H/t Greg Perry
Sunday, August 13, 2023
Saturday, August 12, 2023
UPDATED: A Time Of Reckoning
Most have probably heard about or seen the video of the violent confrontation occurring in Montgomery, Alabama the other day. A riverboat was unable to dock because a group of white louts took up its berth. After 45 minutes of trying to get them to move their small vessel via the ship's PA, the Black co-captain of the riverboat went ashore and tried to untie the vessel. It was at this point that fisticuffs ensued.
Was this a racially-motivated group assault? I don't know if it necessarily started that way, but other than the possibility that those responsible for the misplaced craft were simply poor white trash doing their thing, it would seem that they took exception to being told to do something by a Black man.
Once they began pummelling him, several other Black people came to his assistance, and the melee ensued. The following video is a powerful statement as to why so many came to the beleaguered co-captain's aid. It is well-worth watching, and is a potent reminder of the racial violence that pervades American history and culture, as well as the sense of community evident as people rose to the co-captain's defence.
The writer then looks at the sense of community that surfaced as the Black co-captain was being pummelled by the white thugs. It would seem Aldean's song was never intended to include the safety and community of Black people.
Feel free, of course, to draw your own conclusions.
UPDATE: Damien Pickett, the Montgomery riverboat co-captain, explains what he experienced:
Pickett told police that the captain had asked a group on a pontoon boat “at least five or six times” to move from the riverboat’s designated docking space but they responded by “giving us the finger and packing up to leave”. Pickett and another deckhand eventually took a vessel to shore and moved the pontoon boat “three steps to the right”, he wrote.
He said two people ran rushing back, including one cursing and threatening to beat him for touching the boat. Pickett wrote that one of the men shouted that it was public dock space, but Pickett told them it was the city’s designated space for the riverboat. He said he told them he was “just doing my job”. Pickett said he was punched in the face and hit from behind.
“I went to the ground. I think I bit one of them. All I can hear Imma kill you” and beat you, he wrote. He couldn’t tell “how long it lasted” and “grabbed one of them and just held on for dear life”, Pickett wrote.
Friday, August 11, 2023
Hoping Against Hope
If you are part of the Doug Ford cabal, you must certainly and ardently hope the above is true. If it isn't, you may intuit that you are in big trouble with the electorate, despite the crowing of some Tory insiders that the legislature does not resume until the end of September, long after an often somnolent public has gone back to its repose.
If letters to the editor are any indication, the public mood is sour over the Greenbelt corruption that is obvious to most. Here are a few of those letters:
We must hold our premier accountable
Wednesday, August 9, 2023
"Banana Republic Corruption"
If you have read anything coming out of Ontario Auditor General's report into the removal of Greenbelt lands for development, you will know that the stench of corruption is deep and pervasive in the Doug Ford government. I watched Ford and Housing Minister Steve Clark's damage-control news conference this afternoon, and it was staggeringly unconvincing.
No heads will roll, not even that of Clark's chief of staff. All the hapless duo would admit to was that they are committed to "improving the process."
The following analysis sifts through the facts concisely, articulating the truth to be found in this sordid debacle:
Blame Trudeau
Everyone else does.
We’re team Barbie.
Famous windbag Piers Morgan expressed his displeasure this way.
“So glad I’m not Canadian.”
But the ramification of the 'transgression' goes far beyond old Piers' disapprobation:
THE CONSEQUENCE:
The galaxy has spoken.
Monday, August 7, 2023
When Education Becomes Perverted
“If you’re not straight, white, and conservative, it doesn’t feel safe” - Raineesha Day, California teacher.
Having had a career as a teacher, I have always believed in educations's mitigating effects: it can help bridge the gap between ignorance and critical thinking and can mean the difference between poverty and economic stability. Most importantly, it can contribute to citizens' healthy, knowledgeable participation in their democracy.
But all of those benefits are predicated on an education system that is honest and earnest, that sees itself as a conveyor of truth rather than a weapon to promote ignorance. Sadly, both in Canada and the United States, as I have written in many posts, it is the latter that often prevails today.
In The Guardian, Robin Buller writes about a deplorable situation in California where education has become weaponized by a right-wing faction.
The small southern California city of Temecula made headlines across the US when its school board banned critical race theory and attempted to purge elementary school textbooks that reference gay rights icon Harvey Milk.
On Wednesday, a group of parents, students, teachers and a union sued the Temecula valley school district, alleging the critical race theory ban violates California law, the right to due process and the right to be free from discrimination. If the court rules in their favor, lawyers on the case say it will set a new precedent for the right to fact-based education in California public schools.
It appears that the real problems began during the pandemic, when parents objected to school mask mandates. As we know from our own experience, that brought out the extremists who, in this case, managed to elect three board members who appear to believe that ignorance is bliss. Homosexual icons like Harvey Milk and so-called Critical Race Theory wound up being banned.
In the spring of 2022, three new school board candidates – Danny Gonzalez, Joseph Komrosky and Jen Wiersma – ran on platforms that opposed masking and vaccine requirements, accused the teacher’s union of working against parents’ interests, and suggested standard curriculum had been replaced by “sexualized” material.
The developments echoed those in other parts of California and across the country.
Reshaping suburban school boards was part of a national Republican strategy in 2022 to energize voters. Often, those interventions were funded by national conservative groups with deep pockets, like Moms for Liberty, the American Council and Turning Point USA. The campaigns of Komrosky, Gonzalez and Wiersma were financed by the Inland Empire Family Pac, which is headed by a local evangelical pastor.
And such repression has real-life consequences.
In past years, homophobic and white supremacist graffiti has been scrawled in public spaces, football fans at the local high school have greeted a visiting team with loud racist taunts, and a mayor was forced to resign following the release of emails in which he made racist remarks about police violence against people of color.
Tuesday Cortes, a 16-year-old queer student,
... said she was bullied for her sexuality throughout middle school, with limited intervention from school administrators. In eighth grade, Cortes said, classmates chanted “there’s only two genders” during recess and mocked her for her short hair.
Black parents have also been made understandably uneasy by statements from the board such is this:
...board member Komrosky called CRT a “racist ideology” that uses “division and hate as an instructional framework in our schools”. Gonzalez and Wiersma did not respond to questions.
The only real brights spots here is the fact that sane and reasonable people are fighting back against the unhinged through the lawsuit that has been filed. That, and the fact that both parents and people like Cortes are unbowed.
[Involved parent Jennifer] San Nichols and others say the events will not push them out of Temecula. If anything, the ban has had the opposite effect, bolstering their activism.
“The harder they try to suppress us, the harder Black and Brown parents will push back,” said [Christina] Johnson, the mother of three. “I am staying for as long as I can.”
The final word goes to Cortes, who correctly identifies the poison that ignorance can engender:
...ensuring that the history of gay rights is taught in school is a critical part of preventing anti-LGBTQ+ bullying. “If queer history isn’t available to learn, we will never progress and people will stay full of hatred and ignorance,” she said.
Saturday, August 5, 2023
The Sickness Unto Death
― The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening
In these fraught times, what are critical thinkers to do, other than to muse and despair? It is a question I often ask myself as I watch the United States implode, and worry that the sickness that has besieged its people is having an undeniable influence on politics in Canada. One needs only examine our crazed right-wing for evidence of that.
But the problem seems much worse south of the border, largely due to the cowardice of those seeking the Republican presidential nomination or currying other political favour. With few exceptions, they would rather see the American Republic fall than reduce their own competitive chances. They have freely given themselves over to the darkest of human impulses.
Some Republicans in Congress are still willing to criticise Trump on certain issues and a few, such as Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, are outspoken in their conviction that he is unfit for office. Others, such as Congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming, have either retired or been ousted.
But most party leaders have stayed silent and fallen into line, apparently terrified of alienating Trump’s fervent support base in what critics describe as political cowardice. Even his main opponents in the party’s presidential primary race have dodged the issue or endorsed his claim of a Democratic witch-hunt and “deep state” conspiracy.
And the sad truth is that with each indictment, Trump's popularity amongst his unhinged base increases. Without principled opposition, that cannot change.
Rick Wilson, a Republican strategist and co-founder of The Lincoln Project, which is merciless in its denunciation of Trump, makes some observations worth noting.
“Not one of the serious candidates – there aren’t many in the primary field – are making any kind of argument other than this is illegitimate, this is wrong, [special counsel] Jack Smith’s the real criminal, all these crazy things. Not one of the serious ones is saying this guy should be in prison, not in the White House.
“I don’t think this is a moment where Trump has been harmed in the primary; it’s solidified it. He’s going to be on TV every minute of every day for weeks and weeks and weeks and every time that happens the fundraising for the other Republicans dries up, their ability to communicate a messaging stops, none of it works. The whole thing is set of perverse incentives and it’s an almost inescapable trap for the rest of the field.”
A different set of rules seems to apply to the orange demagogue. Seemingly without consequences, he openly mocks, slanders and threatens those who stand in his way.
At a court hearing in Manhattan in April, Justice Juan M. Merchan, who is overseeing Mr. Trump’s state prosecution on charges stemming from a hush payment to a porn actress, warned the former president to refrain from making comments that were “likely to incite violence or civil unrest.”
Justice Merchan’s admonition came after Mr. Trump posted on Truth Social saying that “death and destruction” could follow if he were charged in the case in Manhattan.
That same month, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, who was presiding over a federal rape and defamation lawsuit filed against Mr. Trump by the writer E. Jean Carroll, warned the former president to stop posting messages about the case. The ones he had already written were “entirely inappropriate,” the judge said.
Mr. Trump had derided the case on social media as a “scam” and personally mocked Ms. Carroll.
After the hearing in front of Justice Merchan, Mr. Trump returned to Florida and to his customary practice, calling the district attorney who brought the New York charges against him, Alvin L. Bragg, a “criminal,” and Justice Merchan himself “a Trump-hating judge with a Trump-hating wife and family.”
Days after Judge Kaplan issued his warning, Mr. Trump attacked him too, saying on a trip to one of his golf courses in Ireland that the judge was “extremely hostile.”
We live in dystopian times, times when selling one's soul for political gain has become commonplace; those who should be protecting their democracy with every fiber of their being have abandoned their responsibilities as they jockey for personal gain.
Sadly, there appears to be few who are willing to save the people from themselves.
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