Flea has never owned a slave, either*;
I don’t get it. Perhaps it is because I am not American. I do not belong to a polity living with the spectre of a promised 40 acres and a mule so reparations are a bit of a non-starter as far as I am concerned. But then I also do not belong to the polity which sacrificed hundreds of thousands of Union lives on the altar of liberty including and especially the liberty of the ancestors of today’s reparations advocates. It seems churlish to demand payment from the descendants of abolitionists let alone those of all the men who gave their lives far from home on behalf of people they did not know. Maybe, just maybe, it is James Cone and his fellow travelers who owe the debt. When it comes to the history of race in America there are villains, no doubt. But the United States government is not one of them. The United States government has been and remains the greatest champion of liberty in human history.
I put my money on the Freemason candidate in the USA upcoming election based on history with an unstated caveat as a vice-president. (JFK) Bets are on!
How dare you, a white person:
1)not feel so guilty about slavery in America that you do not consider suicide every day,
2)have an opinion that does not support reparations.
You bunch of racist, slave-driving bigots.
It doesn’t matter at all that you had absolutely no connection to, made no profit from, do not currently gain from, or in any way have a “life boost” from slavery.
You are white, and thus GUILTY and must be Punished.
Now, sit down and shut up while we figure out what to do with you!!
Perhaps Jesse Jackson and Wright and Obama should quit complaining about the slavery that ended in North America 150 years ago and concentrate on some more recent problems.
Fer instance Mauritania finally passed a law imposing penalties for owning slaves in August 2007.
It won’t actually do anything, but at least it’s on the books now.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6938032.stm
There is other good news out there as well, Niger freed 7000 slaves way back in 2005.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article419355.ece
Slavery as an economic institution is not confined to ‘white skins’. It’s been operating in Africa, carried out by ‘black skins’ against other ‘black skins’ for centuries.
And for centuries by Arabs against arabs/blacks/whites etc.
Nothing to do with skin colour. So, Obama’s support of Wright’s theme and his focus on race is historically and factually totally incorrect.
I think Obama’s focus on race is a serious error. There’s more to the reality of the US than grievances and a sector of the population mired in the virus of victimology.
I think that the Jim Crow laws (legally sanctioned discrimination) are valid issues of complaint, and even (gasp) types of compensation (in the form of affirmative action or other preferences). But these need to be stopped too, the question is just when.
But we do blacks no favours by indulging them in their paranoid fantasies (AIDS theories, for instance), by enabling self-destructive behaviors, or by shrugging as their communities descend into lawlessness. Blacks that kill should be imprisoned, placed on death row and executed, just as whites should be. Blacks that rob people should be imprisoned, just as whites should be.
Long-shot VP candidate for the GOP JC Watts who is black said this about black dems via Wiki:
they are “… “race-hustling poverty pimps”, whose careers he said depend on keeping blacks dependent on the government.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._C._Watts
What Obama should have said ( but he would have to believe it first, which we now know he does not ) by Victor Davis Hanson,
There is nothing to be offered for Rev. Wright except my deepest apologies for not speaking out against his venom far earlier.
We in the African-American community know better than anyone the deleterious effects of racist speech, and so it is time for Rev. Wright and myself to part company, since we have profoundly different views of both present- and future-day America.
“Because we’re owed”
http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/03/obamas_anger.html
In the late 1980s I was on a plane flying out of New Orleans and sitting next to me was a rather interesting and, according to Barack Obama, unusual black man. Friendly, gregarious, and wise beyond his years, we immediately hit it off. I had been working on Vietnamese commercial fishing boats for a few years based in southern Louisiana. The boats were owned by the recent wave of Vietnamese refugees who flooded into the familiar tropical environment after the war. Floating in calm seas out in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico, I would hear tearful songs and tales from ex-paratroopers about losing brothers, sisters, parents, children, lovers, and beautiful Vietnam itself to the communists.
. . . .
While I had been fishing my new black friend had been working as a prison psychologist in Missouri, and he was pursuing a higher degree in psychology. He was interested in my story, and after about an hour getting to know each other I asked him point blank why these Vietnamese refugees, with no money, friends, or knowledge of the language could be, within a generation, so successful. I also asked him why it was so difficult to convince young black men to abandon the streets and take advantage of the same kinds of opportunities that the Vietnamese had recently embraced.
His answer, only a few words, not only floored me but became sort of a razor that has allowed me ever since to slice through all of the rhetoric regarding race relations that Democrats shovel our way during election season:
“We’re owed and they aren’t.”
Here’s a quote from the University of Delaware Diversity Facilitation Training (http://www.thefire.org/index.php/article/8552.html):
This was part of a curriculum that was forced upon students living in residence.
I think the Italians may owe most of us.
The Angles are the subject of a legend about Pope Gregory I which apparently has roots in history. Gregory happened to see a group of Angle children from Deira for sale as slaves in the Roman market. Struck by the beauty of their fair-skinned complexions and bright blue eyes, Gregory inquired about their background. When told they were Angles, he replied with a Latin pun that translates well into English: “Non Angli, sed angeli” (“Not Angles, but angels”). Supposedly, he thereafter resolved to convert their pagan homeland to Christianity
Typical white people.
I think all this talk lately has been what MLK used to call “lancing the boil.”
It has taken far too long, but thank God the conversation has started. A real conversation not just one-sided BLACKmail.
kathy shaidle – yes, it’s taken far too long, and it has been indeed, a campaign of BLACKmail.
Obama’s focus on race, while denying that it exists, is a clever emotional trap for both white and black people. Perhaps now people will realize what others have been saying – what does he offer other than emotional rhetoric?
rabbit – what can one say? Horrendous.
Fred>
“We’re owed and they aren’t.”
I would suggests that they get over feeling owed fast, because an illegal Mexican invasion of their communities, jobs and “civil rights” is well underway. The multicultural mess of the US is quickly leaving blacks in America with a new guiltless master that feels it owes them a boot in the ass.
USA = blacks 12.5% — Latino 15% and growing exponentially.
“One in 36 Hispanic adults is behind bars, based on Justice Department figures for 2006. One in 15 black adults is also as is one in nine black men between the ages of 20 and 34.”
Looks like the demographic shift is bypassing favoring any affirmative action gains by the busload, I would say entitlements and reparations are fast becoming a memory.
12.5% ??? Obama donna hava chance
I have an idea just to add some fairness to the argument over reparations.
Blacks can submit an invoice for reparations, and the government can submit an invoice for an equal amount as partial compensation for the Civil War (or the War Between the States, your choice).
Both sides claim victory, and the matter is closed.
Oh look!
Five Feet of Fugly slithered out from her cave with another incisive bon mot!
“BLACKmail”. Get it, folks? BLACKmail.
One more time!
BLACKmail.
She’s a combination of Coulter, Steyn and P.J. O’Rourke, folks!
BLACKmail.
She’s a ‘poet’, ya know!
Rolick> Wikipedia definition (hope this helps a little)
Blackmail is the crime of threatening to reveal substantially true information about a person to the public, a family member, or associates unless a demand made upon the victim is met. This information is usually of an embarrassing or socially damaging nature. As the information is substantially true, the act of revealing the information may not be criminal in its own right nor amount to a civil law defamation; the crime is making demands to withhold it.
Blackmail is similar to extortion—the difference being that extortion involves an underlying, independent criminal act, while blackmail does not.
yeah, knight99
I know the definition of blackmail.
But what Shaidle wrote was BLACKmail.
What’s the definition of BLACKmail?
Anybody care to hazard a guess?
Rolik>
I hope your not trying to make a racist statement! Most people on this blog would not appreciate those types of inferences, and you should take your hate to another site.
I doubt many people would care to play your definition game but you make it obviously clear that you are inciting people to make comments they would otherwise not make. Possibly you work for the HRC? Rolik = RW?
rolik
should I maybe git my BLACK grand daughter to address your concerns??????