SodaHead - Mikey3664's Blog

Six Uncomfortable Truths About Race in America

2008-08-16T15:55:08Z

0 raves

"People have been calling for national dialogues and conversations for decades. It usually works something like this: Liberals say we need a frank discussion about race (or class or gender) in this country, and then they proceed to bludgeon any conservative stupid enough to take them up on their offer." -- Jonah Goldberg Everyone always says that they want a national dialogue about race, but what they really seem to want is a national lecture where a liberal mouths politically correct platitudes -- and everyone else is welcome to either nod along or shut up out of fear that they'll be called a racist for daring to have an opinion contrary to left-wing doctrine. But, that's the great thing about being a professional blogger: you can tell Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Barack Obama, the NAACP and the rest of the professional grievance hustlers to pre-emptively kiss your behind because you don't have a boss, you don't have shareholders, and you know that they think you're a racist any way just because you're a conservative. So, that being said, let me say a few things that people all across America have been thinking for a long time, but are afraid to say publicly. Most white Americans are not racists: I grew up in a small town in North Carolina and I've had the opportunity to talk to everyone from business executives to redneck country boys and the honest-to-God truth is that most white Americans are not racists. They don't look down on black Americans, pre-judge black Americans because they're black, or even look at most issues through a racial lens. That's not to say that there aren't any racists out there, because unfortunately, there are people with those sort of backwards attitudes. But happily, they are in the minority and I'd even go so far as to say that they are a tiny minority amongst the people who came of age after the sixties. Blacks are, on average, more racist than whites: As we've seen in the Democratic primary this year, black Americans are much more likely to vote for a person based on his skin color than white Americans. Also, most black Americans tend to think it's ok to belong to race-based organizations like the NAACP, while white Americans hold race-based groups like the KKK in disdain. Moreover, percentage wise, there are pretty clearly a lot more black Americans who dislike white Americans based on their skin color than vice-versa. Maybe that's understandable given the shameful treatment black Americans once had to endure in this country, but it's still the truth -- and don't even get me started on black Americans actually defending criminal scum like O.J. Simpson, Mike Tyson, and the L.A. rioters because they're black. It's not racist to be scared of young black men on the street: There's a reason people tend to be more nervous about young black men than young white men: it's that "blacks are nearly 13 times more likely to commit violent crimes than whites." That's why even Jesse Jackson said, "There is nothing more painful to me...than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery, then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved." Moreover, most Americans aren't even scared to walk by black men; they're scared to walk by black men who look like extras from a rap video. Even Barack Obama's poor, much maligned grandmother probably wouldn't think twice about walking up to a half dozen black guys standing on the street corner wearing suits. Affirmative Action does enormous damage to black Americans: Ostensibly, Affirmative Action is supposed to be helpful to black Americans, but it's actually incredibly damaging. Sure, a few black Americans benefit from Affirmative Action, but there are three huge negatives to the program. #1) It breeds enormous resentment amongst white Americans who, quite correctly, feel that they are being unconstitutionally discriminated against based on their skin color. #2) It leads to some of the brightest and most talented black students flunking out of school. As Walter Williams once wrote, "You find the same thing at MIT. Black students in the engineering department, they score in the top 5% nationally in the quantitative portion of the SAT. However, close to 50% are on academic probation or flunking out at MIT. What's the problem? Well, the rest of the students in the engineering department are in the top 1%, which puts the black students at MIT near the bottom of the student body. So those black students who are being turned into failures at MIT, if they'd gone to engineering school at the University of Pennsylvania or Cornell, they'd be on the Dean's list." #3) Affirmative Action taints the accomplishments of every successful black American because there is always an unspoken question: did they make it on their own merits or did they get a little extra help because they're black? Black Americans today sometimes benefit because of their race: Sure, black Americans may occasionally have to confront racism. But, black Americans can -- and often do -- benefit from their race as well. Everybody knows about government mandated Affirmative Action and racial set asides, but black Americans often get special treatment that goes beyond that in the workplace. For example, I've had managers that have been honest enough to admit to me that they're much less likely to fire a poorly performing black worker because they feel the need to have a long paper trail to protect themselves from discrimination complaints. Along those same lines, I've had a higher-up in a major company tell me that he'd hire a talented black salesman over an equally talented white salesman just to make the company look diverse. Moreover, black Americans get breaks in the public arena that white Americans don't. That's why a jerk like Don Imus can lose his job for calling a group of women "nappy headed hos" while a jerk like Jeremiah Wright can spend years preaching anti-white hate speech from the pulpit and still be embraced by a major presidential candidate. Speaking of Obama, of course Geraldine Ferraro was right when she said Obama couldn't win the Democratic nomination if he wasn't black. Setting aside the fact that the man isn't even qualified to be President in the first place, more than half of his support appears to come from black Americans who are voting for him because he's black and liberals who are eaten up with white guilt. If Obama had been white, he would have been fighting it out with Joe Biden and Christopher Dodd at the bottom of the candidate reject pile. Racism is no longer one of the three biggest problems that black Americans face: For much of American history, racism was THE problem that black Americans had to deal with. However today, there are much bigger issues -- like, for example, the 70% illegitimacy rate amongst black Americans. Then there is the victimhood mentality pushed by people making a living off of racial grievances. How many black Americans have given up on their dreams because they've been convinced by race hucksters that the deck is stacked against them? You could also point to the extraordinary amount of crime in many black communities which is committed not by white racists, but by young black men. Even the fact that blacks vote so monolithically for the Democratic Party is a huge problem because it leads to Democrats ignoring black concerns because they figure they have a lock on their votes while simultaneously causing Republicans to write off the black vote. That's why, quite frankly, if every last racist white person in America were to do the right thing and become color blind tomorrow, it probably wouldn't make a whit of difference in the lives of 99% of black Americans.

Liberal Racism

2008-08-16T14:42:30Z

Mikey3664

0 raves

Liberals, who have always claimed to be the authoritative source of progressive attitudes on race, have actually become one of the centers of racist thinking in America over the last quarter century, a period of time in which postwar liberalism itself was being reconfigured by the radical Sixties worldview. Liberal racism began in the last years of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s life, when organizations such as the Black Panther Party and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) radicalized the issue of color in America by focusing on legitimate "black rage" and the "institutional racism" they claimed was embedded in the "DNA" of American society. King was an obstacle in their path; they rejected the gains he had achieved as illusory. This was no mere intellectual disagreement about a strategy for improving race relations in America; it had a bitter personal component. The black radicals and their white supporters derided King as "De Lawd" and "Uncle Martin." Later on, after King's assassination, most of those who had expressed contempt for him during his lifetime would pay cynical homage to his martyrdom. But they never embraced his vision of an integrated social world. Rather, the program of these liberal racists, both white and black, focused on separatism and racial difference. Instead of subscribing to King's belief in a colorblind society, they wanted government policies that were color-coded. The further America progressed from the dark days of slavery, the more they insisted that slavery was present in America's social institutions and its personal interrelationships. The U.S., they asserted, was steeped in blood and guilt: it must pay for its crimes against "people of color." The extent to which such views have not only entered but dominated the intellectual mainstream of America in the past three decades can be seen in the degree to which King's notion that people should be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin has become marginalized as quaint and naive. The racism in the left's view primarily of blacks themselves, but also of whites, has been clear in the policies the left has pursued. Some, like the demand for reparations for slavery, have not yet prevailed. Others, like the demand for affirmative action, have become part of America's way of doing business as a society. Although claiming to be an equitable "leveling of the playing field," this policy has actually tilted the social landscape. It has nothing to do with equality of opportunity, and everything to do with establishing a regime that will produce an equality of results. It is a zero sum game in which some win because of skin color and others lose because of skin color. Ultimately, affirmative action has put government back into the business of playing racial favorites — even after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the summary achievement of the civil rights movement, banned such action. Liberal racists believe that neutral and objective tests for college admissions are actually rigged in favor of whites. When Asians, many of them recent immigrants with little or no cultural experience, refute this notion by outscoring whites on these tests, liberal racists say that these Asians are not really a minority at all but inauthentic, imitation whites. Liiberal racists bear a heavy burden for having helped destroy the black family and create a black underclass by their romanticization of ghetto behavior, and their insistence that blacks are victims who cannot be held responsible for what they do. They reject the idea that culture rather than race may help explain the disadvantages those in the black underclass face. It is true, as they point out, that some 40 percent of America's black children are born poor, and that this fact affects their life chances. But it is also true that 85 percent of these poor children come from single-parent homes. It is this circumstance—studies show that children born into single-parent families are more likely to be poor, regardless of race, than children with two parents—rather than "institutional racism" that actually handicaps them. Yet in the liberal view, any policy aimed at countering illegitimacy and single parenthood among the black underclass is "blaming the victim." The effects of liberal racism can be seen in the way black students taunt those among them who strive for achievement as sellouts who are "acting white." Liberal racism can be seen in the unholy alliance between the Democrat Party, the National Education Association and other teachers' unions, and black spokesmen such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, to maintain their power by opposing school choice for black children trapped in violent and failing public schools. Liberal racism can be seen in the way black voters are kept on the proverbial "liberal plantation" through scare tactics and attacks on "race traitors" such as Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice, who have defied the party line. Liberal racism can be seen, paradoxically, most clearly in the way anyone straying from its premises is immediately branded as a "racist." This is a powerful sanction that liberal racists use like a bludgeon to control the public discussion about race.

The LIberal News Media

2008-07-09T21:26:01Z

Mikey3664

+3 raves

This is an example of the liberal bias of the news media. My example is from CNN, but MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and the Associated Press (AP), and others clearly have an agenda. They want Obama to be the next president. They will slant the news, omit important details, repeat stories that are conservatively negative while omitting stories that are liberally negative, not report stories that are conservatively positive while headlining stories that are liberally positive. Please give an example if you have one. And please, PLEASE provide some proof via links, videos, etc. Thanks for your help! Here's my example. A very common story we've all heard plenty of times is how George W. Bush' approval rating is "at an all time low". As of March 19, 2008, it was at 31%. I read this in The USA Today, and saw it reported on at least a couple of different nightly news shows. Not one of these stories mentioned the approval rating for Congress, (which is controlled by the Democrats), nor were there any stories about Congress' approval rating that I saw. I actually heard that Congress' approval rating is LOWER than George W. Bush' approval rating - 18% - from Rush Limbaugh, and then I looked it up myself. If the liberal media had added this little tidbit of information into their reporting, maybe voters would start to think things like, "Do we really want a Democrat president in there working with our crappy Congress?" The CNN link >>> http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/03/19/bush.poll/index.html The Gallup link >>> http://www.gallup.com/poll/107242/Congress-Approval-Rating-Ti...

Liberal or Conservative?

2008-06-14T15:25:11Z

Mikey3664

+2 raves

Never mind Obama's pastor. I will not vote for Obama because he is extremely liberal. Do all voters really understand what "liberal" or "conservative" means? Sometimes I wonder. Obama may be a great public speaker. He may stand for "change", and we all know that people want change. But other than the war in Iraq, what will a liberal government do for us? What does Barrack Obama, Hillary Clinton, every single liberal democrat in Congress, and every single liberal politician in the US really want to do for us? There are many examples, but let's just start off with the light bulb. Liberals want to force you to use the Compact Flouresent Bulb. Conservatives want to give you the choice of which bulb you want to buy. Watch this video of Ted Poe illustrate this rediculous light bulb law in the Energy Bill.