Can Blacks Be Friends With Whites?

Can My Children Be Friends With White People? - The New York Times:

The content of the column is really not that surprising (I'm months behind on my blogging), nor really is the fact that it is published in what was supposed to be the "paper of record" in the old "America" ... the nation that was "Under God", and "endowned by it's creator". We don't live there, this is BOistan.

I do not write this with liberal condescension or glee. My heart is unbearably heavy when I assure you we cannot be friends.

The column is quite standard racial posturing -- forget all the multi-millionaire and even billionaire blacks. Take Oprah ... $2.8 billion and maybe running for president. Somebody is "afraid for their kids" -- we all know that if you live in a major BOistan city and you are white, you sure as hell tell your kids which parts of the city to stay out of entirely, and CERTAINLY after dark!

You may certainly be afraid for your kids if you are black as well -- but by far the most likely way for them to be killed is at the hands of another black!

So how "racist" can a nation that elects a black president (twice), and in which a black female multi-billionaire is considered by many a legitimate candidate for the same office on the basis of one speech on an awards show? Well, according to the author of the times column, VERY! Because, well, TRUMP!

Of course, the rise of this president has broken bonds on all sides. But for people of color the stakes are different. Imagining we can now be friends across this political line is asking us to ignore our safety and that of our children, to abandon personal regard and self-worth.

See Oprah can be an immediate legitimate candidate in the same nation in which Trump being elected means that blacks who imagine they might be "friends" with a white person would be "abandoning personal regard and self-worth". Got that?

This is what counts as "opinion" in the NY Times. Not just a random brain fart in a drunken stupor, but "opinion".

Does this person have any sort of thought that is NOT "liberal condescension"? I have my doubts.
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Karl Popper, Tolerance

Popper’s Paradox And The Corruption Of ‘Tolerance’ - Tom Knighton:

The modern "liberal"  brand lives on fuzzy headed thinking. The linked article exposes a good bit of it relative to "tolerance" and "hate speech".

Tolerance simply means “to tolerate.” Nothing more, nothing less. 

However, leftists seem to believe that tolerance means something more akin to acceptance and celebration.

One need not CELEBRATE a gay "marriage" to toleratre it! Likewise with 58 genders and rising.

According to this columnist, the left then applies the same logic as they look at "Nazis", and consieer "tolerating" Nazis to be "acceptance and celebration" of Nazis, so they validly refuse.

The article points out that actual Nazis and KKK member sorts are exceedingly (and gladly) RARE. They serve largely has an all purpose demon with which to demonize anything that is remotely "right wing" (which of course is another left wing construction that in reality bears no resemblance to the construction) ... in reality, "left" is any form of increasingly totalitarian state control, and "far right" is anarchy. National Socialism ... or the KKK for that matter are very much about CONTROL. Identifying certain groups as "undesireables", removing their rights, and then removing them!

Certainly a free society wants to prevent any ideology that will destroy it -- Islam/Sharia Law, Socialism, Racism, Political Correctness, etc from becoming powerful enough that tolerance is ended. The main risk of that in the US is of the nation becoming a single party state where "The Party" (TP-D) achieves enough dominance that their opposition is demonized to the extent that they can be removed.

As the linked column puts it in closing ...

In other words, Popper had no interest in destroying the right of free speech. He had an interest in preserving a free society, which is precisely what progressives are trying to destroy today. 

So maybe it’s time for liberals to revise their idea of what makes up tolerance, and recognize that you can meet intolerance and combat it, giving it no comfortable place to take root, without becoming the very thing they claim they’re trying to prevent.

What Is A "Democrat"?

Democrats, Then and Now | Power Line:

Founded by slave owner and indian fighter Andrew Jackson in 1828, the Democratic party is the party of Slavery and Jim Crow in the United States. One might say that Democrats have never met a form of slavery they don't like, as today they are quite commonly Socialists, and would have elected one Bernie Sanders, an avowed Socialist, as their presidential standard bearer if the Clinton Crime Family had not rigged their own primary.

At the moment, the Democrat party seems intent on tearing down the statues of their own Civil War heroes, the bulk of which were erected by Democrats in the Jim Crow south, or it's border states. The current Democrat Minority Leader in the House, Nancy Pelosi's father erected some nice ones in Baltimore that the linked article points out as now being part of Democrat history that they would like to erase.

Barack (BO) Obama was president from '09-'16 (the mourning goes on) and from '07-'10, Ms Pelosi was Speaker of the House -- somehow, neither Nancy or BO ever managed to mention that any sort of Civil War statue was worthy of any concern ... let alone being removed.

Democrats, which I call "The Party" (TP-D) since much like the old Communist Party in the USSR, they dominate the vast Administrative / Deep State where the real government power is at today, academia, the proffessions, finance, the wealthy, corporate CEOs, and of course the media --  both the admitted fake Hollywood entertainment sort, and the "stealth Fake" supposed left wing "news". Since they are so dominate, their whim of the moment is always made to sound like brilliant wisdom falling from heaven -- or more likely in their case, an official howl from Satan himself, since Democrats are not very oriented to anything about God and Heaven!

"Memory", or "consistency" are terms which Democrats simply don't consider of any use --- OK, so they supported slavery, created and presided over Jim Crow, founded the the KKK, put up all the statues honoring confederates in the first place, and up until very recently, they could care less about any of it. So? They suddenly decided it was politically expedient to tear them down. You didn't really expect them to honor any sort of historical memory or consistency did you? What part of "we make the rules and you just kneel" is it that you have failed to understand?

Making a "deal" with a Democrat is somewhat the same as making a deal with the Devil -- in fact, I suspect Satan is a tad more reliable. At least you ALWAYS know he is going the evil route -- in the case of Democrats, they will do ANYTHING to gain power -- even the occasional "good deed":

The idea that they have suddenly decided that their own statues are "bad" is a great example of how the Democrat mind works -- POWER, POWER, POWER!

It really is that simple!

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Charlottesville, Alt-Right, How To Think

An Establishment Conservative's Guide To The Alt-Right - Breitbart:

As an avid NPR listener, I DO know how I am SUPPOSED to think about Charlottesville. Charlottesville is FINALLY the turning point for Trump. It unmasks him completely as the racist he has always been and shows once and for all that conservatism is racism! It's SIMPLE, as the positions of NPR tend to be -- oh, and if you refuse to agree with this obvious truth, then you too are a RACIST -- end of story. There are correct thinking progressives -- Democrats, the MSM, etc, and then there are the racists. We live in a very simple and easy to understand world -- at least for the standard NPR listener.

The linked article gets long, but it can be summarized in a valid fashion pretty easily -- you won't get it all from here, but you will get the sense of it.

The ALT-right is the modern equivalent of the campus radical left "Weathermen", etc from the 1960's. Acolytes of Saul Alinsky -- rebel revolutionaries and faux revolutionaries like Tom Hayden, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama (Obama worked as a "Community Organizer", the main foot soldier in the Alinsky revolutionary vision). The key words are YOUNG, radical and transgressive ... as the young often are.

The '60's lefty revolutionaries grew up and became Senators, Presidents and such -- somewhat less rabid than when they were young, but still with the same far left views. The left grew up, suffered under Reagan, then mostly took over the levers of power and gave us a stagnant economy, gay "marriage" and gender confusion -- not everyone was excited about these developments, so now the youth are "Alt-Right".

These young rebels, a subset of the alt-right, aren’t drawn to it because of an intellectual awakening, or because they’re instinctively conservative. Ironically, they’re drawn to the alt-right for the same reason that young Baby Boomers were drawn to the New Left in the 1960s: because it promises fun, transgression, and a challenge to social norms they just don’t understand.

Of course, just as was the case in history, the parents and grandparents just won’t understand, man. That’s down to the age difference. Millennials aren’t old enough to remember the Second World War or the horrors of the Holocaust. They are barely old enough to remember Rwanda or 9/11. Racism, for them, is a monster under the bed, a story told by their parents to frighten them into being good little children.

Naturally, the dried up leftist old fogies like Hillary, BO, Bernie, Nancy and their buddies at all the major news outlets want to go as negative as they possibly can on the Alt-Right, so it is important for them to link the group with skinheads, National Socialists, white supremacists, etc, and those groups of course DO exist, just like the Black Panthers, Students For a Democratic Society, SLA (kidnapped Patty Hearst), Charlie Manson, etc existed in the '60s ... and the "right" attempted to tie them to the general anti-war, peace, free love movement. (when the media is on the other side, it never works)

Repudiating National Socialists, skinheads and actual white supremacists is great and correct. We don't want to be like the left is with "Black Lives Matter", Nation of Islam and Islam itself. BLM is obviously a black racist group that needed to be repudiated from the left a thousand times over, but of course it has not been. Likewise, the difficulty which BO had with uttering the term "Islamic Terrorism" would be funny if it were not so sad.

The problem is that since the left media is dominant, and the left are EXPERTS at identity politics, Trump is on very dangerous ground here. He would have been FAR better off sticking with his initial statement about "ALL SIDES".  Absent the old world of actual principle -- eg. "we all revere God, Country, the Constitution, Apple Pie and Chevrolet", the "burn your bad actor "allies"" strategy is only demanded of one side. BO can cozy up to BLM even when they are yelling "Pigs in blankets, fry em like bacon!" with no MSM outcry to "repudiate BLM"!.  (why would the media want to repudiate BLM? they are on the same side!!!) In a world with no actual shared values, WINNING is the only "value" that counts.

Racism is indeed wrong, although it is inherent in the human condition. "White Privilege" is the current black equivalent of calling whites the equivalent of the N-word. Every white has it, they can't escape it, it is evil, it invalidates whites, etc ... They are a bunch of white N-words! We all have racism in our DNA -- the magic for the left is to be allowed to use it for their side BOTH to make their own identity groups (BLM) feel superior, but to label the other side as "bad racist", while blacks braying about "white privilege" have "dog whistle privilege".

So what is a "true conservative", the sort that has values beyond economic success to do? The article covers the "true conservative" (they call it "natural conservative") definition pretty well.

 For natural conservatives, culture, not economic efficiency, is the paramount value. More specifically, they value the greatest cultural expressions of their tribe. Their perfect society does not necessarily produce a soaring GDP, but it does produce symphonies, basilicas and Old Masters. The natural conservative tendency within the alt-right points to these apotheoses of western European culture and declares them valuable and worth preserving and protecting."


Needless to say, natural conservatives’ concern with the flourishing of their own culture comes up against an intractable nemesis in the regressive left, which is currently intent on tearing down statues of Cecil Rhodes and Queen Victoria in the UK, and erasing the name of Woodrow Wilson from Princeton in the U.S. These attempts to scrub western history of its great figures are particularly galling to the alt-right, who in addition to the preservation of western culture, care deeply about heroes and heroic virtues.

So the Alt-Right has a strongly shared value with "natural conservatives" -- which is likely why we more natural conservatives are reticent to throw the whole Alt Right movement out with the bad apples travelling with them.  We are perfectly willing to repudiate David Duke, skinheads, National (and other) Socialists, but draw the line at tarring the whole Alt-Right with that broad brush.

The left OTOH, won't even repudiate BLM -- let alone tar NAACP, Black Caucus, "White Privilege" intellectuals,  etc with a validly repudiated negative label! In fact, they cowtow to BLM because they know how identity politics is played! Repudiation rhetoric is for SUCKERS -- which means Republicans to them.

I found this paragraph to be very intriguing:

Some alt-righters make a more subtle argument. They say that when different groups are brought together, the common culture starts to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Instead of mosques or English houses, you get atheism and stucco.

Sadly, this is often the case. Decide you want "Christian Unity", and soon you have women ministers, gay ministers, ministers that can't tell you what they are, atheist ministers, no historical Jesus ministers, etc, etc. As long as America was a "melting pot" where everyone signed up for AMERICAN values -- hard work, self-reliance, reverence for the Constitution, Christianity, speaking English, etc, etc (ie. "American Culture"), it was fine to be an "Italian AMERICAN" who did some different dances, drank some different wines, and served some tasty food -- but spoke English and revered America.

The current sort of BOistani balkanization is more like the Italians would own a section of the city, speak Italian, throw out non-Italians,  and the Mafia would be in charge -- and that was OK, cuz it was "their culture", and there was no thought that there was any sort of "American culture". (why would there be? We live in BOistan).

If the left Davos elite succeeds in defeating Trump,  natural conservatives and assorted disenfranchised Christians, workers, misfits and hangers on (the likely outcome), the Alt-Right will be less than a footnote in a few years. 

**IF** however by some amazing luck, act of God, etc, "America" -- or something like it rises from the swampy wasteland of BOistan, then the Alt-Right likely contains the leaders of the future -- 30, 40, even 50 years in the future, as the Alisky left contained the leaders of today's now "mainstream left" -- even including avowed socialists like Bernie. 

Will Natural Conservatives stick around as researchers like Haidt would say they must because the position is "wired in" to everyone ... and dominant in many? 

The conservative instinct, as described by Haidt,includes a preference for homogeneity over diversity, for stability over change, and for hierarchy and order over radical egalitarianism. Their instinctive wariness of the foreign and the unfamiliar is an instinct that we all share – an evolutionary safeguard against excessive, potentially perilous curiosity – but natural conservatives feel it with more intensity. They instinctively prefer familiar societies, familiar norms, and familiar institutions.

At one level, all humans want to "go home". I argue that "home" is actually Heaven (and the Garden of Eden), and the evolutionary psychology ideas of "Darwin's Cathedral" are VERY specialized wishful materialist imagination. Christ is the difference that allows Christian Conservatives to make the best attempt in world history at actually loving their enemies and viewing history / reality through the transcendent eyes of eternity.

Or we may just be deplorable white privileged racists as the left has confidently labeled us.

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Blackout! Thomas, Sowell, Williams

The Shameful Blackout of Thomas, Sowell and Williams - Larry Elder:

All three of these black men are giants among men -- of ANY color! Their intellect, their character, their ability to communicate and their accomplishments put them in a position where all three ought to be role models for millions of young people of any color, and especially blacks.

Why are they not recognized? Because they are CONSERVATIVE thinkers, and to be a brilliant conservative black man is something that the plantation owners of "The Party" (TP-D) simply do not allow! You will speak as your TP masters tell you to speak, and if you do not, they will marginalize you!

The bottom line of TP is that "diversity" is wonderful for the left as long as it is racial or sexual.

When it is diversity of IDEAS as in there being at least two sides to nearly every discussion, well, that is NOT something that TP wants people to hear!

To have a brilliant black man be able to defend conservative positions to any audience no matter how learned? No way! TP is angry that such men exist!

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Southern Poverty Hate Center

Has a Civil Rights Stalwart Lost Its Way? - POLITICO Magazine:

For regular listeners of Public Radio, "The Souther Poverty Law Center" (SPLC) is a purveyor of holy writ on "hate groups". As the article covers, The Family Research Council, a prominent Christian non-profit has been labled a hate group since 2010 because they have failed to cheer for gay "marriage" and 57 fluid genders. There are a lot of prominent racists and nazis in this country according to the SPLC. For example:

The SPLC has included Senator Rand Paul and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson among the neo-Nazis and white supremacists on its extremists lists

The hate label is a powerful weapon used by the left, and the SPLC is pretty much supreme court of handing out the hate label. "Thou must be suitibly "progressive" or thou shall be branded with a scarlet H and cast into outer darkness".

Good column ... founded by a direct marketer, 250 staffers, big fancy building, $200 million endowment ... being "moral" pays well on the left. Naturally the group is a 501c3 and unabashedly attacks anything conservative. Well, I guess that is just one more thing they have in common with NPR.

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Race vs Civilization, Steve King

Rep. Steve King says his ‘somebody else’s babies’ tweet isn’t ‘about race.’ Except with King, it’s almost always about race. - The Washington Post:

The linked article is a dedicated attempt to mark Steve King as a "racist", and therefore silence his voice, or at least make it "bad". The chief offending comment for this attempt is "our civilization can't be restored with “somebody else's babies”" ... but they dig some other comments out as well.

First of all, what is "our civilization"? I'd argue it is WESTERN civilization ... Greek, Roman, Christian, Enlightenment, Reformation, etc. Assuming THAT is what he means, what is "somebody else's babies"?

To me that would mean babies from people that don't share that civilization -- they aren't Christian, don't know about Greece, Rome, etc -- or at least don't subscribe to what at least once were the tenets of Western civilization -- free speech, private property, rule of law, ordered universe understandable by man (science), etc

Creatures can carry on their SPECIES and differences in the species -- like race, merely by propagation of genetic material. That however is not supposed to be a "civilization", or even a "culture". Humans want to pass on their culture / civilization to their children -- or at least the ones not in dying cultures and civilizations wanted to.

One of the other "racist" things he said was “The idea that every culture is equal is not objectively true,”. Obviously, it is racist to claim that there are value differences between cultures. The Nazi culture would be equal to the San Francisco hipster culture, which is equal to the culture in deeply red Emmetsburg IA where I spent the weekend, and also equal to a culture of cannibals in Borneo. To not agree with that is simply "racist" -- or maybe "culturalist"?

Here is what Thomas Sowell has to say on the topic (in a great column BTW). "There is no economic determinism. People choose what to spend their money on, and what to spend their time on. Cultures differ." Sowell is an intellectual giant who happens to be black ... so it isn't as important for the WaPo to lable him "racist" for having the same view as King.

We know that, much like climate change, this racist label is not up for "debate", because ... well, because we have been TOLD !

King's influence on the Republican Party and American culture writ large is something to be debated. But whether King's comments are about race is not up for debate.

In the world view of the WaPo, race and civilization or culture are totally equivalent, and thus, obviously totally EQUAL ... as in Nazi, Hipster and Cannibal culture being equal.

Our betters are so intelligent it is hard to imagine why a bunch of hick Emmetsburg IA folks would disagree with them and vote for King and Trump! The gall! And AFTER they have been TOLD!


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Tim Scott, Black Republican Senator on Tolerance

There is nothing very surprising about the video -- I prefer text, but very little reporting has been done on this from any source, left or right. What I learned from it was this:

1. Scott has the ONLY black chief of staff in the US Senate. 
2. Scott is one of three black Senators in the current US Senate (I looked this up) , here is one of the others ... I'll let you make you make your own determination on her "level of blackness"
   
   
   
3. He was nice enough to not read the ones that had the "N word" in them
4. The media is a lot more concerned about what happens to Faux Native American left wing women Senators than they are about Republican Black male Senators. 

Political Psychology

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/what-is-he-thinking/201612/the-decline-empathy-and-the-appeal-right-wing-politics

Readers of this blog will generally lose interest well before the end of the linked Psychology Today article and throw up their hands. They aren't wrong, the article is a great example of the depth of the difference in world view that we face in BOistan, but I soldiered on.

One of our giant problems is the loss of philosophy and the attempt to replace it with psuedoscience. Science about creating hypotheiss and MEASUREING results. If it can't be measured, it isn't science. Science can't recognize human consciousness, love, empathy or beauty because they can't be measured.

The "soft sciences" like Psychology, Political Science, Anthropology, etc use statistics which is a branch of mathametics, a TOOL of science (which is also a tool) to give itself the patina of "scientific authority". Scienfic authority itself is a complicated subject -- "works as designed so far with no promises for the future" is the authority. Much like the turkey two days before Thanksgiving giving a 99.999% statistical confidence interval to the assertion that "humans are benevolent creatures that care for turkeys", sometimes there can be surprises in the future.

The purpose of the article is really accomplished in the headline "right bad/childish/foolish/etc", left good/adult/smart/.etc" ... "proven by science"! So lots of ink is wasted on "empathy", "still faces" (uncaring people), family stress, inequality, etc until we get to this fine paragraph.

The right-wing media machine, one that has reached its zenith in the Trump campaign, has stoked the fires of the scapegoating reflex that always seems to lie just beneath the surface of the psyches of victimized whites. Thus, it’s important to pause and recognize that the propagandistic xenophobia of the Right has helped propagate the deep story that Hochschild so empathetically tells.

The "deep story" is that the middle class feels like the US economy isn't moving and that minorities and even "environmental concerns" are "cutting in line" ahead of them. As the above paragraph indicates, they have been "manipulated". The following paragraph lets us know that Robin Hood, Jesse Jackson and Bernie Sanders have the answer, one must "take from the greedah and give to the needah".

Wilkinson and Pickett’s research on the harmful effects of economic inequality should force us to make redistribution the centerpiece of our political program, just as it was for Bernie Sanders. Their research clearly shows us that greater equality itself can ameliorate a wide range of suffering. And the fact that our society disconnects us from each other means that we have to seek common ground with the people on the other side of what Hochschild calls the “empathy wall” and communicate to them that we not only feel their pain, but share it, and that, in the end, we are all in this together.

This sort of writing is not all that interested in much in the way of "facts" (to the extent that such things exist anymore outside the domain of the hard sciences). Income inequality has been going up since the early '80s no matter which political party was in power. The following chart from here.

Our eyes are of course drawn to the red top line, and the headlines admonish us to look there. Let's just not be manipulated for a moment and consider if how Stephan Curry or Lebron James play basketball has much to do with the rest of us. Look at the blue, tan, and yellow lines. First, they are NOT correlated with the red! The fortunes of the 1% rose and fell with primarily the stock market. Were we to look at the blue, we would likely find that stocks were also a component of their fortunes.

THE BIG NEWS looking at this chart ought to be that Trump and his primary supporters are RIGHT!  Whatever policies have been initiated and maintained since '80 have resulted in middle 60% and the bottom 20% having nearly identical economic results for the past 35 years! Is that what we want to see?

Why do we NOT want to see the bottom 20% stay at inflation adjusted flat income? Would we not rather see the 60% grow a little more showing some incentive for work?

My purpose here is not to go into economic policy, but to point out what I see on a regular basis by exposing myself to the MSM.

• "science" is regularly trotted out to support left wing ideas without so much as a tiny shred of factual data being shown.
  
• the left constantly tells themselves that "the 1%" and the "right wing" are the problem, which factual data shows to be completely wrong.
  
  The 1% is pretty much disconnected from the rest of the population -- they are CEOs, financiers, movie stars, sports heros, the Clintons,  etc ... their lives are not the lives of the other 99%, nor will they ever be. Here, in North Korea, China, Cuba, or anywhere.
  
  Most of the trends of the last 35+ years continue through all types of poltical administration. Technology may be driving them. Poltical decisions made prior to 1980 might be driving them (mass immigration, FICA, Medicare, welfare, etc), or something we are not seeing -- but the answer really doesn't appear to be either the 1% or the right wing.
  
• Previous bullet notwithstanding, the left wing position of "the 1% and the right wing" is loud and CONSTANT. The MSM and "The Party" (TP-D) certainly at least seems to believe it fervently. For many on the left, this belief is as strong as any religious belief held in any world religion, because it IS a religious belief in Secular Humanism. 

Knowing Your Whites

President Obama's Faith in White America is Misguided - The Atlantic:

A good article to understand the view of at least a significant number of blacks in BOistan.

In this milieu we, as a friend once described it, know our whites. To know our whites is to understand the psychology of white people and the elasticity of whiteness. It is to be intimate with some white persons but to critically withhold faith in white people categorically. It is to anticipate white people’s emotions and fears and grievances because their issues are singularly our problem. To know our whites is to survive without letting bitterness rot your soul.

No racism or stereotyping there! Or in the following -- turns out that whites got to BO.

White people’s attitudes, the contradictions of their racial identities and class consciousness, made Obama. Obama did not make them.

I think we get down to brass tacks in the following. "reparations" -- the sine qua non (essential condition, the required part) of "ending racism" in the US. "Somehow" giving the deserved upper hand to blacks because they "earned it" because of slavery.

My first black president seems to think that he can raise his daughters to believe in systemic racism without legitimizing the idea of systemic reparations.

My first black president seems to think he can have black cool without black burden. For all his intimacies with his white mother and white grandparents, my first black president doesn’t appear to know his whites.

Knowing your whites is knowing that they are dishonest, out for themselves, priviliged. Blacks on the other hand only want JUSTICE -- everything whites ever got was through corruption and privilege, so the only way for there to be justice is for the roles to essentially be reversed -- blacks have been earning whites living forever, while whites do nothing. It is time to for the reverse -- "reparations", which is synonymous with "justice".

So we come to the following assessment of "whiteness":

Those of us who know our whites know one thing above all else: whiteness defends itself. Against change, against progress, against hope, against black dignity, against black lives, against reason, against truth, against facts, against native claims, against its own laws and customs.

Whiteness can't be changed -- and the only change that matters is REPARATIONS! That is what is embedded in the litany above -- reparations are reasonable, the truth is that that they are required, that is also the FACT ... they are a "native claim" (in an odd way).

My answer to this is to look at Clarence Thomas, Condoleeza Rice, Thomas Sowell, Ben Carson, or even Barack Obama. It **IS** actually possible for blacks to make it in a "white man's world" -- but waiting for reparations isn't the way to do it. The WORST thing for blacks would be reparations -- it would be the black inner city X 1000. The more money that was showered on them, the worse their lives would become.

The sad part of all this is that Western Christian values -- personal responsibility, delayed gratification, stable families, belief in transcendent principles (and almost always God), classical education, etc, ACTUALLY WORK! Those values are fully colorblind -- both Abraham and Jesus were more black than white. Money and poverty are symptoms of ideas, ideas are the causal element.

Lots of luck spreading that message to the author of the linked column.

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Reason Is White

Looking 'White' In the Face - The New York Times:

I've got to hear a lot of African Studies, NAACP and Black Lives Matter people talk on MPR in the last year. The following is from a white PHD of philosophy and religion at east coast schools like Villanova.

I think that what modern philosophers call “pure” reason — the Cartesian ego cogito and Kant’s transcendental consciousness — is a white male Euro-Christian construction.

To the extent that the Greeks, Romans and Jews are "white", that would be a correct statement.

Given that racial assumption, Western Civilization is "white".

The author uses the following rather obtuse paragraph to make the claim that "race is destiny" -- who you are, how you turn out, are all determined by your race.

Were I there, there would be “here.” That is a simple thought whose depth we never plumb. In my own work I cite it frequently to criticize the idea of “the one true religion.” We have seven grandchildren and when the last one was born I remember thinking that a little black child was also being born that day, as dear and innocent as our granddaughter, who was going home to a desperate situation where the odds will be stacked against her. We begin with an originary natal equality and then we crush it. “Switched at birth” stories, like Mark Twain’s “The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson,” have a deep ethical and political import. Were I there, there would be here. That should transform everything.

If he was correct, the planet would be a homogenous tribal culture devoid of philosophy, science, technology, etc. How you were born would be your destiny and "progress" would be an unknown term -- like the English language, nations like England, writing, etc.

Clarence Thomas, Ben Carson, Condoleezza Rice, Washington Carver, Martin Luther King, Thomas Sowell, and uncounted other blacks would not exist, because "race would be destiny". I submit that we do not live in that world

People who try to walk a mile in the shoes of the other, to live among and dedicate their lives to working with the oppressed, are also sensitive to the fact of their own privilege. They know they can never truly identify with them. They understand this paradox but it doesn’t paralyze them. This problem also comes up in Christian theology — God intentionally assumed our mortal condition but it wasn’t an inescapable plight visited upon the divine being without its consent.

One of the most cherished aspects of the left is the paradox of the "victim without choice". Blacks are asserted to have no choice, and no chance. Similarly, whites always have "privilege" -- they created the entire framework of the modern world -- the very concept of reason itself. Even God is denied the power to save -- he had a choice, so can't be a "true victim" in the universe created by the professor.

I came to philosophy through religion and theology and as a result philosophy has always had a salvific and prophetic quality for me. It has always been a way to save myself, even as in antiquity philosophy did not mean an academic specialty but a way of living wisely.

God and creation are denied -- free will is very nearly denied, yet somehow, miraculously, the author arrives at the power to "save himself" -- to be his own ultimate, to be his own god.

Postmodernism -- a rather long word for insanity.

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Headlining Black Voter Turnout

The image below  is a screen grab from Google News this AM as the "top story".

We know that far more unarmed and armed whites are killed by police,  but that isn't the narrative here. "An unarmed black man is 2.5x times more likely to be killed by police than a white man".

What headlines do is make you forget PERSPECTIVE. Two hundred and fifty thousand Americans are thought to die each year due to medical errors. Not likely to see any headlines about that.

The linked article says that in a year and a half, 1,500 TOTAL people were shot and killed by police, so you have roughly a 200x chance of dying of a medical error vs having the police shoot and kill you. Clearly, if you were "rational" (according to TP), you ought to be FAR more concerned about dying from a medical error than of being shot by police ... black, yellow, white, lime green, or whatever.

But what you need to pay attention to is what "The Party" (TP-D) WANTS you to think. On terrorism, they work fairly hard to let you know that "in perspective", you have "more chance of furniture falling on you" than you do of dying in a terrorist attack. We are somewhat regularly told how irrational it is to be concerned about terrorism, while TP and their media arm ACTIVELY wants to give you the perception that police shooting blacks is a HUGE problem!

As we cover in this blog regularly, they are doing this because they have an agenda -- they want to control you, and they know that humans are bad at math, driven by emotion, and prone to believe what others say to them ... especially if the "others" are seen as "authority".

We all have parents, who are our first authority, then teachers, then bosses, then wives (well, close to half of us) ... so we are used to being told what to do, and in general we are compliant. Even better (if you are TP or Trump), we tend not to think about what we are being influenced by. We just "have a feeling" that something is badly wrong relative to police shootings of blacks, and the problem is racist police.

What is really going on here is BO and Hildebeast working to get the black vote energized and out. BO has stated that it would be a "personal insult" if they did not turn out. Black votes are critical because they are the "fuel" for the big city fraud machines that are a major part of TP "winning" elections.

Their VOTES matter to TP, but their LIVES do not -- else TP would be FAR more worried about the chances of a black man being killed by another black man, but that does not fit their narrative. In fact, the big cities where that black on black violence happens are all under TP control and the policies of TP keep the violent cycle going. Which is just FINE with TP, because it is POWER, not anyone's life about which they care.