@snood,
There's lots of pictures of Gorka wearing these medals.
Trump tweeted some tripe about let's all live together in peace. So, I guess he checked the "presidential comment" box.
@izzythepush,
Again, ugh! We live in "interesting" times.
Why don't the Confederate flag wavers tell the neo-Nazis to get lost?
The new generation of white supremacists. No, white racism is not dying out. To the contrary, the U.S. seems to be experiencing a resurgence of it.
By the way, I wonder if they bought their torches at Walmart.
I don't know who Linda is. Gina Belafonte shared this on Facebook. eb
Linda Sarsour
Economic anxiety? Tired of folks who keep lecturing us about reaching out to people on the "other side." We do not have to prove our humanity to people who make it their work to misunderstand, hate and despise who we are. They hate us because we are Black/Muslim/Jewish/Arab/Undocumented/Mexican etc. We are already doing the hard work to defend the rights of our communities. I can guarantee that some of these white fragile folks are the ones sending us death threats from their mother's basements.
White folks need to do the hard work, just as the white folks who stood around the monument in Charlottesville to declare their opposition to white supremacy. I salute them. The hard work starts within your communities and families. We know that not everyone is woke, not all White folks have come to the conclusion that our liberation is bound up together. It's not our responsibility as directly impacted communities to organize & educate your neighborhoods or the neighborhoods where you grew up. That's on you as an ally. That's where the real work needs to happen. Of course it's hard. Of course there's possibility of rejection and/or backlash but that comes with the territory. Ask any women of color activist and she'll tell you she's been scolded, rejected, talked down to, questioned and in some cases threatened and/or abused.
This was never meant to be easy. This work is uncomfortable, especially when we have to confront our own communities' racism. What's happening in Charlottesville is NOT OKAY. (they have the right to protest and believe what they want but doesn't make it ok). The sentiment behind the anti-Sharia marches - not ok. The sentiment behind the anti-immigrant movement - not ok.
In just a short 30 years, we will be a majority minority country. That's what they are afraid of. I wish they weren't. Because we, people of color, immigrants, Black people who make up the minority have always fought for justice for all people, whites included.
We want to live in a nation that treats all its citizens with dignity and respect. Where we recognize the mistakes of our past and forge forward together to build a new future that we can pass on to generations to come. This is not a competition, this is a vision of what our country was supposed to be all long.
I pray that God softens the hearts of the people. Prayers for the safety of those who put their lives on the line for justice for all of us.
Watched a couple of videos of the scene in Charlottesville and you get the sense that there is a burning fuse about to reach the center of the city.
This is what happens when people believe that violence is a legitimate response to political speech.
I firmly suspect that many of the demonstrators who came to protest the removal of the statue of Robert E. Lee were all too happy to show up in riot gear; including an assortment of weapons, but they were practically invited to by the violence of left-wing and anarchist rabble-rousers at other demonstrations around the nation. When the authorities failed to properly crack down on those thugs it guaranteed that right-wing, white supremacy thugs would, at some point, show up at future demonstrations, and they have today in Charlottesville.
Of course political demonstrations of late draw counter-demonstrators and they are there in Charlottesville as well...in black shirts and masks and carrying their own shields and weapons; screaming profanities at the protesters and inviting them to fight.
Government can't be ambiguous about violence. If people are allowed to freely assemble and exercise their right of free speech, it makes no difference how ugly that speech is. City authorities cannot permit any acts of violence as a response to any speech, and if for some exceptional reason, violence is the appropriate response to speech it must be exercised only by the proper public authority and with the proper restraint expected of law enforcement officers.
This should be Municipal Management 101, but, unfortunately, we have public officials who allow politics to interfere. A mayor or governor who allows consideration of how he or she will fare in the next election, or even personal ideological conviction to interfere with maintaining peace and protecting citizens has violated the oath of office, and doesn't deserve their authority.
Government officials who are not clear in communicating that violence in response to speech will not be tolerated to any extent, or worse, condone or even imply approval of such violence are to be condemned.
This is one area where I believe President Trump is open to fair and accurate criticism. At the very least, he has been far to free with his comments that violence in response to speech can be acceptable. A man who wants to become the president of the US and a man who achieves this desire must leave no doubt about his view on this. He must be consistently clear that such violence is never to be tolerated. That a Trump supporter could probably come to this thread and argue, with examples, that the president has never implied that violence as a response to speech alone is acceptable, just means that he has been too cute with his comments. There is no room here for comments cleverly constructed to preserve deniability. Trump may not be directly responsible for acts of violence that occur in Charlottesville today, but if his lack of firm clarity has allowed those who gather today and contemplate or commit violence to believe that he in anyway will condone or support them, then he will bear responsibility. I am not talking about one or two lunatics who might go on a shooting spree, I'm talking about the men lined up across from others who respond to the provocation of profanity and obscene gestures with fists and clubs; the ones who went to Charlottesville looking for a street
fight. He gained support during the campaign by appealing to people's rough sense of justice in terms of popping some obnoxious and profane loudmouth in the nose. To a large degree it was a machismo play. As much as I would love to pop a few obnoxious loudmouths in the nose, I've never encouraged my kids to and if I was running for president I would never encourage my supporters to.
To be clear:
I don't buy for a minute that Trump and those on the Right are the only ones open for criticism in this regard. (Mayor Jesse Arreguin of Berkely, for one, deserves specific condemnation.)
Because the original demonstrators can be called Alt-Right, White Supremacists, White Nationalists, etc, etc, etc we can be sure that the MSM will cover this demonstration and what takes place far differently than they did earlier gatherings of Leftist thugs.
There can be no rationalization of violence in response to purely political speech, even if it offends the majority of the citizenry. If it isn't inciting violence or directly and presently leading to violence, speech should always be free from a violent response (actual or threatened) from the State. All exceptions to the right of free speech based on incitement of violence must be based on actual physical violence and not some projected psychic violence construct that allows for suppression based on the incitement of hatred. This is the US, not Western Europe.
There are no circumstances where the State should not do all in its power to keep speech safe and protected from the violence of other citizens. None.
We can empathize with the rage felt by a Jewish American who lost family members in the Holocaust and is staring across a space of ten yards at a line of Neo-Nazis chanting a call for a new Final Solution, but we cannot allow that person to respond to those vile chants with violence, no matter that doing so might satisfy our personal sense of justice. We don't live in a movie where it's easy (and without consequences) to cheer a vigilante who avenges the murder of his wife and the brutal rape of his daughter by engaging in a one man crusade to rid his city's streets of violent thugs by murdering them.
However this places a tremendous burden of responsibility on the State and it's agents to protect its citizens from violence. This entire thread is based on the fact that a large segment of society perceives, with good reason, that justice in some places in our country is not blind and that all citizens cannot expect protection from violence that is equal to what is provided to others. To insist, with sincerity, on equal justice and equal protection for all is to never rationalize unequal justice or protection.
1 dead - 19 injured in Charlottesville.
[edit] It looks like there are 34 total injured now - a lot of them were injured when someone plowed through the crowd in a car.
@izzythepush,
That's interesting.
I am hardly pro fondness for the US confederacy (are you kidding, snort) but I figure there are some US southerners who aren't complete racists and whose feelings relate more to their regional and family history of war and bravery, because I can imagine soldiers in what I affirm is the wrong side really could act bravely and are distressed by the statues/monuments being taken down.
Being me, I understand and think I agree with their takedowns, but also understand anger about the takedowns. I haven't been south myself (well, once on the top tip of Texas). I consider the southwest US a different place from The South, but probably know better as I've since read about New Mexico's role in some of that.
I'm also interested in what became of the takedown monuments... are they at least stored someplace?
In contrast to me, wary of the south over time and not very interested, my husband was somewhat fascinated, and wrote a screenplay about Fanny Kemble, which I remember liking. I was the typo excavator on a lot of his writing back then
(still pals, to this day, after some bumpy weather that resolved itself). It didn't get picked up, and some other production happened shortly thereafter, sort of beating us down on hearing about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanny_Kemble
@ossobucotemp,
Quote:I figure there are some US southerners who aren't complete racists and whose feelings relate more to their regional and family history of war and bravery, because I can imagine soldiers in what I affirm is the wrong side really could act bravely and are distressed by the statues/monuments being taken down.
This isn't an original analogy I just thought up, but it comes straight to mind whenever I hear people expressing empathy for those who want to keep confederate monuments on display.
Would you extend the same feelings of empathy to Germans whose ancestors fought for the Nazis, and want to preserve swastikas and Nazi memorabilia for public display? After all, there had to be some Nazi soldiers who fought bravely, etc.
They've got the sonofabitch in custody that drove through the crowd. Since all those mowed down were counter-protesters, you shouldn't be surprised if this guy is a white nationalist.
@Finn dAbuzz,
Right . . . some clown plows into a crowd of counter-demonstrators reacting to white supremacists, and it is their fault because "they" are all cut from the same cloth as those who have been violent elsewhere and at different times.
You truly are pathetic, and despicable. Your attempts to portray yourself as the intellectual conservative, while peddling contemporary far-right memes just make you more obviously pathetic and hypocritical.
So, is there a Koch brothers weekly newsletter that provides you the drivel you're expected to peddle that week?
20 injured at the 'rally' presently hospitalized. 5 in critical condition.
A white nationalist group is reportedly planning a 'White Lives Matter' protest for September 11th on the campus of Texas A&M University.
http://abc13.com/society/white-lives-matter-protest-coming-to-texas-a-m/2301399/?cmp_id=sf105743506&sf105743506=1
The organizer Preston Wiginton told the university's newspaper The Battalion he was inspired by today's Unite the Right event in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Wiginton said the event will protest the "liberal anti-white agenda."
Texas A&M said the school does not promote or agree with the organizer's ideas or actions.
Wiginton was responsible for an event last December featuring controversial speaker Richard Spencer.
@snood,
I've just read that three people have died.
@edgarblythe,
Oh, no. . . . We're only two hours' driving time from Texas A&M. My late father, who founded the Architecture Department at Texas A&M in the early 1950s, would be appalled by this latest racist adventure.
