Steve King can’t be evicted from office soon enough. But on the plus side, he exposes the dark underbelly of the Republican Party for all to see.
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It seems to always bear reposting, sadly.
I look forward to a day when I can stop quoting the usual Malcolm X, Coretta Scott King and Maya Angelou adages to people, because it won’t be necessary anymore.
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why did he not learn any of the merits of the history and civilization would be a better question.
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I’m imagining a short Batman story in which Robin finally loses his temper with the Joker and rips him a new asshole based solely on Joker’s complete failure as a clown. “Mister, I knew clowns. And you, sir, are NO CLOWN!”
Basically, King is utterly unfit for public office and should be removed immediately, as well as barred from public office for life. His racist assholery is fused too deeply with his mind and cannot be corrected with any known means.
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The argument you are making conflates cultural pride with white supremacy. There’s nothing wrong with shouting “It’s great to be Scots-Irish!” but there’s an awful lot wrong if that’s followed by “I deserve political and economic power over people of other races, nationalities, and beliefs because I’m Scots-Irish, and I am going to promote that idea with violence, intimidation, and institutional racism!”
I am with @tuhu on this. It isn’t that we cannot disentangle “who has done worse to whom,” it is that we seldom acknowledge those atrocities. Instead, we build mythologies to salve our guilt- the early American colonists didn’t wage decades of vicious, genocidal war on the Native Americans, they fought back to protect their families from scalp hunting savages; the Civil War wasn’t fought over the right to chattel slavery, it was fought over state’s rights. And so on.
Human history is the aggregation of horrible acts committed by awful people, occasionally leavened by altruism, bravery, and hope. There may not be a “fair score card on that,” but if we were honest about our past, we could begin to dismantle the legacy of blood and pain we have built on top of.
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What a country, where the f’ing president isn’t pilloried daily for his unwavering approval of scumbags like Steve King.
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That is (somehow) implied in the Western Civilisation bit.
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Worth noting that there are states actively fighting that change. Texas comes to mind first. Referring to slaves as workers, removing references to uncomfortable truths, eliminating the teaching of critical thinking skills. In situations like that, “western civ” rapidly becomes an exercise in racism.
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“Why did I sit in classes teaching me about the merits of our history and our civilization?”
It’s called “Eurocentrism” it’s a well-known problem with American education that has been talked about for decades you willfully ignorant fuck.
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The three word quote is from the end of the article on snopes. Trump and his cohorts will simultaneously make-up history while denying that history exists without their approval.
It is a system of repression similar to wrapping up the incomprehensible suffering of First Nation peoples into a catchy if somber figure of speech.
ed. And yes, sarcasm. i had thought about it a few times before adding it … and I’m sorry if that pushed any one in the wrong direction.
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What nonsense.
Mark me down as being against racism. I’m relieved your ideas still have some negative stigma associated with them.
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Well sure, if you take a simple-minded view, like excluding all the second-class citizens brought in as guest workers to supplement an aging population who have now become sources of tension, if you ignore the economic stagnation and social ills that have resulted from ethnocentric exclusionary policies, and if you ignore (as @Auld_Lang_Syne points out) the historical mistreatment of native-born ethnic minorities in the country.
It’s unfortunately and ironically becoming one, thanks to Likud and it’s ultra-nationalist and religious fundie allies. But if you’d bother to study the country’s history you’d know it was founded as a very strong reaction to the phenomenon of ethnostates, which always tend to incorporate or at least tolerate anti-Semitism to a greater degree than open and diverse societies do.
So? He’s not asking you to live there, and I doubt you’d want to move there permanently.
The Economist, by the way, is always happy to give such an award to any country that’s moving away from a command economy toward joining the neoliberal consensus. That doesn’t make Armenia a global beacon of liberal democracy or confer a status as one of the world’s most dynamic economies.
How were the autobahns? Did the trains run on time? I ask because, as we all know, such things completely counterbalance any negative aspects of a de jure ethnostate. Hungary is not a peaceful country with liberal democracy and a strong middle class and a dynamic economy.
There are people in all three countries asking for just that. They’re unfortunately matched or outnumbered by those countries’ Know-Nothing 27%s, who are pandered to by conservative politicians.
And in any case, there are native-born ethnic minorities in these countries, just as there are elsewhere (including the U.S.). And, just as elsewhere, they’re discriminated against by the terms of the ethnostate.
“Backwards” is the correct term. And it is suffering in terms of preserving its own legacy as an immigrant nation (involuntary immigrants, at first, but none-the-less).
It’s an attractive place if you’re from a country that’s poorer and more repressive than Thailand, in other words for desperate refugees. In general, the only Westerners who want to emigrate there permanently tend to fugitives from the law, men with “unusual” sexual desires, and the usual assortment of starry-eyed and naive expats trying to find “authenticity”.
I also still see no answer to this question from you, which I’ll repeat here and in any future topic where you try to push Identitarian views:
You might also answer @Loki’s questions about the English while you’re at it.
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I was thinking about this last night. I give people the benefit of the doubt and try not to let literal meanings of words get in the way of obvious intent, so I read it as “why is it a bad thing to be white supremacist?” But the actual words he said feel really weird. There’s nothing offensive about the term “white supremacist” any more than there is something offensive about the term “murderer”.
Added to that is the idea that they somehow came into their current status as “offensive”… from what previous state? I had the impression it was a term that came out of academia, not something people invented to proudly describe themselves. It feels a bit like someone is asking "when did ‘shithead’ become and insult?’
All this and more is what drives me nuts about this statement. I’m going to spend days thinking about his statement and unpacking every word of it. But that’s not productive because we all already know that racism is awful. Instead, it’s like I’ve contracted a thought-virus and I have to suffer from the side effects of my thought-immune-system running rampant.
First, I don’t think there is missing logic. I think that Thailand is entitled to govern itself and the UK is entitled to govern itself. I think that more open immigration policies have proven to be helpful rather than hurtful to the societies that have them and closed societies have shown themselves to have more problems and make less progress. I would vote for a party that had more open immigration policies if I was voting in a UK or a Thai election. I don’t question the UK or France or Germany’s right to self governance, but I do think some of their political parties are racist.
I think that these anti-immigration policies are never disentangled from racism in reality. We might be able to have a philosophical discussion where we keep them separate. The problem is the practice not the theory. If we want to talk about the English, let’s look at how Brexit worked.
Some people felt the need to reclaim their homeland. They did so by making a coalition with high-flying racists (e.g. people who take to the streets to physically attack British citizens whose families have been in the UK for generations because of the colour of their skin) and by outright lying to people about what that would mean (e.g. Nigel Farage admitting that more money for the NHS promise from the side of the bus was never going to happen only hours after the vote came back).
Also Americans tend to look at race extremely simply, but Italian and Irish (and many other) people were terrbly discriminated against in history. If we talk about “white” people we probably include Italians. If we talk about “Western Civilization” we include ancient Greece. Brexit is essentially being imposed on the Scottish, the Welsh and the Irish by the English. This isn’t about the English reclaiming their ancestral home - the engineers of Brexit are against breaking up the UK. It’s further complicated by colonialism. Families of Indian heritage living in Britain may have moved there when they were subjects of the crown (against their will). What’s the justification for disinheriting them now?
I think a lot of people feel a connection to their ancestral homeland. So when you ask about how whites lost that claim I don’t think that feeling of something being lost is illegitimate. But if I felt like something had been stolen from me and I was looking around to figure out who was to blame, I’d look for someone who had the thing that was taken.
I think a lot about hereditary rights to land these days and how to recognize those without racism. But I also look at the world and see that when rich white people get poor white people to blame black people for their feeling of disinheritance, the rich white people get to keep all the money, the land, the power. Chris Rock said that white people and black people have more in common with one another than either of them does with rich people.
So when I see people feeling upset that their heritage, culture and communities have broken down, I want to tell them I’m on their team. But that breakdown was a deliberate strategy of a political philosophy that these same people are usually voting for. It wasn’t Muslims who came to the UK to tell the British that their society was over. It was their own Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher who literally said, “And as we all know, there is no such thing as society.”
If you join a communist revolution you may think you are in it for a more equitable distribution of wealth, but you are probably in it for famine and authoritarianism. When you support anti-immigration politicians, you are almost certainly supporting a person who will point the finger at a black person to get you to turn around so they can pick your pocket.
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“Look, Thailand is a strict monarchy controlled by a military junta that controls its racial makeup by armed force. I don’t know why there’s so much pushback to the idea that the US could just try the same.”
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I guess that’s why he admires immigrant calves so much.
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Violence and germ warfare. The New World population dropped dramatically after Columbus, from both acts of violence which came on the heels of mass die offs from disease.
But I agree it has nothing to do with genetic superiority, but Europeans would not have been able to conquer the new world without disease. they would have had to negotiate and trade most likely.
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Bit of historical nitpicking here, but this is probably not true. Cortes defeated the Aztecs with 500 or so mercenaries. Yes smallpox nearly wiped out that people in later decades, but at the time they had thousands and thousands of warriors to oppose them. However, they had no steel, gunpowder or horses. Or the training of Spanish soldiers, at the time the best in the world. Nobody in Europe could defeat a Spanish army at the time, I have no idea how anyone in the Americas would have done it. If the Spanish had brought an actual army comparable to their European ones they could have crushed everything before them. In reality they needed local allies and suffered some defeats as well.
No, that’s entirely incorrect, historically speaking, so let ME be historical nitpicking here, since I have to teach this history… They had been there a year, making alliances with others who were tired of the Aztecs. By the time he marched into tenochtitlan, smallpox had already had a massive demographic impact.
This is was in 1519, which means that the Spanish had already been there for over 20 years, plenty of time for the first wave of epidemics to hit the local population.
[ETA] Even very short contact could be decisive, as was the case in what became New England - with English and Dutch traders making some early contact, coming back a year later only to find devastated villages along the coast (I can’t remember if that story is in the article or in the full book).
As it was, Cortez and his men BARELY won, and even there, the alliances were KEY to that victory. Overwhelming force can be helpful, but as the lesson of Vietnam teaches us, it doesn’t equal assured victory.
Should we tackle the Comanche empire next? 
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Keep digging, Steve.
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This.
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