Struggling with the terms of the struggle.

I watched a video, posted on twitter by someone complaining about BLM, and I felt the need to write this post.

The video -

First of all, nothing she says in this video is wrong. Second, I think the push back against it is based solely on people misunderstanding the terms that we use to describe things that occur in American society. So, let's discuss some of those terms that people seem to struggle with on a daily basis.

White privilege -  

White privilege is a term for societal privileges that benefit people identified as white in Western countries, beyond what is commonly experienced by non-white people under the same social, political, or economic circumstances.  

Source.

White privilege doesn't mean that all white people have things easier than all people of color. A rich black man, for example, may have more privilege than a poor white woman. The black man having the privileges of being male and rich vs the woman having the disadvantages of being poor and female.

Lots of white people seem to think that when someone says white privilege what they're saying is "You don't have to work for things because you're white." This is not what it means. It just means that you have the benefits of being white in a white country. I would imagine that being *blank* in a *blank* country is always a benefit, wouldn't you? Being Chinese in China, for example, would be more beneficial than being black.

The anger that I see at the use of the term white privilege brings me conveniently to another concept that people misunderstand. Ironically, the reason they misunderstand it is because of it's existence.

White fragility - 

White Fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. These moves include the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation.

Source.

This isn't an attack on white people - the woman that wrote the book is white. It's just a term for a thing that happens. Here's an example of white fragility -

Melissa Francis was so overwhelmed by this conversation that she broke down into tears and effectively ended the discussion. This is exactly white fragility. This comes up often when discussing race with white people in America. I say in America specifically because honestly white people in other parts of the world are far more comfortable having conversations about race than white people in the United States.

This doesn't mean that all white people are fragile or that you're a weak person for experiencing this phenomenon. It's just a thing that exists in American society because of the history of racial tensions in the US and it's the reason that terms like white privilege cause white people here to bristle. 

And, speaking of terms that rustle jimmies...

White supremacy - 

White supremacy is the belief, theory, or doctrine that white people are inherently superior to people from all other racial groups, especially black people, and are therefore rightfully the dominant group in any society.

Source.

The United States of America was founded on white supremacist principles. This should come as no shock to anyone that has read the words of Thomas Jefferson or sung the song of Francis Scott Key. Hell, this is Washington, D.C. in 1925. 

Black people were barely people until 1964 and people are still angry about it today. White supremacy is part of the US. It's woven into the systems that people of color must navigate. It's the reason that being white in America is such a privilege and the reason that white fragility can even exist in the first place.

It's why this is a thug - 

And this is a patriot - 

It's why this is a riot - 

And this is a peaceful protest - 

And it's the reason that this is unacceptable - 

But this is a-ok - 

Simply saying these terms is not an attack on white people. Saying that white privilege, fragility, and supremacy exist is not the same as saying all white people are privileged, fragile, or believe in their supremacy. They're just terms to describe things that are. You do yourself a disservice by refusing to understand these terms. 

If you really want to help people of color in the United States, and the world, the first step is to listen. You can't listen if the terms we must use to describe the things that we must discuss shut you off from what we're actually saying. 

Knowledge is power. 

I love you, white people! Get on the bus! 

Read this, you curious cunt!

Let's talk about the word cunt.

Firstly, let's dispel something right now. The word cunt is NOT automatically misogynistic. The word cunt is not reserved for women. Personally, I rarely use the word when referring to women for that very reason. Can a woman be a cunt? Sure! Anyone can be a cunt. You could be a cunt right now while reading this. Hell, I'm a cunt sometimes.

Wikipedia defines cunt as follows:

Cunt /ˈkʌnt/ is a vulgar word for the vulva or vagina and is also used as a term of disparagement. Reflecting different national usages, cunt is described as "an unpleasant or stupid person" in the Compact Oxford English Dictionary, whereas Merriam-Webster states that it is a "usually disparaging and obscene" term for a woman or an "offensive way to refer to a woman" in the United States.

The key here is “in the United States”. Only Americans restrict the use of this word to women. To me, that's more misogynistic than the use of the word. Are pussies only women? Are dicks only men?

Wikipedia goes on to say:

The Macquarie Dictionary of Australian English gives "a contemptible person". When used with a positive qualifier (good, funny, clever, etc.) in Britain, New Zealand, and Australia, it can convey a positive sense of the object or person referred to.

So, in other English speaking countries the word cunt is not only not exclusive to women but it's also used as a positive sometimes. E.g. - “Nice one, you cheeky cunt!” would not be insulting to an Aussie or a Brit.

I don't know why the United States has decided that cunt is such a horrible word while having absolutely zero issue with the word pussy. I can say pussy all day. I can call men pussies, I can call women pussies, I can call children and animals pussies; No one bats an eye. I call a man a silly cunt and everyone loses their minds. It's ridiculous.

My twitter account was limited earlier for calling Piers Morgan, a British man, a cunt. In his own tongue that's barely offensive. Meanwhile, users call me every slur there is and constantly bombard me with obscene photographs of black people and terrorism victims with impunity. If the word cunt is more offensive to you than the word nigger or a picture of a woman that was torn in half by a truck driven by a terrorist then, guess what?

You're a dumb cunt.

I'm going to continue to use the word cunt liberally. It's a good, strong word with a myriad of uses. It's not just convenient to use but also fun to say! Cunt just rolls off of the tongue.

Giggity.

Thanks for reading and have a fantastic Sunday, you wonderful, wonderful cunts!

Hate Flourishes In Silence.

Obama is not the cause of poor race relations in our country.

I know that white people, even some of the woke ones, don't like to talk about slavery. Whenever it comes up it invokes that notion of justified white guilt and the perceived encouragement of black agitators to stir the cauldron of it. The thing that everyone has to realize is this: African-American's didn't forge that pot.

"Neither did I!", comes the cry from the decidedly pale peanut gallery. And you are absolutely right. Acknowledging the problems in our society caused by slavery is not the same thing as taking the blame for slavery. Understanding systemic racism is the first step to removing it from American culture and healing these old wounds.

The majority of white Americans are not racist and acknowledge that slavery was a very, very bad thing. They understand that no one should be treated in that way and that the people that engaged in it were flawed. The remaining minority is as diverse as that majority. Factory workers, bartenders, "Executive" assistants, cops, firemen, and members of our armed forces. Judges, teachers, and district attorneys?

Most definitely.  

They believe as strongly in their racism as I in denouncing it. They are driven, courageous, and meticulous while working to advance their cause. Though racism is considered an ignorant position we should not dismiss them as imbeciles. Never ever underestimate your opponent. Personally, in life and online, I face every threat head on as if it's the one that will end me. If it doesn't then I win and if it does than I'm right and I win.

Sidebar - I am a petty enough man that, were I killed by a psychotic racist stalker, I would release a final blog post about how I was right. Not that I want to be (un)living Proof, RIP, but I do like the idea of posthumously winning one thousand arguments.

Tombstone idea - Here lies Heysoos. He died for our wins.

I wonder how much of this rant will end up on the cutting room floor. This part, for example, is probably gone.

Back to the main point. The racists that make systemic racism possible. The racists consist of three main groups that I'll name;

The vocal, the yokel, and the focal.

The vocal are your propaganda merchants. Your infowars, your prisonplanet, the hated "andieiamwhoiam". These are your "shout from the rooftops" that blacks are savages racists. Their goal is to push any and all negative press that they can about minorities. Jews, Blacks, Hispanics, Natives, Muslims, of course, and anyone that's different. Any defense of a minority will produce unsourced graphs and hate speech. "Blacks are savages as evidenced by this graph you can't really read that I got from /pol/!". The problem with a lot of these people is that they don't actually even care if their claims are accurate. They know that none of their followers is checking. This allows them to grow more powerful and spread their slimy untruths to a wider audience. Admittedly, there isn't much you can do. You read their claim, Google it, post the actual data, make a factual argument, and they'll either start to yell nigger at you, block you, or their followers attack you while they disappear from the confrontation and sit liking the comments. Still, you win and, with a little luck, those that witness this will be emboldened to speak against their ilk in the future.

The yokels are especially susceptible. I don't mean this as a derogatory term, "yokel". The yokels are usually good people. Salt of the earth and all that. They are not, however, especially well educated. I'm not an elitist, far from it, but certain parts of the education process are important. Conducting proper research, for example, is a learned skill. Understanding the difference between a good source and a bad - and knowing how to check. Recognizing bias and opinion within an article or post, dismissing the fluff, and getting the actual meat of a story. These are things that you learn through proper education and while uneducated America is not dumb or stupid it lacks the skills necessary to educate itself. Fake news is a problem because people can't and/or don't do any research. Most don't even read passed the headline. That's a problem.

The focals just want to be the center of it all. "Look at me! Nigger nigger nigger! I'm edgy and hip. White power and all this. Do I fit in yet?". Kids looking for an identity and creating one on the internet. They're outrageous. Some of them are even funny! The danger here is that, because it's a joke, it is at best ignored and at worst rewarded. Rewarding the focal with attention causes him to swell and sweat. He becomes a size larger as he basks in the adulating light of the internet Gods. He posts more. He gains followers. He spreads the hate. All while bringing it to the mainstream with comedy and increasing tensions between all races.

"That's fucking racist as fuck!" I think to myself as I read tweets and comments. But the slurs aren't what bothers me. What bothers me is when I see that some school teacher from Vermont liked it when someone told me to go back to Africa.

"It's just a joke! Get thicker skin! You think everything is racist!" Says Alice, the totally not racist housewife from Texas that just wants to Make America Great Again.

The local is just someone that is racist because they love in a bubble. Exile from society. self imposed, or otherwise, coupled with a hatred for minorities that they learned as younger humans. A black guy bullied them in high school, a gang of wild ass street niggas best them up for being in the wrong place, or maybe they grew up in that wrong place and were persecuted by blacks that were in that area a majority. This type of racism can easily gain mainstream acceptance with non racist but racist sympathetic white America.

"You'd hate them too if you grew up in [rough inner city]!".

"Well shit!", says the non racist racist sympathizer, "Maybe I would. That's a rough place. Poor guy.".

Their racist views have gained acceptance. Surely, this is confirmation that they are right about everything. Smart people on the interwebs say so. Simply by not challenging their racism you are spreading more hate.

And here is were I get to my point after so much rambling. All three of these groups overlap with the majority because the majority allows racism to exist.

Slavery was only made possible by the racist dehumanization of minorities. What starts off as a session of internet trolling might very well turn into another Dylan Roof. Hate is a contagious intoxicant and there is no more dangerous human than one that is drunk on hate.

The dehumanizing of minorities has only increased during Obama's presidency because Americans as a group refuse to talk about real racial issues like systemic racism. Systemic racism exists because, although the majority of whites are not racist, that majority allows and encourages it with their apathy. People are then allowed to walk through their lives being racist assholes with a measure of security.

Real world examples.

Chip slips and says something about those damn niggers at the water cooler. No one is going to HR. I mean, come on, right?! Yeah, he's a racist fuck but he grew up in Chicago. He can't help it. Later on that day, Frank will deny a loan to an African American couple with excellent credit because he doesn't trust black people.

Eddie is just so damn sick of these black folk. "Criminals, all of them!" He tells his wife at night. She nods glumly as he regurgitates faulty statistics he read on Twitter and sermonizes about the black man's genetic predisposition to crime. The next day, he grins as an African American man stands before him in his courtroom. "Well,", He thinks, "he definitely did it.".

Loraine confides in her co-worker that she really hates minorities and every single day her hatred of them grows. "They're fucking animals!", she seethes. Her new coworker shrugs and sips his coffee. "I don't really want to get into this.", He thinks. Three days later, Loraine hops out of her squad car and guns down an eight year old Latino boy holding a toy truck.

It's not about being politically correct. It's about having integrity. When you know that something is wrong you should speak up and speak out. If you don't then you are just as guilty as those that perpetrate the crime. More so, perhaps, because you knew from the very beginning that it was wrong and you let it go on anyway.

It starts with words but it doesn't always end there.

Sometimes, the words end up killing people.

Happy MLK day, y'all.

Countering the anti-refugee hysteria

The refugee crisis is perhaps one of the most pressing issues that we are facing today. A situation caused by a lack of humanity that can only be solved by demonstrating the opposite. People feeling war should not be treated as though they are criminals. Indeed, even as we argue about "illegals" and The Great Orange teases mass deportations we, as humans, must acknowledge that undocumented immigrants are not criminals. Sure, they have criminals among their numbers. Some "bad hombres" to be sure. The majority, however, are just trying to not live in squalor. Is it criminal to want a better life for your children? 

But I digress. I want to talk about refugees. That tired, poor, huddled mass yearning to breathe free. These people are the weakest of us. The most vulnerable. Homes, families, and lives destroyed by war; They're searching for a place to live in peace. Any place. Anywhere but there. That's what they really are. They aren't roving bands of evil Muslims storming across Europe to genocide the white people. They aren't ISIS invaders attempting to blow up the Eiffel Tower or poison the Rhine. They don't want to climb the fences of Buckingham Palace and rape the queen. They just want to exist.

So, let's dispel some untruth about them, shall we? Let's destroy some lies. 

LIE.

"We have to be vigilant. We have to be strong. We have to see what's going on. There's a big problem in the world. You look what's happening with the migration in Europe. You look at Germany, it's crime-riddled right now."

- Donald J. Trump, President-Elect of the United States of America.


Between 2014 and 2015 the refugee population in Germany increased by 440% while the number of crimes committed by refugees increased by 79%. Germany's Federal Criminal Police Agency's (BKA) report on refugee related crime states that the "vast majority of asylum-seekers commit no offenses.".

"Over-represented [in committing crimes in refugee reception centres] are people with Kosovar, Serbian or Macedonian nationality. Under-represented are those with Syrian and Iraq nationality," the report notes.


"The current trend shows that refugees are just as unlikely to commit crimes as comparable groups among the current population. The majority of them don't commit crimes, they are seeking protection and peace in Germany." - Thomas de Maizière, Germany's Minister of the Interior.

LIE.

"The majority of them are young males. And they could easily be people who are being infiltrated by terrorists and recognize that once you bring them in, then you have got to bring other members of the family in." - Ben Carson.

This is absolute bullshit and can be disproved with basic google search skills. Unfortunately, it seems as though the people that listen to Ben Coonson don't know how to google. Not really much of a surprise.

Here's the actual data, though:

Of the 23,826 total applicants seeking to resettle in the U.S. — 15,937, or around 67 percent, are women (of all ages) and male children (age 0 to 11). Men (age 18 and older) accounted for 25.5 percent.

Maybe they're over represented in the total count of registered refugees?

NOPE.

As ALL DATA has frequently shown the majority of refugees are WOMEN AND CHILDREN. Even if you were to count all males 12 - 59 as young males they are still only 32.9% of the refugee population. So, this is an obvious and demonstrable LIE that is being repeated by Republican xenophobes to besmirch refugees and stoke fear. It's despicable that it's being done with such gusto.

LIE.

Again, the majority of asylum seekers are women and children. So that's a lie to start with. The Great Orange lies a great deal so no surprise there.

The vetting process is arduous. Refugees are vetted by gathering biographical information, interviewed, medically screened, checked by Homeland Security and the FBI, run through databases, and then approved. The approval rate is somewhere around 50%.

It kind of seems as though these are things the president should know. Alas, he in a buffoon.  

His buffoonery is on display in another tweet about refugees;

Another lie?! Surely not! Trump wouldn't know the truth of it hit him repeatedly about the head and shoulders with a Chilean Sea Bass while quoting facts about the things he loves. You know, money, Russia, teen pussy, hooker urine...

The fact is that this tweet is a knee jerk reaction to this story. 

"Members of two Syrian families had turned themselves in to U.S. authorities in Laredo, Texas, at the Mexican border, and were being processed by immigration officials, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said on Thursday.

Two men, two women and four children who "presented themselves" Tuesday at the port of entry were taken into custody by Border Patrol agents and then turned over for immigration processing, DHS said in a statement."

Not sneaking in. Not connected to ISIS. Not terrorists. They presented themselves in the correct way and were processed by immigration officials. 

Again, a fucking buffoon.

LIE.

In 2016 the US let in 12,486 Syrian refugees. Canada has accepted 32,400. Turkey is currently housing 2.7 million. Lebanon?  1.07 million. Jordan? 649,700.

Hardly "pouring into our great country.".

LIE.

"Muslim refugees are running around Europe raping all the white women." - Every xenophobic white supremacist moron on Twitter.

"According to the report, 32 percent of the 208,344 crimes linked to refugees involved asset or fraud offenses, while theft accounted for another 33 percent. The proportion of sexual offenses made up less than 1 percent of refugee-related crimes, with 1,688 cases of sexual assault, including 458 cases of rape or sexual coercion.

According to the latest available figures, there were nearly 47,000 sexual offenses in Germany in 2014."

The fear of brown people raping white women is nothing new in Europe. When French African soldiers occupied Germany after WWI there was the same baseless mass hysteria about rape. Racism doesn't change much.

A German woman has even tried to fight this hysteria by debunking false reports of refugee misconduct with a website called "Hoaxmap". The name is pretty self explanatory. It's a map that shows reports of crimes allegedly committed by refugees that have been refuted, complete with source. She does good work.

"So that extremists can't manipulate people with rumours and half-truths, we need to counter them with facts,“ - Thomas de Maizière, Germany's Minister of the Interior. 

Refugee is defined by Webster thusly:


one that flees; especially :  a person who flees to a foreign country or power to escape danger or persecution

They're just people that had to leave their homes to stay alive. They have already risked everything to get to where they are. We owe it to them as fellow humans to help them. Because we can.

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" 

- Emma Lazarus                                                      

Edit - Here is a NYT article that details the entire vetting process.

Happy birthday Jesus.

A Christmas message.

As we all are, hopefully, enjoying this time with our families I just wanted to send some love out to everyone. Remember that today is supposed to be about other people and not what you get or want. You're meant to be giving smiles and not just getting them.

Atheists... We know. Jesus was born in the summer, if he existed at all, and it's not really his birthday. We get it. Still, when someone says it's Jesus's birthday we do not require you to correct them. Give it a rest for one day? It's fucking Christmas.

Christians... Stop short-circuiting when people say "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas". Not everyone celebrates Christmas. Why not just be happy that it's the time of year where people feel like being nice and not be so focused on their words? After all, it's Jesus's birthday.

Conservatives... Can we give it a rest on Obama being a Muslim for one day? Even if he were, which he isn't, Jesus would have accepted him as a friend regardless. I thought you guys were trying to be like Jesus. What would he do?

Liberals... Take a break from Trump. Eat some turkey. Drink some alcohol. Hug your families. Hope. Maybe we're wrong about him (we aren't) and he'll surprise us (he won't). It'll be good for your soul to get away from that argument for a day. I'm going to try myself but I'm sure I'll end up being a hypocrite before the day is out.

Anyone that is combating racism and bigotry... Do not stop. Especially today. Always call it out. Always stomp it out. Apathy is the warm, dark place in which the deadly fungus of racism grows.

Racists and bigots... Fuck you.

Merry Christmas to all and keep up the good fight.