for example, is similarly rooted in ignorance. So is homeopathy. Neither seem to be going away.

I could have sworn I replied to your post Zack

Anyway. I am not saying it magically fade away. Just that it won't get better with the socio-political distract of something that really does not exist rather than concentrating on the real roots of the problems. It is pretty discouraging that the current protests have ended up in violence killing two cops. But when given lemons make lemon aide.

[Doc]

Living in the USA, I could never decide what was more annoying: racism and stereotyping or hypersensitivity to racism and stereotyping.

amen.

It is a bizarre business model, kind of a cross between a religious cult and some dragon slayer video game. Breeding dragons and demons so one can get hired as either a dragon slayer, or an exorcist is good work if you can get it.

Racism, gun control, and abortion are the few reliable cash cows for both parties....... and several dozen talking heads....... each is a recession proof form of proselytizing.

Buy American!

"The word 'racism' is like ketchup. It can be put on practically anything - and demanding evidence makes you a 'racist.'" - Thomas Sowell

Who benefits from "Race" (not who suffers from it) today?

[Simple Minded]

Who benefits from "Race" (not who suffers from it) today?

IMSMO, the people who benefit are the 1%ers who are running the "Big Racism" industry. Compare income.

Paraphrasing a quote that Typhoon's earlier posted: "Getting someone to understand something is difficult if their income depends upon them not understanding it."

I've talked to several older people and asked the question: "Is Michael Brown dead because of his own actions, or because of a racist cop?"

The Old Farts I have spoken to, overwhelmingly say MB is dead due to his own actions, regardless of their skin color. They usually follow it up their answer with "I blame his parents more than I blame the cop who shot him." I would expect many 20/30 somethings to have the opposite answer.

Is the split in perspective racial, regional, or generational?

Based on this and discussions of other topics, the split regarding the concept of "personal responsibility" vs. "societal responsibility" for any given outcome, seems, more often than not, generational.

Thomas Sowell's Conflict of Visions makes a different case.

Regardless of race, nationality, or era, I find that Theodore Dalrymple's thoughts on this and similar subjects are similar to what I have observed during my life.

https://winteryknight.wordpress.com/201 ... -for-free/

http://www.amazon.com/Life-Bottom-World ... E1XM7D7R87

http://www.amazon.com/Our-Culture-Whats ... left+of+it

[YMix]

It was about Money Ymx. Until the cotton gin created the need for cheap labor slavery was relatively small in comparison before that. Your quote is from the pre cotton gin south.

Which probably means that we're talking about a complex subject that doesn't have a single cause (money).

[Doc]

It was about Money Ymx. Until the cotton gin created the need for cheap labor slavery was relatively small in comparison before that. Your quote is from the pre cotton gin south.

Which probably means that we're talking about a complex subject that doesn't have a single cause (money).

If it was not for the money slavery may have ended around 1800.

[Heracleum Persicum]

.


Autopsy Report .. LAPD shot unarmed black man Ezell Ford in back

The autopsy from the coroner’s office, which was released Monday, states that Ford was shot three times: in the right side, in the right back, and in the right arm. The report says the back and side wounds were fatal. The death was classified as a homicide after Ford died in the operating room.

.

[Heracleum Persicum]

2151494_pic_970x641.jpg (87.5 KiB) Viewed 1358 times

[Typhoon]

Living in the USA, I could never decide what was more annoying: racism and stereotyping or hypersensitivity to racism and stereotyping.

amen.

It is a bizarre business model, kind of a cross between a religious cult and some dragon slayer video game. Breeding dragons and demons so one can get hired as either a dragon slayer, or an exorcist is good work if you can get it.

Racism, gun control, and abortion are the few reliable cash cows for both parties....... and several dozen talking heads....... each is a recession proof form of proselytizing.

. . .

All of these issues which arose such emotions are probably almost completely irrelevant to the future long term viability of the USA.

[Simple Minded]

Living in the USA, I could never decide what was more annoying: racism and stereotyping or hypersensitivity to racism and stereotyping.

amen.

It is a bizarre business model, kind of a cross between a religious cult and some dragon slayer video game. Breeding dragons and demons so one can get hired as either a dragon slayer, or an exorcist is good work if you can get it.

Racism, gun control, and abortion are the few reliable cash cows for both parties....... and several dozen talking heads....... each is a recession proof form of proselytizing.

. . .

All of these issues which arose such emotions are probably almost completely irrelevant to the future long term viability of the USA.

Agreed. WWF, MMA fighting, or NASCAR for the sensitive intellectual political elites...... and perhaps the dullest form of reality TV. My apologies to the fans of those three activities for comparing them to politicians and professional crusaders/activists/victims.

All three are personal issues which affect a minuscule percentage of the population at any given moment. Highly subject to Fred the victim's emotional state and interpretation.

I think their primary purpose is that of strawman or red herring. Useful distractions from real problems and crusades to mobilize or herd the useful idiots.

Low budget doomer porn.....

[Heracleum Persicum]

.

.. a National Guard soldier discovered her brother's bullet-riddled mugshot at a gun range last month.

..

No disciplinary action will be taken because no policies were violated, . .

..

Dennis initially defended using the photos for being "vital for facial recognition drills" . .

come on, come on


.