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#1339239 - 04/17/12 05:56 PM
T Martin+race in America, in general
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VM Smith
Diamond Member
Registered: 11/28/05
Posts: 34611
Loc: Reality
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I think this is quite thoughtful.
By James Howard Kunstler
In the wake of the Trayvon Martin shooting, the excellent Bill Moyers hosted political activist Angela Glover Blackwell on his weekly interview show, Moyers & Company (April 13; "An Activist for Our Times") and in the course of things (12:18 in the program) Ms. Blackwell said, "America does not want to talk about race." In point of fact, we'll talk about it all the live-long day, just not very honestly.
The Trayvon Martin incident certainly provoked a broad media conversation about race all over the cable TV networks and the Internet. It's been an inconclusive discussion because the facts of the case are so muddled and the truth may never be known, or may not satisfy anyone if it becomes known. Mostly, the talk followed predictable patterns of grievance, accusation, and especially hand-wringing - the latter well represented by Bill Moyers, the embodiment of 1960s-vintage idealist Democratic liberalism, who came on the scene as a close aide to President Lyndon Johnson at the height of the civil rights struggle.
The reason the race conversation remains so constricted in America is because the central question makes everyone so uncomfortable. That question is: what accounts for the failure to thrive of such a large percentage of black America? It is uncomfortable for whites (especially Progressives) because it implies a failure of the social justice movement itself, and in particular the watershed civil rights struggles of the 1960s. It's uncomfortable for blacks because it stirs up immense anxiety over the stigma of racial inferiority.
The crucial moment in this recent history of race relations, it seems to me, must be located in the events between 1966 and 1970. This was the historical moment that followed the deconstruction of legal race codes with the passage into law of the Public Accommodations Act of 1964 and then the Voting Rights Act of 1965. These two legislative milestones, promoted and signed by Lyndon Johnson, were supposed to conclude the unfinished business of the Civil War and emancipation, which had festered so long in the Jim Crow inurement.
The expectation was that the removal of legal obstacles to full citizenship would hasten economic justice and cultural equality, but just then something curious happened: the youth revolt of the late 1960s was underway and young black America immediately opted for separatism. Opposition to anything and everything was the motif for my generation back then. A few years after the 1964 Public Accommodations Act passed, the black students at my college demanded (and were given) their own separate student union building. During the riots that followed the Kent State shootings in the Spring of 1971, somebody burned the building down - a mystery never solved.
I believe the black separatist movement of that time derived largely from anxiety around the issues of cultural assimilation - that is, of black and white America forming a true and complete common culture. In any case, it was at this moment of history that the multicultural movement presented itself as an "out" for white America. Multiculturalism allowed white America to pretend that common culture was not important. It also promoted the unfortunate idea that we could have a functioning civil society with different standards of behavior for different ethnic groups. It has left the nation with the unanswered question of black America's self-evident failure to thrive, and an enormous body of narrative affecting to explain it away as "structural racism."
Bill Moyers did not even attempt to address the failure to thrive question in his interview with Angela Glover Blackwell. Both of these people are about as well-intentioned as anyone in the country where race relations are concerned, but neither of them were able to honestly confront the issue. My own opinion is that it's about behavior at least as much as its about race and probably more, and we continue to make tragic decisions in this country about what behavior is okay and what's not. Are there proportionately more black men in prison than members of other races in America? Yes there are, and most of them behaved badly enough to get locked up, whether our drug laws are stupid or not. Is something preventing black children from learning in school? Probably a number of things, but I would begin absolutely with the duty to teach them to speak English intelligibly - something that nobody expresses any interest in, especially white Progressives. Do white people fear black males who affect to act as if they are dangerous? Maybe black men should stop trying to scare people. Are these "racist" observations or exercises in reality-testing?
I doubt even that question can be settled conclusively in our time. The truth is that white America is too uncomfortable with the discomfort of black America and white America will do anything, and will bend any view of reality, in order to avoid the most frightening outcome of all, which is the possibility of race war. Well it's hard not to sympathize with that, but it still leaves us with the burden of all the tragic choices we made since those heady days of 1964 and 1965 when Bill Moyers could stand behind President Johnson signing those landmark civil rights bills, basking in the broad-based belief that real human progress was being made.
I don't know for sure what Trayvon Martin was doing in the moments before George Zimmerman shot him in the Florida condo cluster. The public may never learn what really went on, even after Mr. Zimmerman's trial. People don't get shot for no reason, though sometimes it is not a good reason, or one we want to talk about.
___________________________________
My books are available at all the usual places.
_________________________
It's never too late to be who you might have been.
George Elliot
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#1339842 - 04/21/12 12:38 AM
Re: T Martin+race in America, in general
[Re: Chicago Jesus]
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VM Smith
Diamond Member
Registered: 11/28/05
Posts: 34611
Loc: Reality
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The Need to Lynch Zimmerman
The Coming Race War in America
April 19, 2012
The Coming Race War in America was published in 1996 by Carl Rowan, the black columnist and former ambassador to Finland. The title is not ironic. He foresaw a major racial explosion. The book of course was furiously ignored. It should not have been. It dealt with an apocalyptic vision that has lurked around the edges of American consciousness since before the Civil War. And still does. We just don’t talk about it.
What has this to do with Zimmerman?
This: Our racial policy has proved a disaster. Sixty years after Brown vs. the School Board, blacks have not assimilated. They constitute a separate people having almost nothing in common with the surrounding European society. They fiercely maintain their identity with their own music, dialect, customs, dress, and names. All attempts to turn them into middle-class whites in darker packaging have failed. Only relentless governmental pressure forces an appearance of partial integration.
Let’s consider a few awkward facts that loom ghoulishly above the body politic, which seems to be decomposing. First, on every known measure of cognitive ability, on IQ, SATs, GREs, everything, blacks average about one standard deviation, fifteen IQ points, below whites. The gap is a fact. It exists. It is reflected in performance. It has proved intractable. In a technological civilization that rewards intelligence, the deficit sharply limits legitimate access to the higher reaches of money, power, class, and prestige.
Second, blacks continue to show little interest in schooling. Exceptions and degrees, yes. Yet consider cities such as Washington, which usually has a black mayor, black city council, mostly black school board, black staffs in the schools, black parents, black students, a high per-capita expenditure—and perhaps the worst schools in the country. This is a fact, and shows no signs of diminishing. It is repeated in countless cities.
If the United State had large numbers of manual jobs that paid a living wage, as for example assembling cars, things might not be so bad. But the United States no longer has many such jobs. The economy has no need for huge numbers of people who read at the level of second-graders, if that. The existence of these people is a fact. When such jobs exist, as for example on police forces, better qualified whites are invariably available. Without remedial intervention, the academic and professional worlds, the managerial ranks of blue-collar trades, would turn almost pure white, and there would be actual hunger in the inner cities.
The solution, to the extent that it can be called a solution, has been a combination of welfare and affirmative action. Each has produced its own kind of dependency. Whites in their own way depend on welfare payments to blacks in that ending welfare would send the cities up in flames. We now have dense concentrations of unemployed, unemployable blacks leading meaningless lives in rotting cities. They are angry, blame whites for their troubles, and do not have a lot to lose. The torching of Los Angeles in 1992 is endlessly repeatable. Only a spark is needed.
None of this improves, and it seems to be getting worse. On the Drudge Report and elsewhere on the web, video after cell phone video appears of pack-attacks by feral blacks on whites and Asians. These attacks often result in brain damage: the attackers are trying to hurt the victims badly, and usually laugh while doing it. Other videos time and again show black teenagers looting Seven-Elevens. The perpetrators show no signs of worry about being caught. They know that white police wouldn’t dare arrest thirty black adolescents.
Whites are frightened of blacks. They are afraid of taking the wrong exit from the freeway and ending up in a black ghetto. They are afraid when they pass young black males in a dark neighborhood. White women clutch their purses and cross the street, try not to get into elevators with them. The fear, seldom mentioned, determines where whites live, where they go, and where they send their children to school.
This unacknowledged fear engenders unacknowledged consequences. When white men buy guns, journalistic organs of that prissy rectitude we call political correctness—the Washington Post, probably National Review—speak of gun nuts, psychosexual inadequacies, and sordid fantasies. Hardly. The purchasers of guns have in mind defending their families should the need arise. The buyers do not fear attack by Jewish violinists.
Government also is afraid of blacks. Los Angeles burned because blacks didn’t like the outcome of a trial. Recently cities in England went up because a policeman shot a black. The Zimmerman shooting looks very similar, and blacks are very angry. Jesse Jackson has said that Trayvon was “hunted down like a rabid dog in the street,” that he was “murdered and martyred,” that it was a “hate crime.”
These are the words of a man looking for a fight. One may be available. Charging Zimmerman with murder buys time. If he is acquitted….
The signs are ominous. Tension rises in America. Incomes fall, foreclosures rise, jobs go east, police powers increase, trust in government evaporates, and expectations for the future decline. An unfocused edginess germinates. It is not a recipe for domestic tranquility.
The response of whites to riots by blacks has always been to back away. This prudence, as it is thought to be, has been enforced by the government. If a minority in Russia started burning cities, the army would shoot the rioters on sight. America doesn’t work that way, or hasn’t recently. The lack of consequences for beatings and flash-mobbings, the history of saying “racism” and walking, produces a sense of untouchability in blacks. It could be a mistake.
A spring is being wound. On one hand, when you live in a sprawling tightly packed concentration of people like yourself, it is easy to forget that you are very much a minority, that the majority holds all the high cards, and that food doesn’t really come from Safeway.
On the other hand, via the internet whites now know of the racial attacks, and grow quietly very sick of them. There is among many white men an undercurrent of “Bring it on.” This is not confined merely to cops, soldiers, conservatives, Southerners, westerners, the rural and the blue-collar. You can find it, carefully hidden, in federal offices and even among men in newsrooms. The extent of this sentiment is easy to underestimate. Those who share it don’t dare express it, and most journalists live in ideological bubbles.
We must lynch Zimmerman.
_________________________
It's never too late to be who you might have been.
George Elliot
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#1339897 - 04/21/12 10:50 AM
Re: T Martin+race in America, in general
[Re: Ayuveda]
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VM Smith
Diamond Member
Registered: 11/28/05
Posts: 34611
Loc: Reality
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I forgot to attribute. Sorry about your gag problem, but viewing the world with open eyes can cure it. Or maybe make it terminal.
He knows a little about race, having both served in Vietnam, and having lived in and reported from SE Asia after that. He's lived in Mexico for 8-9 years, married a Mexican who grew up in a dirt-floor shack and now has a Phd, and has adopted her daughter. He was a police beat reporter in DC for 8 years, and has done a lot of riding with those cops, thus seeing the reality of black life in America as few whites ever do.
He's not racist at all; he just sees that US policies have done nothing to bring the races together, or to raise blacks, as a class, after many decades of effort and spending, that some policies have made the problem worse, and he thinks it may be intractable. That's not racism; even one who disagrees with his thoughts should be able to view them as despair, based in realism and observation, and a pretty good knowledge of history, countries and cultures. and human nature.
More Reed on race.
http://www.fredoneverything.net/Travon2.shtml
http://www.fredoneverything.net/Screwed.shtml
http://www.fredoneverything.net/LondonRiots.shtml
http://www.fredoneverything.net/Jared.shtml
http://www.fredoneverything.net/UnderclassLetter.shtml
Reed, as does everyone, views the world through a unique lens, but his is broader than that of most. Here's how his came to be:
Fred's Biography
As He Tells It
Fred, a keyboard mercenary with a disorganized past, has worked on staff for Army Times, The Washingtonian, Soldier of Fortune, Federal Computer Week, and The Washington Times.
He has been published in Playboy, Soldier of Fortune, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Harper's, National Review, Signal, Air&Space, and suchlike. He has worked as a police writer, technology editor, military specialist, and authority on mercenary soldiers. He is by all accounts as looney as a tune.
I was born in 1945 in Crumpler, West Virginia, a coal camp near Bluefield. My father was a mathematician then serving in the Pacific aboard the destroyer USS Franks, which he described as a wallowing and bovine antique with absolutely no women aboard, but the best the Navy had at the time.
My paternal grandfather was dean and professor of mathematics and classical languages at Hampden-Sydney College, a small and (then, and perhaps now) quite good liberal arts school in southwest Virginia. My maternal grandfather was a doctor in Crumpler. (When someone got sick on the other side of the mountain, the miners would put my grandfather in a coal car and take him under the mountain. He had a fairly robust conception of a house call.) In general my family for many generations were among the most literate, the most productive, and the dullest people in the South. Presbyterians.
After the war I lived as a navy brat here and there--San Diego, Mississippi, the Virginia suburbs of Washington, Alabama, what have you, and briefly in Farmville, Virginia, while my father went on active duty for the Korean War as an artillery spotter. I was an absorptive and voracious reader and a terrible student, and had by age eleven an eye for elevation and windage with a BB gun that would have awed a missile engineer. I was also was a bit of a mad scientist. For example, I think I was ten when I discovered the formula for thermite in the Britannica at Athens College in Athens, Alabama, stole the ingredients from the college chemistry laboratory, and ignited a mound of perfectly adequate thermite in the prize frying pan of the mother of my friend Perry, whose father was the college president. The resulting six-inch hole in the frying pan was hard to explain.
I went to high school in King George County, Virginia, while living on Dahlgren Naval Weapons Laboratory (my father was always a weapons-development sort of mathematician, although civilian by this time), where I was the kid other kids weren't supposed to play with. My time was spent canoeing, shooting, drinking unwise but memorable amounts of beer with the local country boys, attempting to be a French rake with only indifferent success, and driving in a manner that, if you are a country boy, I don't have to describe, and if you aren't, you wouldn't believe anyway. I remember trying to explain to my father why his station wagon was upside down at three in the morning after flipping it at seventy on a hairpin turn that would have intimidated an Alpine goat.
As usual I was a woeful student--if my friend Butch and I hadn't found the mimeograph stencil for the senior Government exam in the school's Dempster Dumpster, I wouldn't have graduated--but was a National Merit Finalist, and in the 99th percentile on the SATs.
After two years at Hampden-Sydney, where I worked on a split major in chemistry and biology with an eye to oceanography, I decided I was bored. After spending the summer thumbing across the continent and down into Mexico, hopping freight trains up and down the eastern seaboard, and generally confusing myself with Jack Kerouac, I enlisted in the Marines, in the belief that it would be more interesting than stirring unpleasant glops in laboratories and pulling apart innocent frogs. It certainly was. On returning from Vietnam with a lot of stories, as well as a Purple Heart and more shrapnel in my eyes than I really wanted, I graduated from Hampden-Sydney with lousy grades and a bachelor-of-science degree with a major in history and a minor in computers. Really. My GREs were in the 99th percentile.
The years from 1970 to 1973 I spent in largely disreputable pursuits, a variety that has always come naturally to me. I wandered around Europe, Asia, and Mexico, and acquired the usual stock of implausible but true stories about odd back alleys and odder people.
When the 1973 war broke out in the Mid-East, I decided I ought to do something respectable, thought that journalism was, and told the editor of my home-town paper, "Hi! I want to be a war correspondent." This was a sufficiently damn-fool thing to do that he let me go, probably to see what would happen. Writing, it turned out, was the only thing I was good for. My clips from Israel were good enough that when I argued to the editors of Army Times that they needed my services to cover the war in Vietnam, they too let me do it.
I spent the last year of the war between Phnom Penh and Saigon, leaving each with the evacuation. Those were heady days in which I lived in slums that would have horrified a New York alley cat, but they appealed to the Steinbeck in me, of which there is a lot. After the fall of Saigon I returned to Asia, resumed residence for six months in my old haunts in Taipei, and studied Chinese while waiting for the next war, which didn't come. Returning overland, I took up a career of magazine free-lancing, a colorful route to starvation, with stints on various staffs interspersed. For a year I worked in Boulder, Colorado, on the staff of Soldier of Fortune magazine, half zoo and half asylum, with the intention of writing a book about it. Publishing houses said, yes, Fred, this is great stuff, but you are obviously making it up. I wasn't. Playboy eventually published it, making me extremely persona non grata at Soldier of Fortune.
Having gotten married somewhere along the way for reasons that escape me at the moment, I am now the happily divorced father of the World's Finest Daughters. Until recently I worked as, among other things, a law-enforcement columnist for the Washington Times. It allowed me to take trips to big cities and to ride around in police cars with the siren going woowoowoo and kick in doors of drug dealers. Recently I changed the column from law enforcement to technology, and now live in Mexico near Guadalajara, having found burros preferable to bureaucrats. My hobbies are wind surfing, scuba, listening to blues, swing-dancing in dirt bars, associating with colorful maniacs, weight-lifting, and people of the other sex. My principal accomplishment in life, aside from my children, is the discovery that it is possible to jitterbug to the Brandenburgs.
_________________________
It's never too late to be who you might have been.
George Elliot
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#1340419 - 04/24/12 07:50 AM
Re: T Martin+race in America, in general
[Re: Ayuveda]
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Chicago Jesus
Senior Member
Registered: 01/16/12
Posts: 6616
Loc: Obama's moral compass
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MOBILE, Alabama --
Mobile police need your help to catch a mob that beat Matthew Owens so badly that he's in critical condition.
According to police, Owens fussed at some kids playing basketball in the middle of Delmar Drive about 8:30 Saturday night. They say the kids left and a group of adults returned, armed with everything but the kitchen sink.
Police tell News 5 the suspects used chairs, pipes and paint cans to beat Owens.
Owens' sister, Ashley Parker, saw the attack. "It was the scariest thing I have ever witnessed." Parker says 20 people, all African American, attacked her brother on the front porch of his home, using "brass buckles, paint cans and anything they could get their hands on."
Police will only say "multiple people" are involved.
What Parker says happened next could make the fallout from the brutal beating even worse. As the attackers walked away, leaving Owen bleeding on the ground, Parker says one of them said "Now thats justice for Trayvon." Trayvon Martin is the unarmed teenager police say was shot and killed February 26 by neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman in Samford, Florida.
_________________________
“Satan trembles when he sees a sinner on their knees.”
Remember.... Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl
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#1340880 - 04/25/12 09:07 PM
Re: T Martin+race in America, in general
[Re: VM Smith]
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Ayuveda
Senior Member
Registered: 04/05/10
Posts: 6367
Loc: Imagine
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melancholy foot soldier of libertarianism There you go again, stuffing everything and everybody into your silly concept of everything being controlled by some rigid hierarchy or another. Can't you realize that an individual can simply believe something, without imagining that he's a "foot soldier? You've read too many manifestos (or too few, or the wrong ones, perhaps), and it's dulling your discernment.
My eyes have been open long enough to discern a melancholy foot soldier of libertarianism when they pass by. 
I'm familiar with Fred. And although I find his association with the hardcore right-wing SoF Magazine and conservative Washington Times despicable, his politics wrongheaded, I think his worldly experiences are made tangible and entertaining for any reader.
For crying out loud VM. Where do you see anything concerning hierarchy implied in my post above?
Fred Reed is a self-described "sociopath", his commentaries have been described as scurrilous, satirical and opinionated, yearning for "a time gone by." Reed is a libertarian possessing a wicked wit, as I said, "tangible and entertaining." I might disagree with him politically but hell - totally cool with me.
Judging my choice of reading??
Yikes...
"Don't taze me bro'!"
-Andrew Meyer
_________________________
Sometimes, tear gas can make you see better.
-graffiti in Athens
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#1341031 - 04/26/12 09:50 AM
Re: T Martin+race in America, in general
[Re: Chicago Jesus]
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Ayuveda
Senior Member
Registered: 04/05/10
Posts: 6367
Loc: Imagine
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Very Disturbing.
Since this article was written Mobile Police made their first arrest in the mob beating of Matthew Owens. 44-year-old Terry Rawls surrendered Wednesday on assault charges.
"This here is an ongoing dispute with neighbors, that's what this is," explained Corporal Chris Levy with the Mobile Police Department.
http://www2.wkrg.com/news/2012/apr/25/mobile-police-make-first-arrest-owens-beating-case-ar-3674943/
Matthew Owens Beating Not A Hate Crime, Not Related To Trayvon Martin, Mayor Says
Andy Campbell
04/25/2012
Matthew Owens was allegedly beaten by a vicious mob, after which someone uttered the words, "Now that's justice for Trayvon."
The mayor of Mobile, Ala. said Tuesday that the brutal beating of Matthew Owens was not a hate crime, as new details emerge implicating the victim as the instigator.
About 20 African American adults beat Owens into critical condition on Saturday night after an argument between the victim and some kids at a local basketball court, witnesses said.
One person claimed that Owens spewed racial slurs at the group and even pulled out two knives, according to WPMI.
"It was like kitchen knives," witness David Dinkins told the station. "They were long."
Another witness, Lemicka Whisenhunt, quoted Owens as saying "he's going to lynch all the black kids, he hates black n---ers, he hates that we moved on this street."
Police aren't saying much about the incident Saturday, but they and mayor Sam Jones said the attack is not being investigated as a hate crime, or even a race issue.
"Wait for the facts as far as we’re concerned right now," Jones told Fox 10. "But, I would caution people to not jump to conclusions right now. This is really very divisive in communities throughout the country, and I don't think we have any reason to be divisive here because I don't see any evidence of that."
He said the fact that one of the attackers allegedly said, "Now that's justice for Trayvon" has been "blown out of proportion."
The February death of Trayvon Martin has received international attention after George Zimmerman allegedly killed the 17-year-old boy in what he said was self defense.
Owens reportedly has a long rap sheet in the area, the station reported. He's been booked on charges of assault, domestic violence, harassment and public intoxication in the past.
No arrests have been made in the attack.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/25..._n_1452096.html
_________________________
Sometimes, tear gas can make you see better.
-graffiti in Athens
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#1341079 - 04/26/12 01:30 PM
Re: T Martin+race in America, in general
[Re: Ayuveda]
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VM Smith
Diamond Member
Registered: 11/28/05
Posts: 34611
Loc: Reality
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"A hierarchy (Greek: hierarchia (ἱεραρχία), from hierarches, "leader of sacred rites") is an arrangement of items (objects, names, values, categories, etc.) in which the items are represented as being "above," "below," or "at the same level as" one another."
A hierarchy can be an ordered set, which is the abstract meaning. You use it more as the above, where a "foot soldier" would be one who is "below". I'm surprised you don't use "running dog".
A foot soldier is one who is employed, directed, or duped into carrying out the wishes of those at the top of a rigid hierarchy, such as the monolithic, rigidly structured army of capitalists you imagine, are storming the gates of civilization.
I look at it this way: Jagger and Lennon are/were both obviously practicing capitalists, who wanted to make a pile in the music industry, despite the myths about, particularly, Lennon's socialism. You tend to lump things together. Lennon was, as I am, anti-war, and and he saw, as I do, that there is much injustice in the world. That doesn't mean we were or are socialists.
J and L knew each other and were friends. They saw each other around London often. They talked of matters artistic, but they certainly talked about how to succeed, too. How to get ahead...how to keep the money in hand, etc...the commercial aspects of music, and what would sell, etc. They had drinks, etc. and may have seen each other at St. Moritz, FI.
Capitalists do that today. They get together at the Vineyard and other places, they're friends and acquaintances, they talk about the markets and the players, in and out of government, and how to get ahead, etc. That doesn't mean that there's a rigid hierarchial army of capitalists plotting to take over anything. They don't want to rule; they want to succeed.
You constantly conflate things, or oversimplify things. So Fred's free-lancing for SoF necessarily means anything? Joe Bageant, who described himself as a "cast-iron-bottomed-socialist, was a longtime editor at "Military History", and as he said, "[lived in] Eugene Oregon, worked for an international magazine corporation pushing insecticides and pesticides to farmers worldwide." What's that make him? It's called a job.
Reed was a combat marine. You bet. He took a 12.7 through the face, spent a lot of time at Walter Reed, and is nearly blind from it. He thinks the Vietnam adventure was stupid and counterproductive, which he also feels the same, about all of the Mid East fiascoes, and about Libya, Grenada, Panama, etc, ad nauseum. Bageant was in the Navy, and neither was a war-lover or militarist...quite the opposite.
Both certainly didn't think the US was a well run place, or a model that anyone should emulate...after all, both moved to Latin America for good and considered reasons...it's not something one does lightly.
Bageant traveled up to see Reed in Mexico, and lived in that town, which is where he learned that he had a fast-growing cancer. They had different outlooks in some ways, but they had views in common, too, and respected each other.
Bageant and I wrote, and even though we disagreed on theory and what would improve the situation, too, we had respect for each other, and saw that we had much in common.
At one point, he said, "We should be talking by Skype", and gave me his info. He mentioned that he had a son at Cornell, but we didn't manage to hook up that way, either. I never acted on the Skype thing, or took the trouble to cruise down to Winchester and have a beer with him, on the occasions he came up from Belize to see his family. On 3/26/11 I forever lost the chance to do those things, which I intended to do, but somehow never got around to. Inertia, I guess.
Lesson: If you want to do something, don't wait; life is short.
You seem to blame the capitalist arms merchants for war. You have it backward. The sword wasn't invented by someone who thought that, if he just invented it, a market would arise for it. No, he saw that government had armies and made war. Production doesn't make markets; it's demand that creates production. A perceived, recognized "necessity" is the mother of invention, and of action; though capitalism is not the parent of, or child of, or even the distant cousin or spouse of, government; they're neighbors inhabiting the same world.
To the extent that GE and Raytheon, et al, are intertwined with government, which is heavily, it is because government is corrupt, and invites more corruption; selling itself is as much its lifeblood as is war.
Same thing with Morgan Stanley, et al, and the revolving door to the Fed and Treasury.
Government's a cop, and capitalism a contractor, and they're neighbors. Government says to capitalism, "Okay, if you'll pave my driveway for free, I'll let you off that speeding ticket, and I also will not arrest you, or your buddies, in the future. Government drives it by being openly, for all practical purposes, for sale; you look at it backwards from what I do. Just because both sides engage in corruption doesn't change the situation. Capitalists know that as long as there is government, which is inherently corrupt, and always quite willing to be corrupted further by the selling of favors, such as preferential legislation, using it like the whore it is can be a useful, successful business strategy.
Yeah..whore is an apt description; it encourages, caters and panders to the worst in human nature. It doesn't create that nature, but it makes it much more openly pervasive and damaging.
It's not an honest game, and it's not the only game in town, but it has been proven to be an age-old, surefire winner. Capitalists are human, and some of them will take the offer, in self-interest.
Same way with socialism, which is a half-baked, unrealistic system, which can never work because it has flawed premises about how human nature works.
It can only exist, for very long, if it is imposed, and control maintained, by a dictator government, which is not true of capitalism, which is the way people would act and organize, at least in large groups and societies, even in the absence of government.
But even in the sainted socialist countries, government is for sale. The USSR was just as corrupt as the USG is. Why? Not because it was formed, organized, and run along any particular "evil" ideological line, such as capitalism or socialism, because they are neutral, but because it was run by humans, who recognized the obvious (to some; successful businessman succeed not just because they work hard, but because they are smart enough to see the essential nature of things, and to seize the main chance, when they see it) and essential nature of government, and bent it (easily, as always) to their ends.
Don't ever misunderestimate (thanks, Shrub; though accidental, it's as valid and descriptive as the similarly conflated "flusterated) the ability of government to keep a foolish system going. The USSR people put up with it, and bought the propaganda about the socialist nirvana that would come, just as soon as they could get through the necessary "interim" phase; they sucked it up for 70 years.
It really wasn't until she lost in Afghanistan that they really saw how, imperialistic, ineffectual, weak, short-sighted, stupid, venal and selfish the government was, that it had premises flawed at the core, and that it never would change for the better, or grow in quality, as conceived, constituted and run. They made the mistake of swapping one government for another, which is just as bad, and just as corrupt. Duh!
Would that the fact that the US hasn't won a war since WWII have the same effect on Americans, but you have to hit bottom before you recognize the need for change, and although plummeting, the nation hasn't quite hit bottom. It's a huge military machine engaged in an endeavor which can't succeed, because most of the 7B see it for what it is, and ultimately won't permit it to succeed, and will thwart it by whatever means they feel effective, possible, or necessary. All it can do is to further harm the American people, and the world.
You apparently think Reed is merely a comedian, or maybe even a racist. I think he's much more, being an iconoclastic thinker with a unique perspective and experience, and with a resulting fresh set of eyes, and the fairly rare ability to employ language to say exactly what he means, and the cojones to say it, in or to a country in which race, and government and militarism is not discussed in realistic terms, in large part out of political correctness and government's desire to manipulate minds and win votes.
He's not racist, just because he doesn't use the tired, lame, simplistic, victim/oppressor template, exclusively, although he's aware of history far more than most. And he's not as simplistic and reductionist as most; although it's the "3rd social/political rail" to ever blame blacks for any problems; he's got the perception, honesty and nuts to stand on that rail, and shout out that it's there, and that's not racist; it's realist. And though he's smart enough to know that most won't "get it", he knows both that he's right, and that it must be said.
I ramble, but feel that you deserved some answer. I don't at all say that you are immature, although I get the feeling that you are younger, and haven't had to watch the same old movie play as many times as I've had to, but I do think that you are an intelligent and caring man who reasons from the wrong premises, so that you don't see the forest for the trees. And/or, possibly, that you work in the education industry, or are an inhabitant another part of the land of government, whose inhabitants are cloistered, and so given to blindness, in many cases.
Me? I'm not in anything; I'm retired, and of no religion or political party. Even Ron Paul has been quoted as not being sure that the system can be reformed from within, even though he's in the system. Being in the system has had the opposite effect on him than it has on most; he is smart enough to see how bad it realy is, as are many; unlike many, he is honest enough to suspect and admit that it may, in itself, be useless and inherently and unchangeably corrupt.
His suspicion is correct, and I don't just suspect it; I know it, as surely as I've ever know anything. I am nothing, I've been on the margin, for various reasons, my whole life.and so have no vested interest in the system continuing, and I'm not afraid of change. It doesn't scare menearly as much as the present state of affairs scares and disgusts me.
I'll never change you; you've drunk too much of the Kool-Aid. To closely paraphrase you "If you don't get it by now, you never will; I give up on you.". I can't fight a strong mind which has been that deeply indoctrinated.". Maybe true, but sad, because I think you're an intelligent person, whose heart, at least, is in the right place, and has come to recognize a good part of the truth; you just propose unworkable solutions. We can fight, but it wastes our time and effort.
BTW, Reed isn't a sociopath; that comment illustrates that he's secure enough in himself, and his beliefs, to be comfortable with poking fun at himself in the interest of lampooning his critics, who not only are incapable understanding him, but in the depths of their misunderstanding of him, and of the issues, will say almost anything about him, such as the "scurrilous" charge; they don't even understand why they deserve to be humorously insulted, or why "scandalous" claims should be made about their scandalous behavior and silly beliefs.
All of this serves to say that I'm a huge Fred fan, and think that he's one of the few to perceive the situation clearly, committed enough to truth and honesty to speak out, and articulate enough to state the case well.
Plus, you know, one has to make a living, especially when one has daughters. You should donate; help him keep Padre Kino on the table. 
_________________________
It's never too late to be who you might have been.
George Elliot
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#1341128 - 04/26/12 04:25 PM
Re: T Martin+race in America, in general
[Re: VM Smith]
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Ayuveda
Senior Member
Registered: 04/05/10
Posts: 6367
Loc: Imagine
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Reed isn't a sociopath; that comment illustrates that he's secure enough in himself, and his beliefs, to be comfortable with poking fun at himself in the interest of lampooning his critics, who not only are incapable understanding him, but in the depths of their misunderstanding of him, and of the issues, will say almost anything about him, such as the "scurrilous" charge; they don't even understand why they deserve to be humorously insulted, or why "scandalous" claims should be made about their scandalous behavior and silly beliefs...
You constantly conflate things, or oversimplify things. So Fred's free-lancing for SoF necessarily means anything? Joe Bageant, who described himself as a "cast-iron-bottomed-socialist, was a longtime editor at "Military History", and as he said, "[lived in] Eugene Oregon, worked for an international magazine corporation pushing insecticides and pesticides to farmers worldwide." What's that make him? It's called a job....BTW,
A few things we could eventually break down VM.
Let's just tackle any misunderstanding regarding your beloved 'Fred On Everything' this time.
I don't consider him a racist or a buffoon. I get where he's coming from and, as you read, acknowledged his perspective as interesting. His criticism of imperialist war, from albiet a libertarian viewpoint, is welcome and legit. I think those using "scurrilous" and "scandalous" to describe his work were obviously offering criticisms in facetious tone - Reed would probably admire that and break into a sardonic grin. I don't see how you missed the humor.
Yes, Reed is an interesting individual, but outside of those adhering to a marginalized libertarian political ideology of little real value or influence in the greater struggle I think.
On Reed's tenure Soldier of Fortune (SoF) Magazine.
For those unfamiliar with the war porn rag I've linked an article. Maybe it's me VM, but I think signing on to a ultra-rightwing publication know for running full page ads recruiting for mercenaries and contract killers was a grotesque way to make coin. A modicum of integrity does indeed mean something. Especially for a commentator with his creds.
Padre Kino. 
I think he missed the boat.
http://www.alternet.org/news/152413/the_...aries_for_hire/
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Sometimes, tear gas can make you see better.
-graffiti in Athens
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