Black Lives Matter

Look who's acting not like an adult. What snide comment did I make about you?

Meanwhile: back at the ranch and on topic:

Sign vandalized at Mizzou’s black culture center amid racial tension on campus
Source: WaPo

A sign at the University of Missouri’s black culture center was reportedly vandalized overnight, becoming the latest in a string of racially charged incidents on the campus this week.

The Gaines/Oldham Black Culture Center sign was damaged at around 12:48 a.m. on Thursday, University of Missouri police said in a news release. Part of the sign was covered with spray paint, authorities said; The Maneater, Missouri’s student newspaper, posted a photo of the vandalism.

The University of Missouri police said that authorities would review security footage during the investigation, which is ongoing.

“Safety and security of our students is our top priority, and we are investigating all crimes as they are reported to us,” MUPD chief Doug Schwandt said in a news release. “We are receiving assistance from the Missouri State Highway Patrol and will continue to have an increased security presence on campus for the foreseeable future.”

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2015/11/12/sign-vandalized-at-mizzous-black-culture-center-amid-racial-tension-on-campus/?tid=sm_tw

Jesus Christ, BOB is seriously reporting on small act of graffiti as something that I should care about? When I see so much of it?

OK, show me a pic, I guess there is a chance it is something worth my time, for instance if " part of the sign was covered with spray paint" means that someone painted a swastika on it. Notice the imprecise language which makes in impossible for us to judge the magnitude of what was done. I promise you that this is on purpose. Which is a good hint that it is something minor that we should not care about but that it none the less can be woven into the story that the " journalists" want to tell.

Holy **** - no-one I've seen uses that definition of empathy. Complete straw man. But, by way explanation, because empathy has many definitions, I mean it as in 'being able to imagine yourself in someone else's place and imagine how their personal histories might not allow them to turn out exactly like you'.



Wow - tangential rant.

I'm talking about acknowledging the situation disadvantaged groups find themselves in, not through any fault of their own, but through generational circumstances.

You and Hawk on the other hand appear to think everyone should be just like you even though they weren't born into your family with your upbringing and life experiences so you can feel comforted in denying them any sort of natural justice, and in fact blame them for the situation they're in because, somehow, acknowledging there are issues beyond personal responsibility is some sort of affront to your reality.

I've never understood that mindset, but there's plenty of it on A2K.

I have been accused of lack of empathy. What is the evidence, walk us through the theory.

That just means that not buying the victim story being told means that we are not empathetic and we suck. Never mind why we dont buy it, it is not important, what is important is that victims be believed, that we agree that they are right, as the feminists never tire of telling us.

Back the **** up and lets evaluate the legitimacy of the victim story.

Bob also reported that two white students once upon a time during black history month placed cotton balls in front of the black students center and his complain was they was allowed to plea out to littering only.

I love to find out what punishment fit such a "serous" crime, perhaps hanging.would do?

Oh? Hawkeye had you read some of the complains the black students have on the MU campus, such as other students looking at them when the subject of race come up in classrooms for special insights or how non-blacks assume that even black students from solid middle or above backgrounds can related to the culture of poor ghetto blacks.

Or the rare events like some drunk yelling racial insults as he drive by a group of black students.

All in all my reaction is this kind of behaviors while annoying hardly seems to reach the level of needing or calling for massive protests and forcing out the president of the university.

The whole thing seems to be an over the top reaction.

That you oppose affirmative action in higher ed because of failure rates. What are you saying to those 36% who do graduate from public universities? "**** you, unless you can get another 8% of your black asses to graduate, so your numbers look more white"?

You dont pay attention do you. I am saying that university admission should come by way of merit, and a huge part of merit is being able to finish the program, and low black graduation rates plus admissions telling us that they admit many more blacks that merit justifies because they like to see blacks walking around campus means that we should cut back on the number of blacks that we let in. I hear a lot of bleeding hearts about how bad blacks have it, and I see it being used to justify hurting blacks by letting them take student loans when we have a long history of data that indicates they will not have a college degree to support it is wack.

Going to college is no way better than them owning a house is if they never had the merit to achieve those goals. The data proves it. There is no even half way decent argument on the other side. But tell you what hinge, why dont you do your best to come up with one and let us be the judge.

Like I've said a few times (and thought a lot) it's almost like you, and your ilk, think you lose something if you acknowledge that someone was dealt a worse hand than you. And god forbid anyone should try and stick more cards in the poor bastards' hands without giving you some too.

Maybe you just hate someone else getting attention? Thus my reference to narcissism earlier.

I am not a R but you do understand that the R argument is that cards need to be earned except in some limited special cases, and the special case expiration date for blacks has passed because they have been handed a lot of cards over a lot of years and those who are taking these cards we pay for now seem to have zero interest in learning how to play those cards. They would rather gangbang, yell that the cops suck, yell that whites suck and we owe them big, do just about anything else rather than school. Lately they have been saying MLK was wrong and the Black Panthers were right, I have a problem with that too.

All my life we have been coming up with special programs to give blacks more advantage, but the paybacks have been getting weaker for a long time. At some point we need to get our head around the fact that continual failure to thrive in spite of extraordinary assistance has to boil down to either lack of trying or a lack of ability brought about by bad genetics.

I know this offends you. Get over it unless you cant show where I am wrong. The universe does not give a **** about what you like. Carrots eventually wear out, sticks are needed, and I am of the opinion that it is time for the stick of standards of performance. No work no eat is fine with me.Again this offends you. I dont care. Prove me wrong or move along to an argument you can win.

Let see so all citizens with black skins should be assume to had been given such a bad hand in life that they should not need to competed on a level playing field with the rest of society?

Let see my mixed race two step daughters both have earn degrees, one of them having a master degree and their black father was a college professor and their mother hold a PhD and did hold a very high government job indeed.

So they had a bad hand given to them due to their skin color and needed help completing with the sons and daughters of white auto-mechanic and such?

I have no problem granting special help and aid to those from poor families and poor school systems and such but the granting of such benefits base on skin color alone is as racist as racist can be as it assume that skin color is all important, just as the racist whites did in the 1950s.

This isn't a D's vs R's conversation. Really. But I will get back to you later on the rest. Really busy right now. Promise.

Merit based help would look at the individual, what they have done, what they need to be successful, is this person worthy of any more investment....I cant think of a single reason why we have to think in terms of genetic pool of the individual.

PM me if I dont seem to see it, I dont catch everything.

The fact you can't even imagine how anyone might suggest you have no empathy, even incorrectly. That my friend is one unempathetic comment right there. You can't even imagine how one person on this planet might think you unempathetic.



You don't have to 'buy' a 'victim's' story to be empathetic towards the alleged victim, nonce.

The rest of your nasty little screed? Its just a nasty little screed. I understand it and why you threw that poop onto the wall. But in the end its still poop.

You certainly are forgiving of other people's racist hate speech. "Professional Courtesy"?

I remember this movie comedy/romance concerning a poor white student that found out that a large university [Yale?] was offering a scholarship to the most qualify black person in his area.

He got a hold of some drug that turn his skin very dark and won that scholarship as a black man.

He found himself in love with a black woman student and with her help came to see how wrong it was to take that scholarship.

Happy ending as he turn himself in and still got to go to the University and end up with his black love as a white man.

I frankly miss what moral wrong he did as granting a scholarship base of race or not granting that scholarship base on race instead of merit or economic needs far out weight his misdeed of fooling the university concerning his "race"..

PS does anyone remember the name of that movie?

The Black Bogeyman Cometh

By Jamil Smith at the New Republic

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/123400/republican-party-black-bogeyman-cometh

"SNIP.............

That’s a step beyond the utterly baseless “Ferguson Effect” theory, first referenced by St. Louis police chief Sam Dotson and embraced by Christie and Senator Ted Cruz, among other Republicans. It holds that increased scrutiny of and protest against police brutality is causing officers to be too reticent in their duties, resulting in an increase in crime—or, as Christie called it on Morning Joe, "the lawlessness that’s been encouraged by the president of the United States." It will be difficult to turn the Ferguson Effect into a Willie Horton equivalent, though—a fact highlighted last week when the “war on cops” narrative backfired. You might have heard about the Fox Lake, Illinois, police lieutenant whose recent shooting death was blamed on Black Lives Matter by various politicians and conservative media outlets? Well, we learned last week that he actually killed himself in a cockamamie plot to hide his own crimes. That officer wasn’t alone, either; at least two other cops have recently turned guns on themselves and fabricated shooters from their imaginations. It is fortunate that no innocent civilian was harmed or killed in the resulting manhunts for ghosts.

I can’t predict what kind of horrors the police will perpetrate in the coming election year. But I doubt that Republicans will find the Black Lives Matter movement to be an effective spook (pardon the double entendre)—it lacks the power and simplicity of a focus on a single criminal who stands for all things scary and non-white. The Republican candidates—particularly Trump—have already tried exploiting the shooting death of a young white woman in San Francisco as a symbol of what’s wrong with immigration, because her killer was an undocumented man born in Mexico. But so far, the killer's name has not entered the national discourse like Horton's.

A bogeyman with the potentcy of Willie Horton won't be easy to find. But Republicans will be needing one: After all, the right won't have its most prominent bogeyman of recent elections, President Obama, to kick around anymore. So they, or the eventual nominee, will almost surely pick a Horton for 2016. But first, conservatives will need to reckon with their own problematic black man, Ben Carson.

The famed neurosurgeon has been polling neck-and-neck with Donald Trump, and with that has come increased scrutiny. Since there is no political record to examine, we’re left to pick through Carson’s beliefs and his carefully manicured personal legend, one first immortalized in his 1990 memoir Gifted Hands. And his origin story has changed more times than Heath Ledger’s Joker. Just in the last few weeks, Carson’s tales of nearly stabbing a friend, protecting fellow Detroit high school students from post-MLK assassination riots, and a scholarship offer to West Point have all come under serious question, if not been outright debunked.



.............SNIP"

God I love the internet and google as the movie in question was called Soul Man and released in 1986.

4 GOP Candidates Offer Ridiculous Opinions on Unrest at Yale and Mizzou
Just like you figured they would.
By Kali Holloway / AlterNet
November 12, 2015

The anti-racism protests at the University of Missouri and Yale have become a topic of national conversation, which means politicians are also weighing in. As the party of old white cranks who think the only racism that exists in this country is against white men, it’s pretty much the job of the GOP presidential hopefuls to try to outdo each other yelling about how much they are not on board. (Considering that there are anti-racist protests happening at Ithaca, Smith and the University of Kansas, among several others, they’ll probably have more to say in coming days.) Here are some prize reactions from the Republican presidential contenders.
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1. Donald Trump
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Speaking via phone on Fox Business Network, Donald Trump—who by his own estimation, has “a great relationship with the blacks”— said he thinks the Missouri protests are “disgusting.” The billionaire, apparently taking a break from not reading the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, took a few minutes to scaremonger about the school’s future and boast about how he would have essentially done nothing to deal with charges of racism confronting the campus.

"I think it's disgusting. I think it's disgusting," Trump said about the protests. “I think the two people that resigned are weak, ineffective people. I think that when they resigned, they set something in motion that's going to be a disaster for the next long period of time."

And then, per usual, the billionaire made it about himself. "Trump should have been the chancellor of that university,” he said. “Believe me, there would have been no resignations."

Trump also suggested that student demands are not to be taken seriously.

“Their demands are like crazy. The things that they are asking for, many of those things are like crazy. So it’s just disgraceful."

2. Ben Carson

Oddly, Carson—a Yale alum—began his thoughts on the University of Missouri situation on a sort of reasonable-sounding note, though it does suggest a false equivalence between students and the administration. Then things went really sideways, as you might expect.

"It's part of the problem we have going on in our country right now,” Carson said on The Kelly File. “We have people who get in their respective corners and demonize each other, but there's no conversation. And of course, if you ask people to put on the record what their gripes are and what their solutions are, then perhaps they can see that they're not so far apart and they can come up with some reasonable solutions.”

“But this is just raw emotion. And people being manipulated, I think, in many cases by outside forces who wish to cause disturbances."

That last part sounds a lot like when, in footage from the Civil Rights Movement, you hear white Southerners talking about how everything was fine until “outside agitators” starting coming in and getting the Negroes all riled up. Carson went on to talk about how we should be all be frightened, because anarchy, and also the Constitution and also America.

"Well, we need to recognize that this is a very dangerous trend," Carson said. "When we get to a point where a majority can say, 'I don't like what you're doing, that's offensive, and therefore I have a right to be violent toward you or deprive you of rights, because I don't like what you're doing,' that really goes against the grain of our constitutional rights."

Not sure if Ben Carson knows that the only violence, or threats of violence, during the Yale and Missouri protests have come from two white men who, via social media, said they planned to shoot black protesters. In any case, Carson continued on in the same vein.

“We’re being a little too tolerant, you might say. Accepting infantile behavior....To say that I have a right to violate your civil rights because you’re offending me is un-American. It is unconstitutional. And the officials at these places must recognize that and have the moral courage to stand up to it. Because if they don’t, it will grow, it will exacerbate the situation, and we will move much further toward anarchy than anybody can imagine and much more quickly.”

3. Chris Christie

Because he is still desperate to put that Hurricane Sandy moment—the one when he acted like a reasonable adult who put aside partisan politics for the common good and shook the president's hand—waaay behind him, Chris Christie’s response to the protests could be summed up thusly: “Thanks, Obama!”

“I think part of this is a product of the president’s own unwillingness and inability to bring people together," said Christie, speaking before a crowd in Iowa, not being divisive at all. "...The lawlessness that the president has allowed to exist in this country just absolutely strips people of hope. Our administration would stand for the idea that justice is not just a word, but it’s a way of life. Laws will be applied evenly, fairly, and without bias to everyone."

These latest statements from Christie’s apology tour fit nicely with his campaign’s ongoing efforts to show he is fully opposed to Black Lives Matter.

"I want the Black Lives Matter people to understand: Don't call me for a meeting," Christie said at an Iowa town hall meeting earlier in the day. "You're not getting one."

"I think all lives matter. But let me tell you this: When a movement like that calls for the murder of police officers...no president of the United States should dignify a group like that by saying anything positive about them, and no candidate for president, like Hillary Clinton, should give them any credibility by meeting with them, as she's done."

As the Washington Post points out, Christie’s connection between BLM activists and calls for cop murder is based on one-time chants from a single group out of many during protests following the Eric Garner verdict. Christie knows this, but he also knows his base, so it pays for him to keep lying.

4. Rand Paul

Though it’s setting the bar impossibly low—like, subterranean level—Rand Paul has been the most reasoned voice among the Republican presidential candidates on issues like race, police brutality, mass incarceration and the war on drugs. He hasn’t spoken much on the campus protests in general or the underlying problems that sparked them, but did address the issue of Mizzou students’ refusal, in recent days, to speak to press.

"I think freedom of speech is very, very important,” said Paul. “Does freedom of speech mean there will be boorish people who say things you don't want to associate with? Yes. But really in a free society, there's got to be a place for people to make their argument."

Right-wingers, previously unconcerned about charges of racism at Yale and Mizzou, have been in meltdown mode over free speech and First Amendment Rights in the days since the students’ press blackout. Except, no one’s First Amendment Rights were actually violated. Members of the press have continued to write whatever they want. (The Financial Times’ declaration that the students are “proto-fascists”—because clearly, the writer is trying to reestablish civility in discourse—seems like evidence enough.) But it’s easier to take a stand on an issue we all agree on (saying you support the First Amendment is a little like saying you oppose the beating of puppies—yeah, so do we all) than discussing the actual issue at hand of racism on campuses, or why the problem at Yale goes far beyond Halloween costumes, or how capitalism helps prop up white supremacy, or how the Republican party couldn’t care less about anti-black racism.

http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/4-gop-candidates-offer-ridiculous-opinions-unrest-yale-and-mizzou