Category Archives: bigotry

Hatred, lies and double standards to benefit one group at the expense of another.

Will the Unitarian Universalist Association Split Completely?

Posted on by

I just bought a book titled “A Gadfly Report”, written by retired UU minister Dennis McCarty, who has written many other books in the past. It is a critical analysis of the “Gadflies”, the infamous faction among UUs who reject the efforts to eliminate White Supremacy Culture among UUs.

20230515_143606

The book is being sold here:

And here is McCarty’s own account in Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/dennis.mccarty.90

At one point, McCarty mentions that Todd Eklof has founded a new group, called the North American Unitarian Association. So I looked it up.

Home

And found this list:

About

Current Board: The founding NAUA members have elected a provisional Board of Directors. A new Board will be elected at the first Annual General Meeting.

  • President: Rev.  Dr. Todd Eklof, Spokane WA.
  • Vice President: TBD
  • Treasurer: Lynn Jinishian, Spokane WA.
  • Secretary: Frank Casper, Atlanta GA
  • Directors at Large:
    • Ron Strange, Port Townsend WA
    • Terry Anderson, PhD, Edmonton AB
    • Candace Schmidt, Spokane WA
    • Richard Gammon, Spokane WA
    • Robert Jinishian, Spokane, WA
    • Mike Long, Charlotte, NC

Note the large number of leading members from Spokane, WA, which is Todd Eklof’s base of operations. Clearly, this is little more than a fan club of his. Including Frank Casper, who I have seen in Facebook. After seeing how arrogant he is, I blocked him in disgust.

Because of the decentralized and libertarian nature of the UUA, these people cannot be excommunicated from the Unitarian Universalist movement, but it is clear they want to create an outright split among UUs. After all, Todd Eklof himself said so, even titling a chapter in one of his books “I WANT A DIVORCE”.

I have written about this matter before:

Reopening Old Wounds Among Unitarian Universalists

A Debate in the UU Subreddit Over the 2017 Hiring Controversy

Another Fight in Reddit Over Rev. Todd Eklof’s Publicity Stunt of 2019

Another call for Unitarian Universalists to stop fighting for consistent racial justice

Reading and Reacting to “The Gadfly Molehill”

Too many people seem to have become UUs, ironically, out of an elitist desire to reject and scorn religious fundamentalism, not a desire to improve themselves and their society for the good of all. But religious fundamentalism is itself a form of bigotry. Why abandon one form while clinging to others?

McCarty’s new book should put the final nail in the coffin of Todd Eklof’s credibility. He is a TRAITOR and should be rejected by all those loyal to the principles of Unitarian Universalism. He came from the Southern Baptist Convention…..and in my mind, he still belongs there, not among UUs!

Activists Against Bigotry Must Oppose ALL Bigotry!

Posted on by

Look at this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_May_Cameron

Barbara May Cameron (Standing Rock Lakota, May 22, 1954 – February 12, 2002) was a Native American photographer, poet, writer, and human rights activist in the fields of lesbian/gay rights, women’s rights and Native American rights.[1][2][3][4]

Cameron co-founded the Gay American Indians (GAI), in 1975 with Randy Burns, an Alaska Native. GAI was the first gay American Indian liberation organization.[6][7] The reason for founding GAI, according to Cameron, was that Native American gay people had different needs and struggles than the gay white community. Moreover, there was in general a lack of support for people of color within the lesbian and gay community.[2][8][9][10][7]

It is because of people like her that the concept of intersectionality was invented.

https://www.intersectionaljustice.org/what-is-intersectionality

what is intersectionality

The concept of intersectionality describes the ways in which systems of inequality based on gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, class and other forms of discrimination “intersect” to create unique dynamics and effects. For example, when a Muslim woman wearing the Hijab is being discriminated, it would be impossible to dissociate her female* from her Muslim identity and to isolate the dimension(s) causing her discrimination.

All forms of inequality are mutually reinforcing and must therefore be analysed and addressed simultaneously to prevent one form of inequality from reinforcing another. For example, tackling the gender pay gap alone – without including other dimensions such as race, socio-economic status and immigration status – will likely reinforce inequalities among women.

This makes perfect sense. Homophobes tend to be racists as well, because the atttitude is the same, judging people by their group membership and not as individuals.

This video I made talks about different forms of bigotry:

And that’s why I can condemn Milo Yiannopoulos, despite his being a gay man, for also being racist and anti-feminist. He actually enables homophobia too, because most other conservatives/right-wingers/regressives would see him as an useful idiot, and the moment they don’t see him as useful anymore, they will dispose of him.

Oh, they already did that!

The Downfall of Milo

And so his being gay is irrelevant.

From “I Kissed Dating Goodbye” to [[I Kissed Christianity Goodbye]]

Posted on by

Read this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Kissed_Dating_Goodbye

I Kissed Dating Goodbye is a 1997 book by Joshua Harris. The book focuses on Harris’ disenchantment with the contemporary secular dating scene, and offers ideas for improvement, alternative dating/courting practices, and a view that singleness need not be a burden nor characterized by what Harris describes as “selfishness”.

By the late 2010s, Harris reconsidered his view that dating should be avoided, apologizing to those whose lives were negatively impacted by the book and directing the book’s publisher to discontinue its publication.[1][2]

In I Kissed Dating Goodbye, Harris popularized the concept of “courting” as an alternative to mainstream dating. In so doing, he raised discussion regarding the appropriateness of his proposed solutions, as well as the foundations on which he based his reasoning.

According to Harris, people in dating relationships put up a façade in an attempt to appear to be what the other person wants, thus hampering the “getting to know you” part of dating. Harris said that it is more appropriate and healthier in the long run to participate in “group dates” in order to truly understand the way a particular person interacts with others; in a group setting, a person is less likely to be able to maintain a façade. Harris proposed a system of courtship that involved the parents of both parties to a greater degree than is usual in conventional dating. In an interview with Family Christian Stores, Harris indicated that “people have taken the message of I Kissed Dating Goodbye and made it something legalistic – a set of rules. That’s something that’s beyond my control, and it’s disappointing at times…”[3]

The book has been cited as an example of belief in ‘benevolent sexism’ and ‘women as property’[5] as well as promoting ‘rape supportive messaging’[6] and ‘sexual purity teachings’ that emphasize a ‘hierarchical father-daughter relationship’ and reduces the agency of adolescent girls.[7]

Christian psychologists Henry Cloud and John Townsend suggest that avoiding dating in order to avoid suffering, as Harris advises, causes those who do so to forgo opportunities to mature, especially through learning how to create healthy boundaries.[12]

In 2016, Harris appeared to be reconsidering the claims that he had made in the book and apologized to several who publicly communicated how the book had influenced them to stay single or had been used by adults to impose stringent rules on them.[13][14]

During a 2017 TED talk, Harris said his greatest regret about the book was him transferring his fears into the book. He said: “Fear is never a good motive. Fear of messing up, fear of getting your heart broken, fear of hurting somebody else, fear of sex… There are clear things in statements in Scripture about our sexuality being expressed within the covenant of marriage. But that doesn’t mean that dating is somehow wrong or a certain way of dating is the only way to do things. I think that’s where people get into danger. We have God’s word, but then it’s so easy to add all this other stuff to protect people, to control people, to make sure that you don’t get anywhere near that place where you could go off course. And I think that’s where the problems arise.”[15]

And also….

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Harris_(author)

In 1997, Harris moved from Oregon to Gaithersburg, Maryland to be a pastoral intern.[10][11] There, “C. J. Mahaney, a charismatic Calvinist and founding pastor of megachurch Covenant Life Church, took Harris under his wing and groomed him to take over the church.”[12] Harris was lead pastor of Covenant Life Church from 2004 until 2015.[13][6] Harris assumed the role of senior pastor at Covenant Life Church at the age of 30.[10] In January 2015, he resigned from that role due to a desire to broaden his views and connect to other parts of Christianity. In an interview, Harris said the isolation of Covenant Life, and of a small cluster of churches of which it was a part, may have fed leadership mistakes, including the decision of pastors — himself among them — to handle a child sexual abuse case internally instead of going to police.[6]

In 2016, Harris stated that he was reconsidering the content of I Kissed Dating Goodbye[15] and apologized to people who said that they had been hurt by its teachings.[16][15] In 2018, Harris disavowed I Kissed Dating Goodbye and discontinued its publication.[17] His publishers agreed that I Kissed Dating Goodbye and two other follow-up books would not be reprinted once the current stock was depleted.[18][19] Harris appeared in a documentary film called I Survived I Kissed Dating Goodbye, where he spoke to people who were critical of the book.[20][21]

In July 2019, Harris announced that he and his wife were separating due to “significant changes [that] have taken place in both of us”.[22][23] Subsequently, Harris revealed that he no longer considered himself a Christian and his wife began pursuing a career as a singer-songwriter under the name Shannon Bonne.[24][25][26] In addition to his previously discontinued books, with Harris’s announcement of his loss of faith, the documentary film lost its distributor due to the negative reaction from the Christian market.[27]

My guess is that his extremist views on sexuality, often called “purity culture” were so tied up with his Christian views that when he realized purity culture was bullshit, it also caused his faith to be destroyed as well. That’s what often happens to people with extreme religious views of any kind that don’t measure up to reality at all.

To illustrate the stupidity of purity culture, which is by nature sexist and unrealistic in its expectations of young people, I made this:

And I am confident that it will stand up to reality far better than Harris’ stupid book……or even his former religion!

Is Clownfish TV run by bigoted Republicans?

Posted on by

Clownfish TV is a YouTube channel hosted by a couple who call themselves Kneon and Geeky Sparkles. And they are extremely prolific, often putting out three or four videos a day, so clearly they make a living out of this, it’s not just their hobby.

https://www.youtube.com/@ClownfishTV/featured

ClownfishTV2  ClownfishTV3

The description of their channel:

Hosted by Kneon and Geeky Sparkles, Clownfish TV is an independent, opinionated news and commentary channel that covers Pop Culture from a consumer’s point of view. We talk about Gaming, Comics, Anime, TV, Movies, Animation and more. Opinions expressed by our contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of our guests, affiliates, sponsors or advertisers. Clownfish TV is an unofficial news source and has no connection to any company that we may cover.

They also say directly on their own website:

Clownfish TV is an independent, opinionated pop culture news site. We strive to be apolitical, balanced and based, and are fans who cover media for other fans. We talk about video games, comic books, anime, animation, movies, television, tabletop games and more.

You’d think that would make them trustworthy. However, look at some of the titles of their videos:

Media Worried a TikTok Ban Would Turn Young Voters Against Biden.

Is that really an issue? I haven’t heard of President Biden wanting to ban TikTok. Republicans have been pushing for it.

Silicon Valley Bank Collapses. Wokeness Blamed.

The commentary below the video says:

Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, and some on the right are blaming DEI, ESG, and ‘wokeness’ for that collapse. Leftwing media outlets deny this is the case, of course, but it is getting harder to deny that hiring people based on anything other than meritocracy may have disastrous financial consequences.

It’s always a red flag to me when someone uses “woke” as an insult against liberals. To me, that’s as bad as using the N-word as a racist attack. And here are more examples:

STAR WOKE: The High Republic REWRITES Star Wars History for Current Year

M&M’s Go Woke.

Disney is ‘WOKE’ as Coke? Disney’s REIMAGINE TOMORROW Employee ‘Anti-Racism’ Docs Leaked!

WWE ‘Woke’ Wrestler CANCELLED Days After Debut?!

Coke to Be Less ‘WOKE?’

Shopify SLAMS “Woke” Culture?! Shopify CEO Says Company is APOLITICAL!

Disney SLAMMED for its ‘Wokeness’ by Disney World Customer in Orlando Sentinel?!

They even have recently targeted NPR for attack. NPR is known for not being owned by a corporation pushing a right-wing agenda like FOX News is notorious for.

NPR Reports NPR is in Deep, Deep Sh*t.

NPR is in deep sh*t. Their revenue is drying up and they had to slash 10% of their staff and cancel a bunch of podcasts. They’re going to ramp up calls for donations, but who has the money to bankroll them now? They’d better not try to shake down gamers, as their reporters spent years demonizing them.

So far, I have NEVER seen them attack FOX News, or any other media outlet known to be leaning to the right.

So no, these people do NOT seem apolitical to me.

And consider this:

https://weeklysift.com/2012/09/10/the-distress-of-the-privileged/

As the culture evolves, people who benefitted from the old ways invariably see themselves as victims of change. The world used to fit them like a glove, but it no longer does. Increasingly, they find themselves in unfamiliar situations that feel unfair or even unsafe. Their concerns used to take center stage, but now they must compete with the formerly invisible concerns of others.

<snip>

But even as we accept the reality of George’s privileged-white-male distress, we need to hold on to the understanding that the less privileged citizens of Pleasantville are distressed in an entirely different way. (Margaret Atwood is supposed to have summed up the gender power-differential like this: “Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them.”)

George deserves compassion, but his until-recently-ideal housewife Betty Parker (and the other characters assigned subservient roles) deserves justice. George and Betty’s claims are not equivalent, and if we treat them the same way, we do Betty an injustice.

<snip>

Once you grasp the concept of privileged distress, you’ll see it everywhere: the rich feel “punished” by taxes; whites believe they are the real victims of racism; employers’ religious freedom is threatened when they can’t deny contraception to their employees; English-speakers resent bilingualism — it goes on and on.

While I certainly appreciate the hosts’ slamming corporations like Disney for being WAY TOO BIG, I find their using political slurs in their videos to be offensive. Their eagerness to defend Harry Potter creator J. K. Rowling, who is known to be a transphobe, is also disturbing. As rich and influential as she is, she needs no one else to defend her. The massive royalties she made off her books, the movies based on those books,  and other aspects of the franchise she started means she is set for life. Meanwhile, transgender people have been MURDERED around the world (along with other LGBT people, and racial minorities…..and women…..and atheists and other dissenters from dominant forms of religious bigotry), but do they even MENTION that? Nope! Doesn’t seem to concern them in the slightest. And assuming the drawings representing them are accurate, they are clearly white people and thus they may be completely blinded by their own white privilege.

So I reject them!

Defeating Wahid Azal again!

Posted on by

See this:

What Wahid Azal has been trying to suppress on YouTube from exbahai

Before that, I got these e-mails:

Dear Dale Husband,

In accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we’ve completed processing your counter notification.

The following videos have been restored unless you have deleted them:

Dear Dale Husband,

In accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we’ve completed processing your counter notification.

The following videos have been restored unless you have deleted them:

I was certain that “Nawir Abu Yasser”, who filed the copyright claims against those two videos, was a pseudonym being used by Wahid Azal. My investigation of the blog used against me led to these screenshots:

Gatehood1

Gatehood2

Gatehood5

Gatehood6

Gatehood7

Gatehood8

Fake person, fake blog, fake copyright claims. A clear case of FRAUD!

But I wasn’t done. As soon as my YouTube account was restored, I was so determined to face Wahid Azal in a legal battle directly that I filed another counter notification against the one remaining video he had flagged with his OWN NAME to suppress!

Dear Dale Husband,

Thank you for your counter notification. It has been forwarded to the party that sent the takedown notification.

Keep in mind that by submitting this counter notification, you’ve initiated a formal legal dispute process. As such, YouTube will handle this process in accordance with the law. This process takes some time, so we kindly ask for your patience.

Upon forwarding your counter notification to the claimant, we will allow them 10–14 business days from this date to respond with evidence that they have taken court action against you to prevent the reinstatement of the video(s) in question.

If we receive no response, after that time period your videos will be restored and the associated penalties on your account will be resolved.

You will receive updates in this email thread about your counter notification’s status. You can also check its status within your Video Manager. Though no response is required of you, please respond directly to this message should you choose to provide us with any further information.

– The YouTube Team

Counter Notification as follows:

Videos included in counter notification:

Display name of uploader: Dale Husband

The video was a direct collaboration between me and Wahid Azal back when he and I were on friendly terms, before he backstabbed me and the rest of the exBaha’i community in reddit, which he was later expelled from for disruptive conduct. I wrote the questions and he answered them as part of an interview process. By definition, a video that is a product of two or more YouTube users belongs to ALL of them and for one to claim exclusive copyright over the content is an act of FRAUD against the other(s) and against YouTube. Wahid Azal wants to erase any evidence that he and I were friends because his betrayal of me (which I documented in other videos and blog entries) destroys his credibility as a religious leader. He has sent threats, both personal, and legal, against me in an effort to frighten me. Do NOT enable his abuse! https://dalehusband.com/2019/08/17/a-podcast-interview-featuring-myself-and-wahid-azal/

I swear, under penalty of perjury, that I have a good faith belief the material was removed due to a mistake or misidentification of the material to be removed or disabled.

I consent to the jurisdiction of the Federal District Court for the district in which my address is located, or if my address is outside of the United States, the judicial district in which YouTube is located, and will accept service of process from the claimant.

Dale Husband

Then I took the copy of the video stored on my computer and uploaded it to my account on Vimeo:

Keep in mind that for over two years, Azal has been demonizing me first as a racist, then as a pedophile and finally as suicidal.

  1. I’ve been anti-racist since I was a child, despite being a white person brought up in a southern state (Texas) and even being originally a Southern Baptist. I was smart and ethical enough to see that racism (and other forms of bigotry) was just bullshit that could never be excused! And I have made many, MANY, MANY statements damning racism.
  2. As for pedophilia, several years ago I knew a little girl who was molested by someone that she and I both knew and that, plus knowing a right-wing extremist politician (Roy Moore) was a pervert sexually assaulting underaged girls when he was younger drove me to denounce him and others like him in a blog entry……which Wahid Azal then used to try to “prove” I was myself a pedophile!  That’s as absurd as using Adolph Hitler’s book Main Kamph to prove he was a Zionist.
  3. His claim I was suicidal was another attempt to depict me as weak after the pedophile angle was debunked. My cousin Jim Williams did die by suicide over a decade ago. And it was in his memory that I made this video:

So insulting actual victims of racism, pedophilia, and suicide by calling ME a racist, a pedophile and suicidal is something only a profoundly immature, amoral and TOXIC person would ever do!

zhs5kz6132q31

Azal has denied that he and I were ever truly friends, since if I was indeed as horrible as he has claimed, how could he and I have been involved with each other? That podcast featuring both of us proves him to be a liar, full stop!

Azal has painted himself into a corner he cannot get out of and the only way he can retain any credibility he might have had (not that he ever had much, really) is to completely suppress all the evidence of his dealings with me in a friendly manner. But as long as I live and have access to my computer files and the internet anywhere, he cannot succeed!

My guess is that as both himself and “Nawir Abu Yasser” he tried to get me banned quickly from YouTube by flagging three of my videos for copyright infringement. YouTube must have been suspicious of what was happening from the start, because those initial attempts only got me two copyright strikes, not three that was needed to shut down my account. As a result, I had time to issue counter notifications on two of the three videos attacked and also took YouTube’s “Copyright School” that would allow the copyright strikes against me to be removed in a few months. So in desperation, Azal flagged one more video, my podcast interview with him! But since that video clearly belongs to me too, Azal has legally sealed his fate!

My ultimate goal is at least one of two things:

  1. Sue him directly in court for harassment, defamation, theft of intellectual property, and fraud and collect damages in a large enough amount to bankrupt him.
  2. Get him banned from YouTube, permanently!

Wish me luck! 😀

Update:  Wahid Azal issued another phony copyright claim against the copy of the podcast he and I made together that I uploaded on Vimeo, also getting it taken down. He also made some interesting assertions in comments he tried to place on my blog.

Liar9

But the reality, as revealed by screenshots of a conversation between him and me via Facebook Messenger in 2019, destroy completely his claims against me once and for all!

Liar1

Liar2

Liar3

Liar4

Liar5

Liar6

Liar7

Liar8

We Americans have a term for people like Wahid Azal who pull two-faced shit like this!

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Indian-Giver

Anti-Conservative Rants in Reddit

Posted on by

I sometimes think that as a whole, the users in Reddit are WAY smarter than most people. Here are two powerful comments I have just noticed that seem to illustrate that.

Who ever would have guessed that electing Republican officials over and over again would have consequences? from LeopardsAteMyFace

GarciaJones
 

Fun… ok no, sad fact:

When slavery was abolished, I feel like a lot of people think it came with asterisks next to the amendment.

But it didn’t .

When slavery was abolished, it instantly made every black person equal to whites under the law.

Same rules applied to white and black people. Owning land. Owning a business. Eating anywhere they liked. This was the intended goal. It’s what those in congress voted and passed and celebrated. Equality.

But the southern states saw the loopholes, and within a few months, enacted the Jim Crow laws, separate but equal pretty damn fast.

The federal government made black people equal.

No caveats no restrictions in the amendment.

Then the states took that right away from them.

On another sad fun fact,

FDR was set to push a new bill of rights, an employee bill of rights.

His speech is something that hits so relevant today. His wants for all citizens and his reasoning as applied to the constitution was something you just don’t get from any politician today.

A snapshot of his speech;

We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men.”[8] People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.

In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all—regardless of station, race, or creed.

Among these are:

The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;

The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;

The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;

The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;

The right of every family to a decent home;

The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;

The right to a good education.

All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.

America’s own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for all our citizens. For unless there is security here at home there cannot be lasting peace in the world.

The more you learn of the past, the more you realize that progress could have happened sooner but evil prevailed in the name of “country and patriotism”.

Sad.

Who did the brexiters think will do all those low-paid entry-level jobs? Ukipers? from LeopardsAteMyFace

GrayEidolon
 

Good place to remind folks that conservatism is about hierarchy and a de facto underclass.

Conservatism (big C) has always had one goal and little c “general” conservatism is a myth. Conservatism has the related goals of maintaining a de facto aristocracy that inherits political power and pushing outsiders down to enforce an under class. In support of that is a morality based on a person’s inherent status as good or bad – not their actions. The thing that determines if someone is good or bad is whether they inhabit the aristocracy.

Another way, Conservatives – those who wish to maintain a class system – assign moral value to people and not actions. Those not in the aristocracy are immoral and therefore deserve punishment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4CI2vk3ugk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agzNANfNlTs its a ret con

https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre/conservatism.html

Part of this is posted a lot: https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progressives/#comment-729288 I like the concept of Conservatism vs. anything else.

A Bush speech writer takes the assertion for granted: It’s all about the upper class vs. democracy. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/06/why-do-democracies-fail/530949/ “Democracy fails when the Elites are overly shorn of power.”

Read here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/conservatism/ and here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservatism#History and see that all of the major thought leaders in Conservatism have always opposed one specific change (democracy at the expense of aristocratic power). At some point non-Conservative intellectuals and/or lying Conservatives tried to apply the arguments of conservatism to generalized “change.”

The philosophic definition of something should include criticism. The Stanford page (despite taking pains to justify small c conservatism) includes criticisms. Involving those we can conclude generalized conservatism (small c) is a myth at best and a Trojan Horse at worst.

Incase you don’t want to read the David Frum piece here is a highlight that democracy only exists at the leisure of the elite represented by Conservatism.

The most crucial variable predicting the success of a democratic transition is the self-confidence of the incumbent elites. If they feel able to compete under democratic conditions, they will accept democracy. If they do not, they will not. And the single thing that most accurately predicts elite self-confidence, as Ziblatt marshals powerful statistical and electoral evidence to argue, is the ability to build an effective, competitive conservative political party before the transition to democracy occurs.

Conservatism, manifest as a political party is simply the effort of the Elites to maintain their privileged status. One prior attempt at rebuttal blocked me when we got to: why is it that specifically Conservative parties align with the interests of the Elite?

There is a key difference between conservatives and others that is often overlooked. For liberals, actions are good, bad, moral, etc and people are judged based on their actions. For Conservatives, people are good, bad, moral, etc and the status of the person is what dictates how an action is viewed.

In the world view of the actual Conservative leadership – those with true wealth or political power – , the aristocracy is moral by definition and the working class is immoral by definition and deserving of punishment for that immorality. This is where the laws don’t apply trope comes from or all you’ll often see “rules for thee and not for me.” The aristocracy doesn’t need laws since they are inherently moral. Consider the divinely ordained king: he can do no wrong because he is king, because he is king at God’s behest. The anti-poor aristocratic elite still feel that way.

This is also why people can be wealthy and looked down on: if Bill Gates tries to help the poor or improve worker rights too much he is working against the aristocracy.

If we extend analysis to the voter base: conservative voters view other conservative voters as moral and good by the state of being labeled conservative because they adhere to status morality and social classes. It’s the ultimate virtue signaling. They signal to each other that they are inherently moral. It’s why voter base conservatives think “so what” whenever any of these assholes do nasty anti democratic things. It’s why Christians seem to ignore Christ.

While a non-conservative would see a fair or moral or immoral action and judge the person undertaking the action, a conservative sees a fair or good person and applies the fair status to the action. To the conservative, a conservative who did something illegal or something that would be bad on the part of someone else – must have been doing good. Simply because they can’t do bad.

To them Donald Trump is inherently a good person as a member of the aristocracy. The conservative isn’t lying or being a hypocrite or even being “unfair” because – and this is key – for conservatives past actions have no bearing on current actions and current actions have no bearing on future actions so long as the aristocracy is being protected. Lindsey Graham is “good” so he says to delay SCOTUS confirmations that is good. When he says to move forward: that is good.

To reiterate: All that matters to conservatives is the intrinsic moral state of the actor (and the intrinsic moral state that matters is being part of the aristocracy). Obama was intrinsically immoral and therefore any action on his part was “bad.” Going further – Trump, or the media rebranding we call Mitt Romney, or Moscow Mitch are all intrinsically moral and therefore they can’t do “bad” things. The one bad thing they can do is betray the class system.

The consequences of the central goal of conservatism and the corresponding actor state morality are the simple political goals to do nothing when problems arise and to dismantle labor & consumer protections. The non-aristocratic are immoral, inherently deserve punishment, and certainly don’t deserve help. They want the working class to get fucked by global warming. They want people to die from COVID19. Etc.

Montage of McConnell laughing at suffering: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTqMGDocbVM&ab_channel=HuffPost

OH LOOK, months after I first wrote this it turns out to be validated by conservatives themselves: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/12/16/trump-appointee-demanded-herd-immunity-strategy-446408

Why do the conservative voters seem to vote against their own interest? Why does /selfawarewolves and /leopardsatemyface happen? They simply think they are higher on the social ladder than they really are and want to punish those below them for the immorality.

Absolutely everything Conservatives say and do makes sense when applying the above. This is powerful because you can now predict with good specificity what a conservative political actor will do.

We still need to address more familiar definitions of conservatism (small c) which are a weird mash-up including personal responsibility and incremental change. Neither of those makes sense applied to policy issues. The only opposed change that really matters is the destruction of the aristocracy in favor of democracy. For some reason the arguments were white washed into a general “opposition to change.”

  • This year a few women can vote, next year a few more, until in 100 years all women can vote?

  • This year a few kids can stop working in mines, next year a few more…

  • We should test the waters of COVID relief by sending a 1200 dollar check to 500 families. If that goes well we’ll do 1500 families next month.

  • But it’s all in when they want to separate migrant families to punish them. It’s all in when they want to invade the Middle East for literal generations.

The incremental change argument is asinine. It’s propaganda to avoid concessions to labor.

The personal responsibility argument falls apart with the whole “keep government out of my medicare thing.” Personal responsibility just means “I deserve free things, but people more poor than me don’t.”

Look: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yTwpBLzxe4U

And for good measure I found video and sources interesting on an overlapping topic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vymeTZkiKD0

Some links incase anyone doubts that the contemporary American voter base was purposefully machined and manipulated into its mangle of abortion, guns, war, and “fiscal responsibility.” What does fiscal responsibility even mean? Who describes themselves as fiscally irresponsible?

Here is Atwater talking behind the scenes. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/exclusive-lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-interview-southern-strategy/

https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/religion/news/2013/03/27/58058/the-religious-right-wasnt-created-to-battle-abortion/

a little academic abstract to lend weight to conservatives at the time not caring about abortion. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-policy-history/article/abs/gops-abortion-strategy-why-prochoice-republicans-became-prolife-in-the-1970s/C7EC0E0C0F5FF1F4488AA47C787DEC01

They were casting about for something to rile a voter base up and abortion didn’t do it. https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2018/02/05/race-not-abortion-was-founding-issue-religious-right/A5rnmClvuAU7EaThaNLAnK/story.html

The role religion played entwined with institutionalized racism. https://www.forbes.com/sites/chrisladd/2017/03/27/pastors-not-politicians-turned-dixie-republican/?sh=31e33816695f

https://www.forbes.com/sites/chrisladd/2017/03/27/pastors-not-politicians-turned-dixie-republican/?sh=12df77c6695f

https://www.salon.com/2019/07/01/the-long-southern-strategy-how-southern-white-women-drove-the-gop-to-donald-trum/

Likely the best: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-right-real-origins-107133

Just a couple of brilliant statements I noticed. And they deserve a wider audience.

George Floyd’s killer is brought to justice!

Posted on by

Yesterday, racist cop Derek Chauvin was convicted of murder in the case of George Floyd, whom he held down by his neck for over eight minutes until he was dead.

Make no mistake about this; the only reason Chauvin was found guilty at all was because his act was recorded and made public. But in the past, even that would not have been enough. The terrible beating nearly to death of Rodney King by four white cops was also recorded and made public, and those cops were acquitted at their first trial, triggering rioting in the city of Los Angeles. Rodney King did not get justice. Nor did Treyvon Martin. Nor have many other black victims of police brutality.

At long last, people are FINALLY waking up to the idea that having bad and bigoted cops in a police force is not something to tolerate. It never should have been a thing at all.

Hell. even the TV show In the Heat of the Night never showed the cops of Sparta, Mississippi assaulting and murdering blacks unjustly (others were shown doing that, however) and that may have contributed to the public perception that most cops can be trusted. I am not so sure, based on my own experience. Corruption rather than integrity seems to be the norm. So let’s keep fighting the system until it truly changes!

Racists should be consistent in their bigotry

Posted on by

I always assumed that most racists rejected and looked down on ALL members of minorities, without exception. But that appears to not be the case sometimes.

Take a look at this discussion:

British expats ‘in tears’ as Spain to deport 500 for failing to register for residency under post-Brexit regulations. By March 31 they will be deemed as illegal immigrants. from worldnews

gothlaw

“expat Shaun Cromber voted Leave but said he did not believe Brexit would end his Spanish lifestyle. He said: “Yes I voted out, but I didn’t realise it would come to this.”

So he voted for the UK to leave the EU, but then did not immediately leave the EU to return to the UK? Seriously???

InPatRileyWeTrust

This is literally the classic leave voter. Yeah we voted leave but didn’t think anything negative would actually happen.

_________________

Don_Fartalot

‘Get those dirty Italian and Spanish foreigners out of the UK….but oh let me stay in their country so I can enjoy their lifestyle’.

Then the discussion went beyond the issue of Brexit.

GZHotwater
I spent most of the past decade working (legally) in China. You wouldn’t believe the number of American “expats” I met there “teaching” English on tourist & business visas. For most I didn’t care about their status…except the ones who ranted on about “illegals” back home. I took great pleasure in discussing & highlighting their illegal status. Most didn’t get the irony of their situation due to exceptionalism.

Note: I was an economic migrant. I had a choice of being unemployed/redundant back home or move to China.

__________________________

Swarles_Stinson

A Trump supporter’s husband was deported in 2017 and she says that Trump was only supposed to deport “bad” people and not illegal immigrants like her husband. She Trump made a mistake, but still has her support.

____________

endoffays

and then they interviewed other Karens from the same town. Apparnetly the genetleman deported had lived in the town for 20 + years, raised a family there, OWNED THE ONLY MEXICAN RESTAURANT IN TOWN, was loved by all the people there……

Interview after interview these white folks said they LOVED TRUMP and still supported his push to get rid of illegals, but they wanted him to make an exception for their illegal.

Just like every other thing and republicans…..they are filled with hate and anger until their policies affect themselves…..then they have an epiphany, say something akin to “I didn’t think the leopards would eat my face” and then keep on hating the next day.* (* explained at bottom)

Hate is their fuel. Just like old people’s medicine is for the robots that are going to take over and kill us all.

*: I just made a comment about 30 minutes ago about Republicans who protest outside abortion clinics. I’ve read countless interviews with abortion clinic nurses and providers who repeatedly state that many of the same women that protest wind up in their clinic receiving their services, but ALWAYS say something along these lines, “Well, you see, my situation is special. I wasn’t a whore like all the other girls that come here.”

And then after being treated with kindness and compassion, the abortion protestor is seen outside the very clinic they received an abortion at less than a week afterwards, yelling hateful things to the people that treated them with kindness. Just another example of someone who can’t fathom life outside of their own little minds until they are thrust into the same situation. Then, instead of it changing their viewpoint and becoming a better person, they think they’re the exception and go on right back to hating.

_______________

JessicantTouchThis
I listened to an NPR interview a couple months ago (up to 6 months ago I’d say, so I may get some details wrong) where the host did a segment on one gentleman. He was from Mexico, but his family got him US citizenship when he was a child and moved him up here. I think they said he joined the Navy for a time before getting out and joining Border Patrol. He was a distinguished border patrol agent, got several awards and a fair amount of recognition over his 10+ year career.
He talked about how he didn’t always agree with who he was tasked with deporting, but it was the law and how things worked and he left it at that. I was honestly kind of pissed with how he could view someone in such similar circumstances as himself, but because their family didn’t do their due diligence, they deserved to have everything taken from them in an instant. Him and his wife both voted for Trump, despite him being an immigrant.
And then they talked about how he was called into his supervisors office one day where he was met with a couple other federal agents. He was informed that his US birth certificate was actually a forgery and completely fake, and he had been illegally living and working in the US for a few decades. He was ordered to turn in his badge, his gun, and then told that he would need to fight it in the courts. Y’know, just like all the people he had arrested over the years. He had no idea, his parents/grandparents had lied to him since he was a boy.
Him and his wife were very upset, obviously, and got legal help. During the interview he had mentioned that they had been fighting in the courts for a couple years already, but they had just submitted their final appeal, likely in vain. They couldn’t believe that he, a distinguished federal employee and veteran, couldn’t be granted any sort of leniency to try and prevent him from being deported, or that Trump had enacted such tough immigration laws and had basically abandoned them when they felt they needed him.
The whole interview, like I said, pissed me off because I honestly felt the guy was getting what he deserved. He broke the rules, just like he said all those people he had apprehended over the years, and they needed to suffer the consequences. But once the shoe was on his foot, and he was the one being deported, all of a sudden it’s “this isn’t fair, this isn’t right, this isn’t just,” blah blah blah.
The most astounding part? I’m pretty sure they both said they (the guy and his wife) had or were going to vote for Trump again in 2020, and… Just, I don’t get people. The Republican Party and those who follow it are the epitome of “rules for thee, not for me,” and this guy was acting like he was unjustly being targeted when he was literally guilty of everything they said he had done.

________________

Teripid

And Trump himself is responsible for Melania’s parents.

__________________

Myfourcats1

I watched an episode of that show Ghosted on MTV. There was a white girl who had been ghosted by her black friend. She couldn’t figure out why. It turns out she was a Trump supporter and would post all kinds of hateful stuff on FB. When they found her former friend the ghoster was like you really don’t understand why I wouldn’t want to be friends with you?

__________________

Seeker_Alpha1701

That’s the very definition of hypocrisy.

There was the case of a German Army officer who had to deal with a Swedish diplomat (Sweden was neutral in World War II) who eventually revealed he was Jewish. The German officer said, “You are a good Jew. I wouldn’t consider you my enemy.”

That German was still a Hitler supporter to the end, of course.

______________

ky0nshi
there was this saying that every German had their “good Jew”. You know, that one Jew who wasn’t like the others, all the others were terrible, but that one Jew they knew, he wasn’t like that.

It’s always easier to hate a big abstract group of people than the people you actually know.

_______________

Voroxpete

There’s a very important corollary this that I want to note; despite what they claim, they don’t actually believe that abortion is wrong. They just believe that the wrong kind of people are getting abortions.

This is prevalent in Conservative attitudes to literally everything. It’s all about hierarchies, and making sure that the right kind of people are at the top of those hierarchies. Everything is acceptable, when the right people are doing it.

This reminds me of this earlier blog entry:

The Dumbest Kind of Trump Supporter

And the cases of Thomas Jefferson and Strom Thurmond come to mind as well. Both had relationships and even children with black women……and both were racists and championed racist policies. BOTH WERE HYPOCRITES!

And that’s why I have always said:

I believe in consistent standards of right and wrong and so I see no point in ever excusing something that is wrong because the wrongdoer is otherwise a friendly or nice guy. That’s how corruption sets in.

And corruption is the only thing Conservatives in ANY society seem to do. People enable that nonsense because it seems they only want to be good to a certain point and when that point is reached and ethical consistency starts to make their lives a bit less convenient for them (but beneficial for people that are different from them), they embrace corruption instead. And so they might as well not be good at all.

Rape Apologists, Round Two!

Posted on by

Start with this earlier blog entry:

A Horror Story of Rape, Ostracism and Triggering Memories

Focus on these passages:

I heard a group of fifteen year old girls discussing a girl in their high school who had been [raped] by a classmate talking on the train yesterday……As far as they were concerned, the girl who had accused their classmate of rape was probably not lying, but apparently should have known better than to have hung out with this specific boy because he was a “ghetto” kid who had a reputation for being a ladies man?

In other words, blacks are expected to be rapists and white girls can protect themselves by being racists. Which is bullshit, of course. Rich white men also rape!

I was raped by my puppt loves cousin as his uncle held my puppy love down to wait to take his turn on me. Fortunately, my bf finally got out of his much older uncles grasp and ran. His uncle chased him to the train station where he lost him and my puppy love called the cops to tell them his cousin was raping me…..In the year leading upto the trail, my entire neighborhood (mostly old school Italians) completely turned on me. I went from being a straight a student to a high school drop out within 6 months due to the insanity which ensued. Not only facing death threats, having guns pulled on me, having my family threatened by the family of the guy who raped me, but also being shunned by the very community I grew up in all because
a white girls like me must have been asking for it to have 3 Puerto Rican boys in my house alone. I guess that fact alone made what happened to me my fault.

The harrassment and bullying I endured at the hands of my community, including being jumped by the same Italian girls I grew up with almost every week and having their mothers who had known me as a little girl shun me and forbid me from talking to their daughters (one neighbor of mine went so far as to call me a slut and spit on me after telling me if she saw me try to talk to her daughter again she would personally fuck me up).

Not to mention what the so called “Justice System” put me through, maligning my character, questioning my morality, trying to paint me as a slut beforehand (which shouldn’t have mattered even if that had been true, which it certainly was not). As if wearing a short skirt or hanging out with a boy or two is tantamount to asking to be raped!

I see a connection between this and MRA’s making excuses for raping women.

Rape Apologists!

Women say “no” to me in one way or another on a regular basis, e.g. “no, you can’t have my number”, “no, I should go home”, “no, I’m not coming into your apartment”, and of course, the classic, “no, we’re not having sex”.

Yet somehow, when it’s all said and done, the woman is invariably happy that I didn’t listen to a single word of protest she uttered; that I barreled through her resistance nonchalantly and drove the ball to the basket. Women RESPECT this sexual insistence even if they aren’t acutely aware of it……….I’ve had hour or more long battles with a girl who had come to my room and then protested that she wasn’t going to have sex with me. Hell, it just happened again yesterday. In the end, of course, we got naked. And, she appreciated it after the fact. If a girl isn’t open to being seduced she will either not come in or will precipitate hastily from your room. Anything short of that is a green light.

Note: the website that posted those lies was eventually shut down.

But there are still people who believe the lie that rape can EVER be blamed on the one who was raped. Read this horrible story from India:

https://currently.att.yahoo.com/att/cm/outrage-16-old-girl-tied-133656911.html

Outrage after 16-year-old girl tied to her rapist and paraded through Indian village

A teenager who said she had been raped by a neighbour was punished by being bound to her alleged attacker and paraded through her village, in a ritual humiliation which has caused outcry in India.

Film of the incident showed villagers raising pro-India chants as the pair were led around by a mob of men.

Six people have been arrested after the incident, which campaigners said demonstrated the widespread shaming of victims of sexual assault.

Members of the mob struck and spat at the 16-year-old girl as they lined her path in the village in Madhya Pradesh. Those arrested included the alleged attacker and the victim’s brother, uncle and cousin.

“When I saw them doing that to her, I had tears in my eyes,” one villager called Tilak Ram Bhilela told the New York Times. “But no one could speak a word, the mob was so angry they would have killed us.”

Accounts of horrific sex crimes are commonplace in India, which has seen repeated waves of protest over the issue since the notorious 2012 rape and murder of a teen on a Delhi bus.

Yet campaigners say a culture of violence against women includes the harassment of victims, who are often considered shamed and not fit for marriage. Women are put under pressure not to report crimes and often face revenge if they do.

The teenager had told family members that their neighbour had pushed her to the floor, then gagged and attacked her. The relatives, with a number of villagers, found the man she had accused and beat him, before parading them both.

India’s government promised to do more to protect women after the 2012 Delhi rape sparked outrage. Yet despite regular protests and new laws, the number of assaults on women has not abated and prosecutions languish in the backlogged courts for years.

Recent notorious cases have included the murder of a woman in Unnao district, Uttar Pradesh, who was on her way to court in 2019 after alleging she had been raped. She was set upon by five men, including two alleged rapists, and set alight. She died soon afterwards.

Sexism is a problem because of India’s two main religions, Hinduism and Islam, both of which teach that women are to be property of men, or at best socially inferior.

In such an atmosphere, a man, even if condemned for rape, can argue that the sex was consensual. “She must have wanted it too, or she wouldn’t have been with me at all!”

Men can learn to not rape women and girls even if they have strong romantic and sexual feelings for them. It is sad that religions do not seem to teach that!

https://www.openbible.info/topics/rape

Deuteronomy 22:23-29

If there is a betrothed virgin, and a man meets her in the city and lies with her, then you shall bring them both out to the gate of that city, and you shall stone them to death with stones, the young woman because she did not cry for help though she was in the city, and the man because he violated his neighbor’s wife. So you shall purge the evil from your midst.

But if in the open country a man meets a young woman who is betrothed, and the man seizes her and lies with her, then only the man who lay with her shall die. But you shall do nothing to the young woman; she has committed no offense punishable by death. For this case is like that of a man attacking and murdering his neighbor, because he met her in the open country, and though the betrothed young woman cried for help there was no one to rescue her.

If a man meets a virgin who is not betrothed, and seizes her and lies with her, and they are found, then the man who lay with her shall give to the father of the young woman fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife, because he has violated her. He may not divorce her all his days.

Is that why my friend was scorned and why the girl in India was scorned, because they were raped in cities and not the countryside? Location has nothing to do with it!

I remember a discussion I had with another friend about sex with underaged girls.

Being Better Educated and Changing my Opinion

Teenagers do not process information the same way adults do. Their brains have not fully developed the ability to reason and understand consequences of their actions. They act on almost pure emotion. They process information using the amygdala and adults use the pre-frontal cortex. Children and teenagers do not have the ability to reason the way an adult does, which is why they are notoriously impulsive and they are easily influenced. Adults have the ability and responsibility to protect young people and, even if put in a position where a minor comes on to them, it is their responsibility to handle that situation appropriately and not use that as an opportunity to prey on that vulnerability.

So even in a big city, an adult can manipulate a teen into sex because the teen responds naturally to peer pressure (essential as a survival tool in a natural environment of small tribes, but dangerous in larger and modern communities where one can thus “disappear” after committing an offense or crime).

If the teen later regrets the sex act, it is because their sense of personal autonomy and justice kicks in later and makes them realize they were used purely for physical gratification by the older partner, and not for love!

Which makes this meme particularly insidious:

Any adult by definition has power over a child, so sex between them cannot logically be consider consensual once the child clearly says she was raped. If you want to avoid ever being accused of rape, DO NOT EVER HAVE SEX WITH AN UNDERAGED PERSON, PERIOD! If you can’t wait until the younger person becomes legally an adult, or better still, find an actual adult to satisfy your urges, you deserve to be locked up to protect others from you!

And yes, that includes that damned pervert R. Kelly!

A non-theist version of “One Man, One Woman”

Posted on by

This is a direct sequel to Jehovah, the Homophobe.

For reference, here is the video again:

https://www.jw.org/en/bible-teachings/children/become-jehovahs-friend/videos/one-man-one-woman-marriage/

What if the mother and daughter in that video had been atheists and not Jehovah’s Witnesses? Let’s rename the children and retell the story.

Debbie: “Look, Mom! I drew our family in school today!”

Mom: “Oh, wow!”

Debbie: “I didn’t have time to finish James’ face.”   (Mom chuckles.)

Debbie: “Carrie drew two mommies. She said they are married to each other. My teacher rejected her picture, saying Carrie’s mommies are living in sin. That made Carrie cry. What does that mean?”

Mom: “Your and Carrie’s teacher has a common view of gays and lesbians as sinners or even diseased because of their sexuality, but that is based mainly on religious bigotry. Thousands of years ago, when most of the world’s religions were being founded and spread, most people lived in tribal groups. Marriages were usually not just relationships between individuals, but also alliances between families or even nations. So fathers would often arrange for their children to marry members of other families and then those children would be expected to produce the next generation as adults. But the problem was that gays and lesbians couldn’t have children with each other, so they were useless for procreation. Because the founders of the great religions and the writers of the scriptures of these religions mistakenly believed that people could choose their sexuality, harsh punishments were often called for in an effort to force young people to avoid being gay or lesbian and try to be straight instead. Today, we understand how foolish and ignorant those people were and that’s why prejudice against LGBT people is fading away.”

Debbie: “What can we do to help Carrie?”

Mom: “Her rights are being violated by the teacher. If they haven’t done so already, Carrie’s mothers need to consult a lawyer and try to take legal action against the school. Let me talk to Carrie and her mothers so they can know what to do.”

 

Bigotry and laziness disgrace America’s medical profession

Posted on by

Look at this story:

https://news.yahoo.com/am-worth-why-thousands-doctors-194203051.html

‘I Am Worth It’: Why Thousands of Doctors in America Can’t Get a Job

Emma Goldberg

 

Dr. Kristy Cromblin knew that as the descendant of Alabama sharecroppers and the first person in her family to go to college, making it to medical school might seem like an improbable dream. Her parents watched in proud disbelief as she inched closer to that goal, enrolling in a medical school in Barbados and enlisting in the military with plans to serve one day as a flight surgeon.

Then came an unexpected hurdle: A contentious divorce led Cromblin to take seven years away from medical school to care for her two sons. In 2012, she returned for her final year, excited to complete her exams and apply for residency, the final step in her training.

But no one had told Cromblin that hospital residency programs, which have been flooded with a rising number of applications in recent years, sometimes use the Electronic Residency Application Service software program to filter out various applications, whether they’re from students with low test scores or from international medical students. Cromblin had passed all her exams and earned her M.D., but was rejected from 75 programs. In the following years, as she kept applying, she learned that some programs filter out applicants who graduated from medical school more than three years earlier. Her rejection pile kept growing. She is now on unemployment, with $250,000 in student loans.

“There are times you question your worth,” Cromblin, 43, said. “You wonder if you’re useless. I’ve had to encourage myself over and over: I am worth it. I am useful. I am damn good.”

Cromblin is one of as many as 10,000 chronically unmatched doctors in the United States, people who graduated from medical school but are consistently rejected from residency programs. The National Resident Matching Program promotes its high match rate, with 94% of American medical students matching into residency programs last year on Match Day, which occurs annually on the third Friday in March. But the match rate for Americans who study at medical schools abroad is far lower, with just 61% matching into residency spots.

Note the description of the doctor in question:

the descendant of Alabama sharecroppers and the first person in her family to go to college

A contentious divorce led Cromblin to take seven years away from medical school to care for her two sons.

Which indicates to me that she is black, and as a single mother as well she has TWO strikes against her!

Continuing the article:

Last year, the Association of American Medical Colleges released a study that found that the country would face a shortage of 54,100 to 139,000 physicians by 2033, a prospect made all the more alarming as hospitals confront the possibility of fighting future crises similar to the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet each year thousands of graduates emerge from medical schools with a virtually useless M.D. or D.O.; without residency experience, they do not qualify for licensure in any state.

Then don’t make residency experience an issue, obviously.

Residency directors say that although they are committed to diversity and consider many factors beyond test scores, they sometimes use filters in sifting through applications because they receive thousands of applications for just a handful of spots. “Nobody has the time or desire to read this many applications,” Dr. Suzanne Karan, an anesthesiologist at the University of Rochester, wrote in a 2019 blog post. “It makes my job a lot easier when I can filter your applications by M.D./D.O./foreign graduate.”

But Dr. William W. Pinsky, the chief executive of the Educational Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates, which credentials graduates of international medical schools, said residency directors who down-rank medical students from abroad were missing out on opportunities to diversify their programs.

“I understand program directors have to do what they have to do,” Pinsky said. “But if they put on a filter to leave out international graduates, they’re cheating themselves.”

Of course, but to a racist, cheating yourself doesn’t matter if in the end you can surround yourself with people like you. We need to stop making excuses for these biased hiring practices and just call these residency directors out on their bullshit.

Aspiring to help

The pool of unmatched doctors began to grow in 2006 when the Association of American Medical Colleges called on medical schools to increase their first-year enrollment by 30%; the group also called for an increase in federally supported residency positions, but those remained capped under the 1997 Balanced Budget Act. Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., introduced the Resident Physician Shortage Reduction Act in 2019 to increase the number of Medicare-supported residency positions available for eligible medical school graduates by 3,000 per year over a period of five years, but it has not received a vote. In late December, Congress passed a legislative package creating 1,000 new Medicare-supported residency positions over the next five years.

Dr. Adaira Landry, an emergency physician in Boston, said of all the young doctors she had mentored, those who went unmatched were the most challenging to assist: “They want to be part of our health care system,” she said. “But they have this boulder blocking them.”

But it’s not just black doctors that are discriminated against.

At some point, Dr. Saideh Farahmandnia lost count of the number of residency rejection emails she had received. Still, she could remember the poignant feeling of arriving in 2005 at Ross School of Medicine in Dominica, thinking she was “the luckiest person in the world.” She had grown up in a religious minority community in Iran in which access to higher education was restricted. When she passed her licensing exams, she ecstatically called her parents to tell them they had raised a doctor.

After medical school, she spent two years doing research with a cardiothoracic surgeon at Stanford, thinking it would make her residency applications more competitive. But she applied to 150 residency programs, from rural to urban community hospitals, and received 150 rejections. She kept applying every year until 2015, when her mother died suddenly and she took a break to grieve.

“You leave your family to follow your passion and promise you’re going to help the country that adopted you,” Farahmandnia, 41, said. “At the end, you’re left with $300,000 in student loans and a degree that took so much of your life and precious time with your mother.”

Note this detail:

She had grown up in a religious minority community in Iran in which access to higher education was restricted.

Most likely, she is a Baha’i, and Baha’is in Iran ARE denied higher education. Even as a critic of the Baha’i Faith, that strikes me as stupid.

The average medical school debt for students graduating in 2019 was $201,490, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges. Students who match into residency positions soon advance and become attending physicians, making an average of nearly $200,000 a year. But unmatched students are left scrambling to find other areas of work that can help them repay their debts.

With the ongoing controversy over student debt in general, this is even more serious. I wonder if some kind of class action lawsuit would help.

Dr. Douglas Medina, who graduated from Georgetown University School of Medicine in 2011 and has been unable to match, says he pays at least $220 each month in loans, though some are now paused. “Just a couple of weeks ago I tried to decide between student loans or a stroller for the baby that’s coming,” he said. “It’s not just our careers being ruined, it’s our families.”

Remember this the next time you see some conservative in politics speak about the need for “family values”. They mean WHITE family values.

‘The cold smack of reality’

Students graduating from American colleges choose to go to medical school abroad for many reasons. Some have test-taking anxiety and prefer to apply to schools that don’t rely on MCAT scores for admission; others are attracted by the warmth and adventure promised by schools based in the Caribbean, which tend to have acceptance rates that are 10 times as high as those of American schools.

But many applicants, especially those coming from families unfamiliar with the intricacies of medical training, say they aren’t warned of the low match rates for international medical students.

“When I graduated, I got the cold smack of reality that all my credentials don’t matter, because you’re not getting past that match algorithm,” said Kyle, an international medical school graduate who asked that only his given name be used because he is reapplying for residency after an initial rejection.

Most frustrating, Kyle said, is being unable to work when he is aware of the urgent need for Black physicians like himself, especially in places like Atlanta, where he was raised. “It really hurts, because everyone thinks I should be a doctor,” he said. “They saw me pass my tests, they celebrated with me.”

Pinsky of the Educational Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates said that the organization was working with the World Directory of Medical Schools to ensure that international schools described their credentials in a more clear and honest way.

“Unfortunately, there are schools that perhaps exaggerate a bit on their websites in terms of the success of their graduating students,” Pinsky said.

The 61% match rate for international students may understate the problem, some experts say, because it does not account for medical students who receive no interview offers. With those students included, the match rate for international medical students may drop as low as 50%.

Residency program directors said that in recent years they had increased their efforts to look at candidates holistically. “Straight A’s in college and perfect test scores does not a perfect applicant make,” said Dr. Susana Morales, an associate professor of clinical medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York. “We’re interested in diversity of background, geographic diversity.”

Question: Why do medical students who study abroad insist on coming back to America to proceed with their careers?

Standing on the sidelines

Some international medical students struggling to match have looked for alternative pathways into medical work. Arkansas and Missouri are among the states that offer assistant physician licenses for people who have completed their licensing exams but have not completed residency. Unmatched doctors, eager to use their clinical skills to help in the pandemic, said that they had found the opportunity to serve as assistant physicians particularly meaningful during the crisis.

After she failed a first attempt at a licensing exam, then passed on her second try, Dr. Faarina Khan, 30, found herself shut out of the matching process. Over the past five years, she has spent more than $30,000 in residency application fees. But with an assistant physician license, she was able to join the Missouri Disaster Medical Assistance Team in the spring, helping out in medical facilities where staff members had tested positive for coronavirus.

“Hospitals need to realize that there are people in my position who could show up to work in the next hour if we’re called,” Khan said. “I didn’t go to medical school to sit on the sidelines.”

Legislation allowing for similar licensure is being considered in a handful of states. This position typically pays about $55,000 per year — much less than a physician might earn — which makes it challenging to pay off loans, but it allows for medical school graduates to keep up with their clinical training.

Cromblin, in Prattville, Alabama, felt a similar urge to join the COVID-19 front line in the spring. She had defaulted on a loan and had little in her bank account, but as soon as she received her stimulus check she bought a plane ticket to New York. She spent the month of April volunteering with the medical staff at Jamaica Medical Center in Queens.

She applied again for residency positions this year, although she says her sons have a hard time believing that their mother will ever become a practicing doctor.

“Every time I get a rejection letter, I go through my positive affirmations,” she said. “I say, ‘There’s a place for me, this just isn’t the one.’ ”

I know a place that must be desperate for doctors to come help its people: AFRICA!

Two Reasons for Public Ignorance

There is a reason why I call Africa the Cursed Continent. It was almost entirely taken over and beaten down by European imperialism around the turn of the 19th and 20th Centuries:

africa-partition

And even after the Europeans gave up control of those areas after World War II, they mostly left the Africans to fend for themselves. The results were horrific. The following cartograms, representing different territories in the world by size according to various statistics, show what Africans are suffering:

http://archive.worldmapper.org/display.php?selected=230

Malaria Deaths

https://i1.wp.com/archive.worldmapper.org/images/largepng/230.png
In 2003, 92% of malaria cases and 94% of malarial deaths were recorded as being in African territories. The other 6% of deaths were mainly in Asia Pacific and Southern Asia. The total deaths recorded were 0.15% of the total cases. Whilst there were most malaria cases in Southeastern Africa, there were most deaths in Central Africa. Symptoms of malaria include fever and vomiting. Most deaths occur in cerebral malaria.The term ‘malaria’ comes from the medieval Italian ‘mala aria’ meaning ‘bad air’. The term was coined at a time before the mosquito had been identified as the carrier of the parasite.

http://archive.worldmapper.org/display.php?selected=232

Cholera Deaths

https://i1.wp.com/archive.worldmapper.org/images/largepng/232.png

Cholera deaths result from severe dehydration caused by diarrhoea. This is treatable: in 2004 the number of cholera deaths was only 2.5% of the number of cholera cases that year. Distributions of cholera cases and deaths differ due to differing availability of treatments.

In 1962, in Papua New Guinea, 36% of cholera cases, which was 464 people, died. In 2004, in the Central African Republic, 15% of cholera cases, which was 48 people, died.

In contrast, there were 73 territories where nobody died from cholera, because of good sanitation, clean water and available treatment. These territories have no area on this map.

http://archive.worldmapper.org/display.php?selected=236

Yellow Fever

https://i2.wp.com/archive.worldmapper.org/images/largepng/236.png

Yellow fever is a disease that is spread by mosquitoes. Unlike malaria, also carried by mosquitoes, yellow fever is not found in Southern Asia. This disease is almost exclusively found in Northern Africa (68% of cases) and South America (31% of cases).

Yellow fever is also known as black vomit (vomit negro in Spanish). Both of these names describe some of the more severe symptoms. “Yellow fever” due to the fever and jaundice that can occur. “Black vomit” because of the congealed blood in the sick of its victims.

A vaccine against yellow fever exists, but not everyone has access to this. 1 in 10 yellow fever cases lead to death.

http://archive.worldmapper.org/display.php?selected=227

HIV Prevalence

https://i2.wp.com/archive.worldmapper.org/images/largepng/227.png

HIV, or Human Immunodeficiency Virus Infection, attacks the immune system. It eventually causes AIDS, which stands for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. With cases first recognised in the United States in 1981, AIDS increases the risk of many infections and tumours.In 2003, the highest HIV prevalence was Swaziland, where 38%, or almost 4 in every 10 people aged 15 to 49 years, were HIV positive. All ten territories with the highest prevalence of HIV are in Central and Southeastern Africa.Transmission of HIV is through sex, using infected needles and in the womb. Infected children are not shown here. HIV/AIDS often has an acquired social stigma.

Despite Africa being the most disease ridden continent, it also has the fewest doctors to treat those diseases.

http://archive.worldmapper.org/display.php?selected=219

Physicians Working

https://i0.wp.com/archive.worldmapper.org/images/largepng/219.png

A physician can also be called a medical doctor. Physicians may be general practitioners or may specialise. The Caribbean island of Cuba has the most physicians per person working there; the fewest physicians per person are in the Southeastern African territory of Malawi.In 2004 there were 7.7 million physicians working around the world. The largest number were in China, which is the largest territory on the map. If physicians were distributed according to population, there would be 124 physicians to every 100,000 people. The most concentrated 50% of physicians live in territories with less than a fifth of the world population. The worst off fifth are served by only 2% of the world’s physicians.

So there is the obvious solution: if you can’t get a position in America, MOVE TO WHERE YOU ARE REALLY NEEDED!

Were blacks among the Southern Baptists really expecting better from their white leaders?

Posted on by

Read this story:

https://news.yahoo.com/prominent-black-pastor-pondering-exit-140305638.html

Some Black Southern Baptists feel shut out by white leaders

DAVID CRARY

As a student in college and seminary, then as a pastor in Texas, Dwight McKissic has been affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention for more than 45 years. Now he’s pondering whether he and his congregation should break away.

“It would feel like a divorce,” McKissic said. “That’s something I’ve never had, but that’s what it would feel like.”

If he does, he would be following in the footsteps of several other Black pastors who have recently exited in dismay over what they see as racial insensitivity from some leaders of the predominantly white SBC. Tensions are high after an election year in which racism was a central issue, and after a provocative declaration by SBC seminary presidents in late 2020 that a fundamental concept in the struggle against racial injustice contravenes church doctrine.

A crucial moment for McKissic and other Black pastors could come in June at the SBC’s national meeting in Nashville, Tennessee, if delegates rebuff their views on systemic racism in the U.S., and if Rev. Albert Mohler, a high-profile conservative who heads the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, is elected SBC president.

Last year, even while announcing new scholarship funds for Black students, Mohler declined to change the names of buildings at his seminary named after slaveholders. More recently he played a key role in the seminary presidents’ repudiation of critical race theory — a broad term used in academic and activist circles to describe critiques of systemic racism

The presidents later apologized for not consulting Black pastors before issuing that repudiation, but Mohler told The Associated Press the presidents would likely have reached the same decision in any case.

The seminary leaders’ stance on critical race theory, as well as Mohler’s public support for Donald Trump in the 2020 election, “should disqualify him from being SBC president,” said McKissic, who has become one of the SBC’s most prominent Black pastors since founding the Cornerstone Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas, in 1983.

Some of the pastors who cut ties with the SBC in recent months also share negative views of Mohler. The Rev. Ralph West, whose Church Without Walls in Houston claims a weekly attendance of 9,000, called him “a polarizing figure” who would worsen divisions within the SBC.

Mohler suggested his critics do not reflect the opinions of most Southern Baptists, white or Black.

“I believe I represent the vast mainstream of conservative Southern Baptists on these issues,” he said. “I think I am polarizing only at the extremes.”

Regarding Trump, who had overwhelming backing from white evangelicals, Mohler said he consistently pointed out the former president’s flaws, but opted to endorse him based on his stances opposing abortion and defending religious liberties.

The SBC, the largest Protestant denomination in the United States. was founded in an 1845 split with northern Baptists over slavery and became the church of Southern slaveholders. Its membership of about 14.5 million remains overwhelming white — its predominantly Black churches claim a combined membership of about 400,000.

While the SBC formally apologized in 1995 for its pro-slavery past, and later condemned white supremacy, some tensions flared again after the Nov. 30 statement from six seminary presidents, all of them white. They declared that critical race theory was “incompatible with” central tenets of the SBC’s Scripture-based theology.

The statement swiftly created friction far beyond the realm of SBC academia, particularly due to the lack of Black involvement in its drafting.

Virginia pastor Marshal Ausberry, president of the organization that represents the SBC’s Black pastors, wrote to the presidents saying concepts such as critical race theory “help us to see and discover otherwise undetected, systemic racism in institutions and in ourselves.”

“The optics of six Anglo brothers meeting to discuss racism and other related issues without having ethnic representation in the room in 2020 — at worst it looks like paternalism, at best insensitivity,” Ausberry, first vice president of the SBC, elaborated in an interview with Baptist Press, the SBC’s official news agency.

The presidents apologized for not consulting Black pastors and met with some of them Jan. 6, but have not wavered in their rejection of critical race theory.

McKissic, who was in the Jan. 6 meeting, said the conversation was polite “but the outcome was not respectful to who Black people are in our history.”

He’s likely to remain in the SBC until the June meeting but is prepared to exit then if the delegates ratify the presidents’ stance on critical race theory as official policy.

“if they adopt that statement in June, it would be the feeling to me that people you trusted hit you in the face with a baseball bat,” McKissic said.

Another possible trigger for him would be if delegates rescind a 2019 resolution that included a positive reference to critical race theory, suggesting it could be useful as an “analytical tool” as long as it was subordinate to Scripture.

The Rev. Charlie Dates of the Progressive Baptist Church in Chicago, one of the pastors who have already severed ties, said the November statement was “the last straw.”

“When did the theological architects of American slavery develop the moral character to tell the church how it should discuss and discern racism?” Dates wrote in an op-ed for Religion News Service. “The hard reality of the seminary presidents’ statement is that Black people will never gain full equality in the Southern Baptist Convention.”

Other Black pastors who have cut ties include the Rev. Seth Martin, whose multiracial Brook Community Church in Minneapolis had been receiving financial support from the Southern Baptist association in Minnesota, and the Rev. Joel Bowman, who abandoned plans to move his Temple of Faith Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky, into the SBC fold.

“I genuinely believe the SBC is headed in the wrong direction,” Bowman said. “White evangelicals have gotten in bed with the Republican Party.”

Some white SBC pastors are also troubled, such as the Rev. Ed Litton of Mobile, Alabama, who is one of Mohler’s rivals for the SBC presidency. McKissic has endorsed Litton’s candidacy.

Litton was a co-signer of a statement by a multiethnic group of Southern Baptists last month which asserted that “some recent events have left many brothers and sisters of color feeling betrayed and wondering if the SBC is committed to racial reconciliation.”

When evangelical churches get involved in partisan politics, like they have so much since the 1980s, both the government and the churches become corrupted. That’s what we saw in the case of Donald Trump being elected President.

Even if I were still a Christian, I could never return to the Southern Baptist Convention because of its racist roots. I’d be more likely to join the United Methodist Church or some other mainline or liberal Protestant body.

Since 2017, Unitarian Universalists have had their own struggles about race issues. And I believe strongly that the path should be open for blacks who are Christians to feel welcome among UUs. Consider the case of Bishop Carlton Pearson.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlton_Pearson

I actually saw him preach at First Jefferson Unitarian Universalist Church, and he also has a regular place at All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

https://www.uuworld.org/articles/the-gospel-inclusion

When the story broke that evangelicals were calling Carlton Pearson a heretic, Lavanhar recognized right away that what he was preaching was classic Universalism. He called Pearson up and invited him to lunch. “Marlin was very sensitive and seemed to understand even more than I did in some ways where I was,” Pearson recalls. “He was probing my mind, and I his, and he was offering brotherhood. I didn’t have many friends in this town.”

Then Lavanhar invited Pearson to preach at All Souls. The sanctuary was packed. “They gave us their Sunday morning offering,” Pearson recalls, tearing up. “It makes me emotional just to think about it.”

Tulsa’s United Church of Christ ministers also reached out to Pearson. (He was granted ministerial fellowship in that denomination in 2006.) “But I was fellowshipping with Marlin,” Pearson says. “He grasped my position on Universalism even more than the UCC folks.” Pearson had read about Universalism at ORU, but he didn’t realize that All Souls Unitarian was part of that tradition.

In late 2005 Pearson sold the Higher Dimensions organization in order to avoid foreclosure, at a loss of $3 million in equity. The building is now a Christian prep school. “We were hurting, scattered, wandering through the wilderness like Moses and the children of Israel,” Pearson says. But they weren’t giving up. The 200 or so survivors renamed themselves New Dimensions. For the next two and a half years they held a one o’clock Sunday service in Trinity Episcopal Church downtown, attended on Sunday mornings by Tulsa’s country club and business elite.

Meanwhile, lunch had become a monthly ritual for newfound friends Pearson and Lavanhar. In April 2008, Lavanhar preached a sermon that got some buzz on the Internet, defending presidential candidate Barack Obama’s pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, by placing him in context with the Hebrew prophets and the historic black church. He showed Pearson a thankful letter Wright had sent.

Pearson thought out-loud, “We should have come to All Souls, because y’all really are interested in this kind of thing, racial justice. We wouldn’t be like boarders or visitors. Y’all would want us there. It would mean a lot to you.” So Lavanhar extended yet another invitation. New D could have the 11:30 a.m. Sunday service slot, free, for the summer, when All Souls went down to a single 10:00 a.m. service.

What caught everyone off guard was that about half the people who showed up at that service were All Souls folks. They loved the emotion, the spirit, the high they got from “bucking and shouting and getting our praise on,” as Cassandra Austin, a New D member since 1994, describes it.

https://www.uuworld.org/articles/humiliation-hostility-riot-lives

After Pearson was declared a heretic by his fellow Pentecostals for preaching universal salvation in the megachurch he led, he accepted Lavanhar’s invitation to lead worship at All Souls. He and approximately 200 of his parishioners started worshiping at All Souls in 2008, and today, about 4 percent of the church’s 2,023 members are black. 

Black membership among UUs may grow enormously if all UU churches do become as inclusive as All Souls is.

Bigotry is bigotry, and NONE of it should EVER be excused.

Posted on by

The most troublesome bigots in American society are often the ones who are white and/or Christian and say crap like “I have black/Jewish/Muslim/(other minority) friends,” but being conservative they must have lower standards for friends than me, because if they truly saw every other person in their community as equals, THEY WOULDN’T BE CONSERVATIVE! Liberals are the ONLY ones that truly champion equal justice for all.

Want proof of that? Read this article

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/viral-video-forced-wealthy-texas-suburb-confront-racism-silent-majority-n1255230

Southlake, Texas is a community not far from where I live (Haltom City, just outside Fort Worth). And Texas is a notoriously red (conservative) state.

Let’s zero in on some specific parts of the article in question.

This past summer — nearly two years after the viral video — the school board unveiled a plan that would require diversity and inclusion training for all students as part of the K-12 curriculum, while amending the student code of conduct to specifically prohibit acts of discrimination, referred to in the document as “microaggressions.”

Within days, outraged parents — most of them white — formed a political action committee and began packing school board meetings to voice their strong opposition. Some denounced the diversity plan as “Marxist” and “leftist indoctrination” designed to “fix a problem that doesn’t exist.” The opponents said they, too, wanted all students to feel safe at Carroll, but they argued that the district’s plan would instead create “diversity police” and amounted to “reverse racism” against white children.

Basically, they were saying they wanted minorities to feel maybe 90% equal to whites, NOT 100% equal. We mustn’t be fooled by their false rhetoric.

Like many small towns in the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area in the early 1990s, Southlake was on the cusp of explosive population growth. In the nearly three decades since the Cornishes arrived, Southlake’s population has tripled to more than 31,000 residents, driven in part by a surge of immigrants from South Asia. Hundreds more Black people also moved in, though they still make up less than 2 percent of the population in a city where 74 percent of residents are white.

With its proximity to the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport and the headquarters of several Fortune 500 companies, the city became a magnet for wealthy professionals, with the median household income now topping $230,000.

As it grew, Southlake gained a reputation in the Dallas area as a sort of suburban utopia, with master-planned neighborhoods and dominant high school sports programs. A 2007 D Magazine article about the Carroll football team’s run of state championships described the city’s “otherworldly” charm.

Despite having lived most of my life in suburbs like Haltom City, North Richland Hills, and Arlington, I am perceptive enough to recognize that the purpose of establishing most of those suburbs, including Southlake, was to provide places where whites could move away from the huge cities where minorities are concentrated. But then some members of those minorities began to follow the whites to those places. Including the Cornish family.

One example: Every year when Cornish’s children were small, Carroll fifth graders were required to participate in Colonial Day, an educational celebration in which students dress up like characters from the 1600s. But little thought seemed to go into what that meant for Black children, Cornish said, an oversight that became all too clear when a classmate told one of her daughters that she couldn’t dress up like a nurse; she would have been a slave.

Which is exactly why we need to teach ALL aspects of American history, good, bad and ugly, and stop glorifying so much of it when it clearly involved the abuse of blacks, Native Americans and other minorities. Colonial Day in Southlake should be ended for that reason!

As in-person classes resumed in the fall, Moore and other Carroll board members searched for a compromise. The board agreed to appoint seven new volunteers to the diversity committee, including some who’d been critical of the plan, and asked the group to propose revisions based on community feedback.

But that work was halted after one parent, Kristin Garcia, sued the district over the way the diversity plan was developed, alleging that board members had violated the Texas open meetings law. Although the district has disputed that claim in court filings, a judge issued a temporary restraining order in December prohibiting the school board from working on the plan while the litigation is pending.

Garcia declined to comment through her lawyer, and messages to the Southlake Families PAC went unreturned. NBC News reached out to a dozen other residents who’ve spoken against the diversity plan, but none responded directly. Instead, a group calling itself Concerned Parents of Southlake Students reached out to NBC News to share a statement saying the district’s plan “is its own form of racism that categorizes students based on their skin color to purportedly achieve equitable outcomes.”

“As parents of Southlake students from many different backgrounds, we condemn discrimination and racism in any form,” the statement said. “We are gravely concerned with attempts to infuse our children’s education with political indoctrination that seeks to divide rather than unite.”

This seems to be the standard subversive playbook: In most cases, don’t be willing to talk about what you are doing and your motives about it and when you do, LIE OUTRIGHT ABOUT IT!

And it gets worse!

The fight in Southlake eventually caught the attention of state Republican Party officials.

Allen West, the Texas GOP chairman, addressed the dispute in August when he was invited to speak at a church near the city. In a video of the speech posted to YouTube, West told the audience that the situation in Southlake follows a pattern of school districts attempting to indoctrinate children with liberal values.

West, who is Black, then offered a suggestion for how to fight back. He told the audience to welcome new residents from out of state with a pecan pie, but then to ask, “Now why are you here?”

And if those new neighbors don’t share traditional conservative beliefs about gun rights and tax policy, West advised the audience to respond with seven words: “Go back to where you came from.”

With that, the room of mostly white Southlake residents, including City Councilman and mayoral candidate John Huffman, jumped to their feet in applause, the video shows. Huffman, who has opposed the district diversity plan on social media, did not return messages seeking comment.

West ended his remarks by urging the crowd to continue the fight to “run these progressive socialists the hell out of Texas,” and was again given a standing ovation.

Just because you are a black person doesn’t mean you should be using bigoted hate speech. Allen West is an enabler of not only racism (despite being one of the “good” blacks in the eyes of white supremacists), but various other forms of bigotry (including those of anti-Muslim and anti-LGBT), favored by the privileged classes across America. And NONE of it should be accepted, period!

Seriously…….FUCK WEST AND FUCK HIS CONSERVATIVE CRAP!

I am a Liberal who was born and raised in this state of Texas and I am not going anywhere!

Bigotry in Religion

Posted on by

When I rejected the Baha’i Faith in 2004, I also rejected theism itself, reasoning that if any God-centered religion could have been true, the Baha’i Faith was because it was the newest and most progressive in nature. So I could not revert to any older faith, not even the Christianity I had been raised in. They had already failed, and once I understood that the Baha’i Faith was also a failure, I couldn’t believe in God at all.

Most followers of the Abrahamic religions regard non-theists with contempt, and they are encouraged to have this bigoted attitude by the scriptures of their religions. Here are some noteworthy examples.

The first is from the Bible.

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm+14&version=NIV

Psalm 14

For the director of music. Of David.

1 The fool says in his heart,
    “There is no God.”
They are corrupt, their deeds are vile;
    there is no one who does good.

2 The Lord looks down from heaven
    on all mankind
to see if there are any who understand,
    any who seek God.
3 All have turned away, all have become corrupt;
    there is no one who does good,
    not even one.

4 Do all these evildoers know nothing?

They devour my people as though eating bread;
    they never call on the Lord.
5 But there they are, overwhelmed with dread,
    for God is present in the company of the righteous.
6 You evildoers frustrate the plans of the poor,
    but the Lord is their refuge.

7 Oh, that salvation for Israel would come out of Zion!
When the Lord restores his people,
let Jacob rejoice and Israel be glad!

From the Quran we have this:

2: The Cow

6 As for the Disbelievers, Whether thou warn them or thou warn them not it is all one for them; they believe not.
7 Allah hath sealed their hearing and their hearts, and on their eyes there is a covering. Theirs will be an awful doom.
8 And of mankind are some who say: We believe in Allah and the Last Day, when they believe not.
9 They think to beguile Allah and those who believe, and they beguile none save themselves; but they perceive not.
10 In their hearts is a disease, and Allah increaseth their disease. A painful doom is theirs because they lie.
11 And when it is said unto them: Make not mischief in the earth, they say: We are peacemakers only.
12 Are not they indeed the mischief-makers ? But they perceive not.
13 And when it is said unto them: believe as the people believe, they say: shall we believe as the foolish believe ? are not they indeed the foolish ? But they know not.

Here’s another example from the Gleanings of the Writings of Baha’u’llah:

www.bahai.org/r/207266714

CXIV (that’s Roman numerals, it would be 114 in Arabic numerals)

Know thou for a certainty that whoso disbelieveth in God is neither trustworthy nor truthful. This, indeed, is the truth, the undoubted truth. He that acteth treacherously towards God will, also, act treacherously towards his king. Nothing whatever can deter such a man from evil, nothing can hinder him from betraying his neighbor, nothing can induce him to walk uprightly.

As a non-theist who has personally known many other honorable non-theists, these passages show the writers of these scriptures to be as ignorant as it gets when it comes to the true character of atheists and agnostics.

My strict ethical standards are defined here:

https://dalehusband.com/about-the-author/an-honorable-skeptic/

I have seen plenty of examples of treacherous and dishonest behavior from people who profess to believe in God.

Atheists do not reject theism because they are corrupt (though to be fair, some are). They cannot behave treacherously towards one they do not believe exists. To disbelieve in God is not evil, merely a different point of view. Saying otherwise is hate propaganda.

Ethical standards only make sense if they come from reality and are applied to reality. People are real. God(s) may not be. And if your only source of ethics is religion, what happens if a religious leader commands you to commit mass murder and rape?

This attitude of bigotry towards non-theists was used to justify the nonsense written by Hugh Ross, as recorded here:

Insulting and Libeling Unbelievers

And we simply shouldn’t accept that anymore.

An Idiotic Cause from Change.org

Posted on by

I just got this e-mail:

Save Ducktales Reboot!

Change.org <change@e.change.org>

It was recently announced on twitter that Ducktales Reboot 2017’s Season 3 would be it’s final season. This is terribly heartbreaking to all of its dedicated fanbase. This show appeals to both old and and new fans and has inspired many people to create amazing things. After an initial hiatus the show is now back on one and with the announcement from Drew Taylor on twitter- well most of the fans are very upset.

This show brings a whole new appeal with a great set of lessons and fun for it’s audience. For the creator of this petition, it’s given them a place to belong and a reason to keep going on through hard times. When this show ends, the fandom fades with it. We can’t have that happen, especially with how much more there is to experience. Scrooge has a lifetime of adventure ahead of him and his family and we can’t let that end now! 

We know most companies like Disney don’t care, but we hope you will listen to the stories of the viewers. Listen to all the fans talk about how much this show has done for them and you will see that this show needs to be renewed and keep airing new episodes. 

Continue reading →

The downfall of Return of Kings

Posted on by

I was overjoyed to see this announcement:

Return Of Kings Is Going On Hiatus

Return Of Kings Is Going On Hiatus

October 1, 2018

After six years of continuous operation and 5,800 articles published, I’m putting ROK on an indefinite hiatus so I can take a break from the daily grind of maintaining the site. I don’t know when the hiatus will end.

The first factor for this hiatus is that site revenues are too low. We’ve been banned from Paypal and countless ad partners, which forced me to lay off the site editor last year and also lower payments to regular contributors. This started a negative spiral of declining content quality, site traffic, and revenues. Even the beloved comments section, which many see as the highlight of ROK, was badly hit when Disqus banned us. Currently, ROK receives half the traffic of its peak and less than one-fifth of the income.

The second factor is that I’m burned out. Keeping ROK updated, writing books, posting articles on my blog, doing live streams, and maintaining the forum has put too much on my plate. Out of everything on that list, working on ROK has become my least favorite activity because duties are centered more around editing other people’s work than creating my own.

I’m sure many of you understand that we are in the early stages of a censorship wave that will sweep through society. Scoundrels like myself get banned first, and then soon the hammer will come down on anyone who dares to share the truth. Personally, I believe that I will suffer death by a million cuts, but until then, you can continue to follow my work here:

[List of where he continues to publish his bullshit]

Lastly, I’m planning on doing a book tour in 2019, mainly in the United States. If you are interested in attending, complete this brief survey to help me identify which cities I should visit. The tour will probably happen in the summer.

In the meanwhile, if the situation with ROK changes, or I miss updating it, articles will return. Thank you for supporting the site all these years.

UPDATE: Here are some more thoughts on my decision…

[A video that has already disappeared]

What truth was he sharing? A sample of that may be found here:

An Ugly Anti-feminist

The truth is that he, like his fellow anti-feminist bigot Milo Yiannopoulos, wasn’t a victim of censorship, since only governments can do that. Paypal, Disqus, and ad producing companies are private business entities, and in a free market economy, they can choose freely to reject association with and enabling of hate speech and writing masquerading as political commentary. A really horrifying example is shown here:

https://dalehusband.com/2014/02/09/rape-apologists/

Roosh and others made a CHOICE to bash women in hateful, childish language, and no one but himself and his fellow perverts are to blame for his website falling into disuse.

free_speech

When people like Roosh and Milo are able to discuss serious topics regarding men and women in a mature, fair manner, they may be allowed to return to the table of discussion on those topics. I won’t hold my breath about that.

Trump supporters = Nazis-lite

Posted on by

The question was posed, “Why do people continue supporting Trump no matter what he does?” A lady answered it this way:

You all don’t get it. I live in Trump country, where racists are still common. It was never about what he does. He’s just something to rally around and hate liberals, that’s it, period.He absolutely realizes that and plays it up. They love it. He knows they love it.The fact that people act like it’s anything other than that proves to them that liberals are idiots, all the more reason for high fives all around.If you keep getting caught up in “why do they not realize this problem” and “how can they still back Trump after this scandal,” then you do not understand what the underlying motivating factor of his support is. It’s defeat liberals, that’s pretty much it. Have you noticed he can do pretty much anything imaginable, and they’ll explain some way that rationalizes it that makes zero logical sense? Because they’re not even keeping track of any coherent narrative, it’s irrelevant. Defeat the liberals is the only relevant thing. Trust me; I know firsthand what I’m talking about. That’s why they just laugh at it all because you all don’t even realize they truly don’t care about whatever the conversation is about. It’s just a side mission story that doesn’t matter anyway. That’s all just trivial details – the economy, health care, whatever. Destroy liberals. Look at the issue with not wearing the masks. I can tell you what that’s about. It’s about exposing fear. They’re playing chicken with nature, and whoever flinches just moved down their internal pecking order, one step closer to being a liberal.You’ve got to understand the one core value that they hold above all others is hatred for what they consider weakness because that’s what they believe strength is, hatred of weakness. And I mean passionate, sadistic hatred. And I’m not exaggerating. Believe me. Sadistic, passionate hatred, and that’s what proves they’re strong, their passionate hatred for weakness. Sometimes they will lump vulnerability in with weakness. They do that because people tend to start humbling themselves when they’re in some compromising or overwhelming circumstance, and to them, that’s an obvious sign of weakness.
Kindness = weakness.

Honesty = weakness.

Compromise = weakness.

They consider their very existence to be superior in every way to anyone who doesn’t hate weakness as much as they do. Just like the Nazis in Germany! They consider liberals to be weak people that are inferior, almost a different species (think European Jews before the Holocaust), and the fact that liberals are so weak is why they have to unite in large numbers, which they find disgusting, but it’s that disgust that is a true expression of their natural superiority. Go ahead and try to have a logical, rational conversation with them. Just keep in mind what I said here and be forewarned.

From a Facebook post

You couldn’t reason with the Nazis; they had to be defeated in a war that killed over 60 million people. And we may have to go to war here too.

Another fight in reddit over Rev. Todd Eklof’s publicity stunt of 2019

Posted on by

For some background, read these earlier blog entries:

https://dalehusband.com/2019/07/12/reopening-old-wounds-among-unitarian-universalists/

https://dalehusband.com/2020/02/25/a-debate-in-the-uu-subreddit-over-the-2017-hiring-controversy/

https://dalehusband.com/2020/07/19/another-call-for-unitarian-universalists-to-stop-fighting-for-consistent-racial-justice/

In reddit, my primary focus has always been debunking and opposing the Baha’i Faith, but I am also dedicated to promoting Unitarian Universalism, despite issues like that above. The occasional hypocrisy that crops up among UUs, unlike that other religion, is not a direct product of its contradictory teachings.

Continue reading →

Another call for Unitarian Universalists to stop fighting for consistent racial justice

Posted on by

Read this blog entry published by Mel Pine and written by Rev. Richard Trudeau:

https://trulyopenmindsandhearts.blog/2020/06/24/uus-in-the-pews-please-help/

Here are excerpts from it in red and my responses in blue.

I am writing this for lay members of Unitarian Universalist congregations. I believe there is a crisis in the national UU movement, and I believe that laypeople are in the best position to help resolve it. The rub is, very few laypeople are aware of the crisis…

Why would you assume that? Many reports about what has been happening over the past few years have been published online and in print, by bloggers like myself, on Facebook, and even in the UU World magazine itself.

What integrity in leadership looks like

An Open Letter to the New President of the Unitarian Universalist Association

Stop whining about “censorship”!

A debate in the UU subreddit over the 2017 hiring controversy.

I’m a UU minister. I first learned about the UU movement in 1960, as a teenager unhappy with my Catholic upbringing; I decided then that if I ever returned to church, it would be to a UU church. In the early 1980s, I started attending a UU congregation, which I then joined. I was granted UUA ministerial fellowship in 1994 and was ordained in 1995. I served two UU churches, 1992-2012. I am now semi-retired, preaching a total of about twenty times a year at a dozen or so UU churches in southeastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

So he is someone who has credibility because of his long association with UUism. Granted.

The crisis I see is that a majority of our UU national leaders have become committed to a particular ideology that threatens two aspects of UUism: our commitment to social justice, and our values of reason and free expression.

These leaders — at the Unitarian Universalist Association, in our two seminaries, and in the UU Ministers’ Association — have become so committed and intransigent that I have started to think of the ideology that has captivated them as a mental virus with which they have become infected. By this analogy I do not mean to imply that they are mentally ill, of course, but only that they seem stuck in a rut (think Communism, 1917-1989). Victims of this mental virus can be recognized by their calls to “dismantle our white supremacy culture.”

I would think that efforts to dismantle white supremacy culture IS promoting social justice. And people have used their own reason and free expression to call for it. Freedom can’t be one sided.

I said this mental virus threatens the UU commitment to social justice. I was present at a ministers’ meeting ten years ago at which someone who had just ended a term on the UUA Board reported that there was then a consensus on the board that the UUA racial-justice strategy — at the time called “Journey Toward Wholeness,” and underway for thirteen years — had accomplished disappointingly little. What the UU leaders of today are doing is to double down on this same strategy.

While the name “Journey Toward Wholeness” has been retired, and the rallying-cry has changed from calling on whites to “confess our complicity in institutional racism” to calling on all to “dismantle our white supremacy culture,” the underlying strategy has not changed.

The racial-justice strategy our leaders are pursuing is a strategy that doesn’t work to make Black lives, or any other lives, better.

I think his claim is false. Read this:

https://www.uuworld.org/articles/new-uua-hiring-practices

New hiring practices help UUA live into its values

Careful attention to hiring practices has diversified the staff of the Unitarian Universalist Association and deepened its commitment to antiracism, antioppression, and multiculturalism.

The UUA Leadership Council is 42 percent people of color in January 2020.

Last October, at a symposium on Black theology sponsored by Black Lives of Unitarian Universalism (BLUU) in Saint Paul, Minnesota, Carey McDonald, executive vice president of the Unitarian Universalist Association, shared exciting news with the Rev. William G. Sinkford: In just over two years, the UUA had more than doubled the number of people of color in top leadership roles, meeting an ambitious diversity goal Sinkford set for the UUA during his ten-week interim co-presidency in the spring of 2017.

Sinkford, the first African American elected as UUA president, had led the association from 2001 to 2009. In his final full year as president, the UUA’s Leadership Council—its senior staff, including the president—was 14 percent people of color; the staff as a whole was just under 14 percent people of color. Eight years later, during the final year of the presidency of Sinkford’s successor, the Rev. Peter Morales, the first Hispanic president of the UUA, people of color made up 20 percent of all employees, but the number of people of color on the Leadership Council had not changed. For an association with a stated commitment to antiracism and multiculturalism, the numbers of people of color, especially in top leadership positions, frustrated and angered some UUs. Critics said the UUA was routinely favoring white ministers when hiring for senior positions, and a denominational crisis over hiring practices erupted in March 2017, three months before the end of Morales’s second term. Morales and two other top officials resigned in April 2017.

Instituting a shared model of leadership it had not used before, the UUA Board of Trustees named three people of color as interim co-presidents—Sinkford, the Rev. Sofía Betancourt, and Dr. Leon Spencer—until a new president could be elected in June 2017. The board also established a Commission on Institutional Change to assess institutional and structural racism in the UUA. The co-presidents announced a hiring freeze until new policies could be set and added two people of color to the Leadership Council: Jessica York, the interim director of Ministries and Faith Development, and Carey McDonald, the UUA’s Outreach director.

Soon the co-presidents announced new hiring goals: at least 40 percent of people in managerial and decision-making positions on the UUA staff should be people of color and/or indigenous people, they said, and, overall, the UUA staff should be 30 percent people of color/indigenous people. While no UUA employees were to be terminated to meet the goals, the policy was to guide all new hires.

At the BLUU symposium in Saint Paul, McDonald told Sinkford that today, through focused and concerted effort to transform UUA culture, the Leadership Council is 42 percent people of color, and the overall staff numbers have risen to 30 percent people of color.

“My response,” says Sinkford, “was to be both impressed and delighted.” Moreover, Sinkford encouraged McDonald to make sure the story got told: in less than three years, the UUA had moved from a particularly low point to a place of celebration—albeit qualified by a clear recognition that there is much work to be done.

So it appears the latest efforts have been more successful than those of the past because clear difference in policies and practices were made. So what’s the problem now?

The reason I lean toward the analogy of a mental virus infecting the majority of our national leaders is that I have no doubt that they are well-intentioned, and for the most part capable, people, yet their behavior is to me incomprehensible. I can only understand it if I imagine them as victims. Just as a physical virus, like the one causing COVID-19, exploits laudable human traits to gain entrance to our bodies — like our human desire to be physically close to one another — the mental virus of which I speak seems to have gained entrance to our leaders’ minds by exploiting their laudable qualities of empathy and passion for social justice. But the result is that their judgment seems to me impaired; they are no longer thinking clearly.

So just because you do not understand the motivations behind the people you disagree with, you claim they are somehow diseased! That’s no way to have a fair dialogue on the matter, but then again if you wanted that, you would not be publishing your insults in Mel Pine’s blog, right? He quit the UUA, so most UUs wouldn’t even notice his works now. It’s now an anti-UUA echo chamber.

I said that the mental virus also threatens the UU values of reason and free expression. This is clear from the treatment accorded over the last year to Rev. Todd Eklof of our Spokane, WA congregation. Rev. Eklof wrote a book, The Gadfly Papers, that expressed concern about the crisis in UUism to which I have been referring. Since the book’s appearance, the UU Ministers’ Association has publicly censured him and then expelled him; he has been fired by a UU seminary as a supervisor of ministerial interns; and he has been removed from UUA fellowship by the UUA’s Ministerial Fellowship Committee. These organizations have claimed procedural irregularities as the reasons for their actions, but upon close inspection I don’t find that any of their explanations hold water. And as a result of the example that has been made of this one minister, UU ministers across the land are intimidated.

Eklof wasn’t punished merely for writing a dissenting book. That was absolutely his right. However:

Reopening Old Wounds Among Unitarian Universalists

With the election of a new President of the UUA at the 2017 General Assembly (GA), it seemed like we could start to move forward to heal the racial divisions. But then came the GA of June 2019, which was held at Spokane, Washington. Imagine the shock among the attendees when the minister of the UU church at that city, Rev. Dr. Todd F. Eklof,  backstabbed the rest of them with a book he had written and was trying to distribute at the GA without prior notice. This book, titled The Gadfly Papers: Three Inconvenient Essays by One Pesky Minister, attacked all the efforts to solve the racial problems, angering many non-white UUs. When the UUA leadership tried to talk to Eklof about what he was doing, he refused to meet with them, putting them in the awkward position of expelling him from the GA itself! (Emphasis mine)

The betrayal was felt so strongly because Eklof’s congregation was supposed to be HOSTING the General Assembly, which was expected to continue dealing in unity with racial issues. Eklof’s stunt would be like me as a known critic of the Baha’i Faith invited to a meeting of mostly Muslim people and after arriving instead of giving a speech criticizing that Faith, attempting to give attendees there copies of this:

Contradictions of orthodox Islam

No, I wouldn’t do that! That would only get my @$$ thrown out of there. You can’t force people to listen to a message they didn’t expect to hear and are not receptive to. Eklof should have known better!

I hate writing this essay. As a minister, my instinct is always to bring to the people in the pews a message that is positive. And what I have written today is hardly that.

Somehow, I doubt you hated writing that too much. I never hate writing anything I feel strongly about and think is important. And I write a LOT of negative stuff on my blog.

What I have said today is that UUism is under attack by those sworn to uphold it. They are destroying the commitment to reason and free speech that attracted so many of us in the first place. And they are wasting our energy on an approach to racial justice that doesn’t work.

How would you know it doesn’t work? Can we wait another decade or so and find out?

What can be done? You might think, “This should be brought up at General Assembly.” But General Assembly is not really democratic, according to the UUA Board’s Fifth Principle Task Force (2009), and the UUA has since become even less democratic because all UUA Board members are now elected at-large and do not represent local constituencies.

Well, a lot of UUs of color didn’t think the UUA was democratic enough because their views were not being heard. Now they are and….that bothers you. You know, if people who have been privileged are not feeling a little uncomfortable about social changes, then the changes are meaningless, merely window dressing without substance. 

What can be done? All I can suggest is that lay UUs look into these matters for themselves and, if they agree with me that the situation is alarming, express their unhappiness loudly to their congregational leaders, to their Regional staff, and to the UUA itself.

UUs in the pews, please help!

And what will you do if they don’t agree with you and even oppose outright your opinions as I do? Quit being a UU also?

What a waste of keyboard strokes! As a UU layperson myself, I feel profoundly insulted by Rev. Richard Trudeau’s diatribe!

She could have been my daughter!

Posted on by

Read this online obituary:

https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/franklin-oh/sarah-grossman-9203495

Sarah Rae Grossman

October 7, 1997 – May 30, 2020
Obituary of Sarah Rae Grossman

With great sadness we announce the death of Sarah Rae Grossman, age 22, of Columbus, Oh (formerly of Springboro, Oh) on May 30, 2020. Born October 7, 1997 in Naperville, Il, Sarah is survived by her parents, Todd and Christi Grossman, and sister Jessa Grossman, of Springboro Oh; Grandparents Lonnie and Thelma Mullins, Mel and Shelley Grossman, and Phillip and Sue VanKersen, and many loving and amazing friends, aunts, uncles and cousins. She was a 2016 graduate of Springboro High School.

Sarah graduated May 3, 2020 from The Ohio State University with an Honors Degree of Bachelor of Science in the School of Environment and Natural Resources. Her specific course of study within the EEDS program (Environment, Economy, Development and Sustainability) reflected her life passions. Prior to the Covid pandemic, Sarah planned to complete a second degree in Spanish in 2021 while attending the Universidad of Belgrano in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

It is impossible to find the words to describe her kindness, unique spirit, and unwavering dedication to her convictions. Sarah was a fierce but compassionate supporter of environmental issues and social justice. A genuine friend who loved and cherished her extraordinary friendships. She was the most caring and thoughtful daughter, a beloved granddaughter, and a loving sibling and best friend to her sister Jessa.

Sarah had spent the past two summers in Guatemala researching the harvesting industry. After graduation she planned to pursue work promoting positive environmental, climate and land use policies, assisting migrant workers and indigenous communities. She wanted to help the voices of the underserved be heard. She opened our eyes to both lovely ideas and ugly truths. In addition to being a full time student, she was a hard working employee, having held over six jobs in her short life, most recently at Stauf’s Coffee, and Chadwick Arboretum in Columbus, Oh. Sarah loved nature and being outdoors- hiking in the great National Parks of this country, collecting and caring for plants, watching the sun set and the moon rise. She had many interests that brought her joy- creating ceramics and art, finding that awesome thrift store find, and she definitely loved her coffee! She had visited nine countries- always wanting to learn about the world through the eyes of another. She lived a short but full life.

We will forever miss those big dimples and sweet smile. Those who knew her will understand what a beautiful soul the world has lost.

And how did she die? According to posts on Twitter:

Wow. I know some people on Twitter are still in denial about this:

Erin Stalcup
@stalcup_erin4
Replying to

@MichaelSatoshi
Hey, this claim is currently unsubstantiated. As such, her family is asking that tweets like these be taken down until such time as they can prove them and are ready for all of the negative attention that has come upon them.
2:27 PM · Jun 5, 2020
________________
eclair
@canuclairify

Replying to

@MichaelSatoshi
Hello! Please take this post down immediately out of respect for Sarah’s close friends and family. There is no conclusion as to how she has passed and spreading misinformation is incredibly harmful.
_____________
But I’m sure it’s only because she was a white woman and some people still can’t get their heads around the idea that ANYONE can be a victim of police brutality or racism in general!
Well, think again!

Viola Fauver Liuzzo (née Gregg; April 11, 1925 – March 25, 1965) was a housewife and mother of five. In March 1965, Liuzzo heeded the call of Martin Luther King Jr and traveled from Detroit, Michigan, to Selma, Alabama, in the wake of the Bloody Sunday attempt at marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Liuzzo participated in the successful Selma to Montgomery marches and helped with coordination and logistics. At the age of 39, while driving back from a trip shuttling fellow activists to the Montgomery airport, she was murdered by members of the Ku Klux Klan.

One of the four Klansmen in the car from which the shots were fired was Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) informant Gary Thomas Rowe.[1][2] Rowe testified against the shooters and was given witness protection by the FBI.[3] The FBI immediately began a smear campaign and leaked to the press what were purported to be salacious details about Liuzzo. The FBI attempted to downplay the situation and to discredit Liuzzo by spreading rumors that she was a member of the Communist Party, was a heroin addict,[4] and had abandoned her children to have sexual relationships with African-Americans involved in the Civil Rights Movement.[5] All of the rumors were entirely false and were wholely fabricated by the FBI.[6][7]

THAT woman could have been my mother or grandmother!

If it turns out that Sarah Grossman did not die because of tear gas, we should correct the misinformation. But she is worth remembering anyway. So is anyone who takes a stand (or drops to a knee, for that matter) to protest injustice.

16142334_10211338387960087_7371942984170139432_n

Police misconduct is not just about killing black people.

Posted on by

With all the protests erupting across America regarding the murder of an unarmed black man, George Floyd, at the hands (and knee) of a white cop, I am reminded of an incident that illustrated to me why police can’t always be trusted, even if they don’t kill blacks at all.

Back when I was living in Arlington, Texas, I was traveling down highway 360 when I was pulled over by a cop. He approached my car and said, “Do you know why I pulled you over?”
I said, “No clue, officer. I know I wasn’t speeding. In fact, it is impossible to speed on this highway; it’s too congested.”
The cop then said, “Are you lost? Do you need help getting somewhere?”
I said, “No, I’m fine.”
The cop let me go. But I have no doubt that he did so only because of my white privilege. But I was driving a 2002 Saturn that was in such poor condition that I’m sure the cop seeing it from a distance assumed it was being driven by a poor black or hispanic man. So if instead I had been a person of color, he likely would have written me a ticket for some made up excuse and I would have had to go to court to fight it and still risk losing the fight in front of a mostly white jury. I already knew that traffic tickets are a convenient means of a city to raise extra money without raising taxes on most citizens, not merely a matter of public safety. And what better way to keep minorities down than by targeting their pocketbooks?

I have been distrustful of police ever since.