i point to the comment from @nungesser above about the editing of footage from the video for example–
leading to his overall point that
is it accidental that this is the nra push after the silence over philando castile? i don’t know, maybe. but i do know there was never anything like this being pushed by them when armed men took over a wildlife preserve and threatened government agents with guns. doesn’t that pretty much say everything we need to know about the politics of the nra? if you didn’t know that before and you still don’t know that then that tells me what i need to know about your politics as well.
Sorry, I did not wish to express an assumption, or it least my assumption did not go nearly as far as you took it to go. I was trying to challenge some cultural assumption that clashes with my own (Central European) cultural assumptions, not trying to personally accuse you of anything.
I did not intend to imply anything about you personally, but I will admit that I felt there was something there that I felt needed contradicting. But these are my vague gripes with things that I think are generally accepted in American culture, not something that I want to accuse you personally of (or blame you for).
Just for the record, the “quasi-ethnic” argument irked me because…
I don’t see any significant racial difference between that sneering *** in the video and the white people in Europe. She looks vaguely American, but that might be due to fashion or body language.
Distinguishing such fine racial differences is a skill people are more likely to acquire in racist societies. Example: My grandmother (born 1920) was very good at distinguishing European Jews from other Europeans at a glance.
I haven’t gotten used to how strongly American English defines “white” to be the default; the fact that the thousands of different light-skinned ethnicities of Europe are somehow no longer considered “ethnic” in modern American English hints at an underlying problem.
Labeling this person fits the pattern of “due to this person’s racial characteristics, I will give less credence to her opinions than I would otherwise”, which really isn’t a pattern that I approve of.
So, sorry again for expressing my general observations in such a way that they ended up sounding like I was accusing you of something.
It goes without saying that racial bias takes on different forms from country to country, and therefore, so will the individual perspective of it.
Being that I am an American, it also goes without saying that the society I live in is inherently racist, and the covert institutionalism of it has had an impact on everyone born here.
You haven’t gotten used to it? Try growing up here as a ‘minority,’ sometime; it gets really tiresome then, even when you fully expect it, because “it’s just the status quo.”
Labeling people by mere physical appearance and then judging everyone who even remotely looks like that as if they are all exactly same is the textbook definition of prejudice.
It’s kinda what bigots do; it’s their thing.
I don’t approve of said patterns, but it still behooves me in my own quest for survival to know how those who consider themselves my ‘enemies’ often think.
No harm, no foul, no need to apologize; next time, feel free to just ask me what I mean.
And the vast, VAST majority of them are talking about in perfectly legal, perfectly moral ways - call in campaigns to our elected officials, mass protests in the streets, sit ins, etc. You could probably round up all the people interested in VIOLENT resistance in a small ballroom (on BOTH sides). I doubt that this woman is talking about the right wing militias who like to play army and think obama was born in Kenya.
Who better to represent the cause of responsible law-abiding gun owners than a drug-addled maniac who shot machine guns into the air for fun and eventually blew his own brains out?
What happens in a lot of situations is that the opinions of the sensible majority become irrelevant in the face of the vocal and extreme minority.
Many big events were set in motion by movements that never had much numerical significance. There have never been that many anarchists, but they seem to have played an outsized part in late 19th and 20th century history. They assassinated McKinley in 1901, and made attempts to kill Teddy Roosevelt as well.
in 1919, a bunch of Anarchist and Syndicalist non citizen residents were rounded up and deported to Russia on the USS Buford.
For example: Americans as a group are overwhelmingly in favor of expanding background checks for gun purchases and imposing more restrictions on which kinds of guns should be available to the public. Too bad that sensible majority has become irrelevant in the face of a vocal and extreme minority.
That’s yet another case of the insecure projection that seems to define nearly every complaint ‘conservatives’ level against liberals in the US. They are the group that have now elected two celebrities to the office of president. Then there was Sonny Bono and Fred Thompson in congress. Its like their complaining about hollywood is some weird jealousy or unintentional admission of how easily they are enthralled by the superficiality of celebrity rather than expertise or technical competence.
For a couple of hundred years, the sensible majority in America thought slavery was a-okay. Then the sensible majority agreed that slavery in all but name was pretty cool.
Care to compare that to the number of lynched black men, acts committed by the so-called sensible majority? After all, entire towns would come out and enjoy it. They’d sell postcards of the event, and sometimes even toes and fingers of the lynched. But they were the “sensible majority” so it’s all cool? No, of course it wasn’t.
What’s sensible (or common sense) is often manufactured to keep a particular order. Sometimes, the radical extremists - such as the abolitionists prior to the civil war or the radical republicans during reconstruction or groups like the NAACP in the first half of this century - were the ones who were pushing for a more humane order.
