And speaking of President Obama’s trip to Oklahoma this week:
Supporters of the Confederate flag rallied Wednesday in Oklahoma as President Barack Obama arrived in the state for a series of events, including the first ever visit to a federal prison by a sitting President.
About 10 people waving Confederate battle flags were among the crowd that gathered Wednesday night outside the Oklahoma City hotel where Obama was expected to stay, according to a White House pool report. One person waved an American flag and another held up a pro-Obama sign, the report noted.
Protesters also gathered earlier in the day near Durant, Oklahoma before Obama arrived at a local high school to deliver remarks on a program expanding high-speed Internet access,according to local TV station KFOR.
“We’re not gonna stand down from our heritage. You know, this flag’s not racist. And I know a lot of people think it is, but it’s really not,” one protester who said he drove up from Texas, Trey Johnson, told the news station. “It’s just a southern thing, that’s it.”
So yeah, waving Confederate flags at a black president in 2015, that happened.
I’m constantly amazed at just how much of a better man Barack Obama is than I am, because I would have had these assholes rounded up in a fenced-in George W. Bush Free Speech Zone(tm) about 3 miles away faster than you could have said “Boomer Sooner”.
Another Holocene Human
Oklahoma is NOT the South, it was Indian Territory. White supremacy, however, is highly relevant to the conversation there. It shapes everything about OK life and culture.
And since oil (“oll”) dried up and blew away the people left behind were not only those with the least wherewithall to get the fuck out of Oklahoma but they’re also sad, bitter, reactionary, super evangelical Xtian, and also the main reason never to visit Oklahoma.
the Conster
@Another Holocene Human:
The Confederacy is a state of mind.
debbie
@Another Holocene Human:
All they’re left with are the fracking earthquakes. Poor dears.
NobodySpecial
IIRC, Oklahoma at the time of the Civil War wasn’t even a state. What fucking heritage?
Ryan
I hear there are some FEMA camps in the next state over.
Mustang Bobby
@NobodySpecial: Statehood came in 1908. It didn’t even make the Spanish-American War.
c u n d gulag
“It’s a Southern thing.”
Yeah, and so were all of the examples of “Strange Fruit” hangin’ from the tree’s.
That’s the flag of slavery, open traitorous treason, and secession.
Those, on top of the lynching’s, were also “Southern things…”
Another Holocene Human
@the Conster: I note that some dipshits of Texas caravaned to join the hate cosplay, as if OK couldn’t rally enough angry bitter white olds for this.
OK I believe did have ex-Confederacy region families settle there, I mean people relocated. My mother says “warsh” just like they do in Baltimore but she grew up in Bartlesville. Her familiy both sides was actually from Kansas but one half had ties all the way back to Ole Virginny where the family patriarch owned slaves. He had to give them up when he settled in Kansas at the time but the family kept hope alive. Big family row in the 80s over the slave owner’s sugar bowl that they’d buried to hide from Union soldiers (or something, I’m so confused). Dunno about this sugar bowl story, the one about settling in Kansas is confirmed by census records, the sugar bowl was real, the stories were just family stories. I told my mother why the hell would she want to own some slave owner’s shit.
chopper
oh, well, the authority on the subject has weighed in so i guess it’s settled.
feebog
@NobodySpecial:
mai naem mobile
These are the same fuckers who voted for Coburn who held the bill helping vets with mental health issues to decrease suicide rates. Also voted against the Sandy aid bill but wanted $$$ for OK tornado damage. Why dont you just secede and pay your own tornado damage bills.
Another Holocene Human
@c u n d gulag: The Tulsa Riot. Called a “race riot” which is a nice rhetorical two-step, actually whites invaded the Black neighborhood.
NonyNony
@Another Holocene Human:
IME – white supremacy is dripping all over anywhere that is near a Reservation.
If you want to hear some truly ugly racist invective, go visit the South Dakota and ask a local about the Sioux.
Another Holocene Human
@mai naem mobile: You’d think such God-fearing people would take a fucking hint when God keeps sending those twisters their way.
Another Holocene Human
@NonyNony: Oh I know. I had to listen to my mother growing up.
Another Holocene Human
One of my mother’s cousins married an Osage Indian and they still lived in Oklahoma. We visited many many years ago when I was just a child. I’ll never forget his sarcastic smile as he opened the door and ushered my parents in the house. It was no secret that my mom’s family never liked or trusted him.
Hell, my mother married an Irish American and she’s prejudiced against Irish people as well. I grew up hearing about my “thin skin” because she resented that I resembled my father.
ps: so, another weird turn, my mother was aware of anti-Irish and German prejudice in the 19th century (there’s a famous cartoon of a drunk German and drunk Irish stumbling down the street) but she made a point of the notion that Germans could “hold” their liquor but Irish could not. No, she was serious.
Roger Moore
That’s true; the flag doesn’t have feelings or opinions. It’s just the assholes who fly it who are racists.
Bobby B.
Insurgents. Drone them with extreme prejudice.
boatboy_srq
@the Conster: The Confederacy is a loose association of individual states of mind.
Another Holocene Human
This is why I felt sick when Scott Brown’s Senate staffers were doing tomahawk chops and all that shit in Boston. I mean, let’s not even get into all the layers of wrong that that projects to the embattled Native communities in Boston. Anti-Indian prejudice in Oklahoma was very, very real. One side of her family believed the other side was mixed race and that’s where all the trouble started.
Botsplainer
@Ryan:
Mission creep is actually part of the Jade Helm plan; in no time at all, they’ll be marching into Oklahoma with mobile firearm smelters, forced gay marriage psalters and FEMA camp relocation buses on a blitz like Nixon sending B-52s to bomb Cambodia.
eldorado
@Ryan: the town obama is visiting today has a fema camp a couple of miles outside of it. i won’t link, but you can google it if you like.
Botsplainer
@Another Holocene Human:
I recently read about the depradations that good white Christian businessmen wreaked upon the Osage in the 1920s, for control of oil rights.
It is horrifying, and includes a bunch of murders.
boatboy_srq
Fixt.
greennotGreen
I recently had a surprising conversation with my sister who moved away from the South when she was 12 and I was 16. The difference is that I moved back at 18 and have never left and she hasn’t lived here in almost 25 years. (She lived in Texas for a few years in the 80s.)
She supported the battle flag as “heritage, not racism.” I think it should come down. I wonder if her support is based on fond memories of our childhood in the 1960s; it certainly isn’t based on the South of today. When almost all white people embraced the flag because we hadn’t really thought about it, then maybe it did mean heritage to us. But now, who flies a Confederate flag? People who don’t care who they offend, people who are so lacking in awareness that they’re not conscious of other people being offended, and racists. Personally, I don’t want to grouped with any of those, and I sure as hell don’t want any arm of state or local government flying the flag of those who rebelled against it (and got their asses whupped.)
Anyway, my point is that there may be people for whom the flag is a piece of nostalgia. People flying it in front of Obama? Their white sheets are in the laundry.
Kropadope
@boatboy_srq: The Confederacy is gone, but is has left behind generations of people who don’t want the government butting into white people’s lives. My libertarian associates get insulted when I call them Republicans, so I’m working on a catch-all. I’m thinking “the anti-governance coalition.”
It’s great for those friends who lament that the environment is being destroyed by human industry, but think your a fascist if you want the government to stop it.
Another Holocene Human
ot: Jade Helm commemorative car magnet:
https://twitter.com/jaylee/status/621635518749499393/photo/1
Germy Shoemangler
@Roger Moore: A small crowd of racists get all the attention. A much larger crowd were thrilled to see the president.
Last summer HRC came to a bookstore in our town. There was a line around the block, literally. My wife had the HRC book and wanted it autographed. I stood with her in line for about 1/2 hour, then politely excused myself and visited a tavern around the corner for a burger and a cold tall one. When I returned, my wife had just gotten inside the bookstore.
Lots of nice people waiting in line. Smart, funny, activist. And then across the street I saw four (FOUR!) people protesting; waving benghazi signs. They were pale and seriously overweight. Completely ignored by the folks waiting in line. The protestors walked around for a bit waving their signs, then disappeared.
Guess who our local news talked to.
BGinCHI
What in the world is wrong with white people?
OK, at least some white people.
When they make a schedule for the day, is one of the things on the list “Hate on brown and poor people”?
Bobby Thomson
OT but the corrupt Wisconsin Supreme Court saved Scottie’s bacon and made the coverup complete. Unfortunately there’s no Gingrich to let him have it in the primaries.
The Other Chuck
Since “Heritage, not Hate” has become the slogan, let’s see how much traction we can give the phrase “Heritage of Hate”. Keyboard Kommando Korps, unite! Er, lets make a better acronym first ;)
Another Holocene Human
criticize this Iran deal all you like: https://twitter.com/andendall/status/618893077906894848/photo/1
Germy Shoemangler
@Kropadope:
I can’t begin to tell you how many republican/foxx newz/GOP talking points I’ve heard from people who insist on calling themselves “INDEPENDENT”
Did GWB really damage the brand so terribly? I remember in my 2008 local town elections; I’d receive a ton of campaign literature. I could always spot the republicans because there was NEVER any mention of their party affiliation.
Another Holocene Human
@Bobby Thomson: Damn.
The Other Chuck
@Germy Shoemangler: I need to start showing up at scientific conferences waving signs that are pro-flat-earth, anti-germ-theory, just to get the media to report “both sides”. Except I’d probably attract serious followers. Hm, how about one decrying the theory of gravity?
Belafon
@The Other Chuck: How about just “White Heritage”?
Omnes Omnibus
@The Other Chuck:
It’s just a theory.
raven
Who gives a flying fuck?
Germy Shoemangler
@The Other Chuck: You know you could make a fortune if you asked for contributions. Tell them you need the money to continue your research into the “Big Gravity Lie” and I’m sure you’ll accumulate a tidy sum.
Another Holocene Human
@BGinCHI: There’s a reason black and brown people have to be twice as good to make it half as far. There are white people everywhere who nurse resentments against non-whites being successful at anything. And they will twist all kinds of fantasies to avoid cognitive dissonance. Witness the white liberals and lefties who were gutted when Obama started presidenting while black, without seeking the advice of wise white lefties like themselves. No accomplishment of his admin was authentic or real, any failure was due to Obama’s moral failure or naivite or cowardice and not due to opposition party pushback or the majority-white Dem legislators bravely running away.
shell
Stay classy, Okies.
Omnes Omnibus
@raven: And a cheery good morning to you too.
Another Holocene Human
@The Other Chuck: Hm, Magnets, how the f*ck do they work? has a certain ring to it.
Another Holocene Human
@shell: Tulsa: proof that building a “world class” opera house does not klass up the joint as much as you thought.
raven
@Omnes Omnibus: Morning, shit I’ve been at it for 7 hours.
Roger Moore
@The Other Chuck:
So you’re a believer in intelligent falling?
Omnes Omnibus
@raven: No wonder you are cranky.
Another Holocene Human
@Kropadope:
It drives me nuts talking to one of those people that has those childlike philosophical beliefs wholly without evidence. Like, motherfucker, why don’t you research how other countries do it and get back to me, mkay? You can’t even argue these counterfactuals. They exist in theoretical land. Nobody has ever tried them because they’re fucking ridiculous. And these clowns don’t even realize they’re useful pawns to the extent they vote this nonsense for big business interests that don’t have their best interests at heart.
boatboy_srq
@Germy Shoemangler: Hate always gets the attention regardless of the proportion of the presence it represents. Westboro is the archetypical example: six wingnuts with a bullhorn and signage got more air time than thousands of peaceful celebrants/mourners/whatever.
raven
@Omnes Omnibus: I ain’t I just can’t get all out of joint because some dumb fucks do something dumb.
shell
A little smile for a Thursday morning..
A small amount of the ashes of American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh are on board the New Horizons spacecraft, which has spent more than nine years traveling to the outer reaches of the solar system.
Tombaugh made the landmark discovery of Pluto on February 18. He was 24 at the time. The breakthrough helped advance human understanding of the solar system.
Another Holocene Human
@Botsplainer: Even my racist mom thought they had gone too far, and that’s saying something.
Don Elliott
@Mustang Bobby: 1907. Close enough to make your argument, however. We were born and reared in OK, have lived elsewhere for almost 50 years. What has happened to it is a tragedy.
Elizabelle
Oldish news by now, but Tom Petty in Rolling Stone:
[He eventually asked his audiences to stop wearing and waving Confederate regalia at his concerts, and they pretty much complied. Petty had photos of the band performing before the flag removed from a live album record cover.]
Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/tom-petty-on-past-confederate-flag-use-it-was-downright-stupid-20150714#ixzz3g4FpiCgX
Follow us: @rollingstone on Twitter | RollingStone on Facebook
Interview is brief and well worth a click.
Saw Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers at the Hollywood Bowl a few years ago. Opening band was ZZ Topp. Excellent concert.
boatboy_srq
@Omnes Omnibus: I looked up the word “cranky.” It said: “grouchy.” I looked up “grouchy”; it said: “crochety.” No wonder you have such an eccentric culture: none of your words have their own meaning! You have to look up one word to understand another! It never ends.”
Another Holocene Human
Caitlyn Jenner gave a pretty good speech at the ESPYs and thanked Laverne Cox and Janet Mock, although I’m sure tumblr has decided that’s not good enough.
tumblr is full of kids who confuse the person for the system, the form for the function. It’s the media machine that is prejudiced. It would make more sense to blame Diane Sawyer or blame the network bosses than blame Caitlyn Jenner for courting the media to put her story out there the way she wanted it told. (Remember, the gutter media was on her ass anyway, for months.)
They’re almost as stupid as the grown people who nurse grudges and blame their minority coworker who is doing better than them at work instead of blaming the government and the industry for the fact that they can’t afford a middle class lifestyle. Almost as stupid because they’ll more likely than not grow out of it.
Archon
I think the racial backlash against Obama was slightly bigger and more intense then I expected but anyone who is truly surprised over this doesn’t know American history that well.
Kropadope
@boatboy_srq: Well, a word can’t define itself, can it?
Another Holocene Human
@boatboy_srq: :D))))))
Another Holocene Human
@Kropadope: “I said ‘crotchety–this cannot be a word’.”
Kropadope
@Another Holocene Human: I see that word particularly associated with older grouchy people.
Germy Shoemangler
@Archon: I remember being thrilled when Obama won his first term (it had been a long time since anyone I’d voted for actually won) and then a moment later I thought “Oh shit, the assholes are gonna go nuts now.”
And I was right.
Chyron HR
Just another bunch of Democrats waving the Democrat flag that only Democrats want to fly. (Fox News, 2015)
Jeffro
@Another Holocene Human: That. Is gonna leave a mark.
Pee Cee
@boatboy_srq:
Deh-f’hurst!
BobS
@c u n d gulag: The Malaysian flag is also a flag of slavery — be nice if Obama would show a little more concern for the ongoing atrocity (since we know the American corporations that benefit from it aren’t likely to).
dmsilev
@The Other Chuck: At the big physics conference I go to annually, there’s a rule that anyone who submits an abstract can give a talk, no filtering. As a result, there are always a bunch of crackpots giving talks on why Einstein was wrong, why everything we think we know about the Universe is wrong, etc.
The crackpot session (usually “General Theory” in the schedule) is always very well attended.
Jeffro
@Germy Shoemangler: He very nearly destroyed it.
Heck, even my kids know to give their uncle grief about his supposed “Libertarian” tendencies that cropped up quite suddenly around 2006 or so…
boatboy_srq
@Elizabelle: Petty’s interview is heartening: it’s good to see how what was thrown up as “culture” can be discarded when its unpleasant connotations are understood. Petty’s interview is one more example of the Undoing of the Wingnuts By Their Own Devices. More of this, please.
@The Other Chuck: Best bumper sticker I ever saw: Stop Plate Tectonics. Might be useful.
Another Holocene Human
@BobS: Are you talking about the palm plantations? Where’s the American consumer in all this? Where’s our responsibility?
What about the environmentally destructive plantings in Brazil of a plant that is used to make toilet paper softer, something Americans are buying by the ton. You’d never hear about it outside of fringe environmentalist media. (In much of Europe they use recycled paper. Yes, it’s rougher.)
dmsilev
@Another Holocene Human:
I can actually answer that; my PhD is in that area. Without the profanity, sad to say.
Germy Shoemangler
@Another Holocene Human:
I remember an interview with Chris Rock. He was talking about the wealthy neighborhood he lived in. There were a few successful black families living there, all of them brilliant figures in science and the arts. The top people in their fields. And the white guy living in the same neighborhood? A dentist.
Another Holocene Human
@dmsilev: Minor question, then, you know those magnetic stripe readers? Do you have to run them through quickly because they’re depending on the electrical field generated by a moving magnet or is it something a lot stupider than that?
rikyrah
I feel ya, Zandar.
I feel ya.
slag
I would love to believe that all who notice this guy’s complete lack of self-awareness could examine themselves the next time someone suggests that they are obtusely insensitive about something.
Lots of people of seemingly good intentions bristle at the terms “whitesplaining” and “mansplaining” but those terms exist for a reason (see above).
FlipYrWhig
Seems to me that in 2015 the Confederate flag and the Gadsden flag mean exactly the same thing: don’t you dare fuck with us. That isn’t inherently racist. It’s just that so many of the examples of “fucking with” involve black and brown people, and so few of the “us.” That’s what makes it racist. Oh, and also the fact that the flag was first adopted to fight for the enslavement of black people, and next adopted to fight against the education of black people.
Kropadope
@Another Holocene Human: As a long-time retail worker, I can tell you that smoothly and firmly against the surface of the reader are both more important than quickly.
Mudge
The battle flag in its current era arrived in the 50s to symbolize resistance to desegregation. The hatred of the “the North”, which threatened the Southern Way of life, was much like the Confederate hatred of “the North”, which threatened slavery. Oklahoma had segregation, so it was a natural symbol for them as well. Over 60 years, the flag has been adopted by states and NASCAR and Tom Petty. These 60+ years are the heritage. It is the heritage of the flag itself and logically has no connection to the antebellum South, although nitwits attempt to make that connection. It is a divisive racist heritage. A klan hood is a similar South heritage that is less acceptable in polite society. The fact that the klan embraced the battle flag was no accident.
Another Holocene Human
@Germy Shoemangler: Truth.
My grandmother pointed out the house in her ‘hood of a famous basketball player from Chicago. To be fair, it was slightly nicer than hers (assuming you like that architectural style, it was very “modern” for the 80s). My grandparents? Ran a boring business that mostly did business with other businesses that they had inherited.
rikyrah
@Another Holocene Human:
tell the truth!
Another Holocene Human
@Mudge:
OK and Kansas were very, very segregated. Sundown towns, segregated schools, the whole nine yards.
dmsilev
@Another Holocene Human: No, to get any appreciable electric field from a moving magnet, you have to be moving at a fair-sized fraction of the speed of light. As far as I know, the stripe card readers are looking at the N->S and S->N transitions written into the stripe. Speed shouldn’t matter much, though that depends on exactly how they’re doing the detection (i.e. a Hall sensor attached to an edge-detect circuit might care about how quickly the N->S transition occurs).
Goblue72
If you read the article, it was an African American dude who calls himself the “Black Rebel” who organized the Confederate flag rally.
boatboy_srq
@Germy Shoemangler: Gingrich damaged the brand. Shrub reaped the bitter harvest. Objectivist Libertarians connect with the Pauls and with Norquist more readily than they do with RNC these days: that these same three individuals are part of the driving force behind RNC policy and talking points is, alas, beyond their ken.
@Pee Cee: Why, thank you.
opiejeanne
@Germy Shoemangler: In Western Washington they just started to put party affiliations on campaign signs in the last election, and only one or two candidates out of a dozen in my area. We noticed it in 2010. I checked the ones that didn’t proclaim their party and all of them were Republicans.
cmorenc
@Another Holocene Human:
There actually IS a great reason to visit Oklahoma – to drive through it at 70mph on a long road trip from North Carolina to New Mexico. And it is kind of interesting to watch relatively the relatively humid, lushly vegetated (and correspondingly limited horizon) landscape gradually transition to semi-arid, sparsely vegetated, open horizons as you travel westward across the state. However, except to stop and refill for gas, I can see little value in staying in Oklahoma any longer than it takes to drive across it.
Matt McIrvin
@Germy Shoemangler:
And around here, I hear stuff that could come from the mouth of Bernie Sanders from these people. Of course, Bernie Sanders was a self-declared independent, but these folks tend to insist that they can see merit in “both sides”, then start saying mostly fairly liberal/left-wing stuff, though they don’t seem to realize that that’s what they’re doing.
I think being partisan is just still uncool.
Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant)
Just saw my first tRump 2016 sticker. The vehicle was from just our asylum state neighbor to the south, but I won’t be surprised to see them on our side of the line too…
Another Holocene Human
@Kropadope: I’ve noticed that a frequent problem is customers lifting the card out of the reader too quickly. It always leads to a misread. I wonder if data on there is encoded similarly to a cassette tape or the old magnetic spools? It’s a terrible technology for multiple reasons.
catclub
Anybody else see this?, speaking of postracial USA:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2015_07/a_proposed_compromise_on_stone056608.php
Amusing.
The Other Chuck
@dmsilev: Those pole transitions ARE an electrical field, according to Faraday, no?
Another Holocene Human
@Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant): Hi Ben, how are ya doin’? I was just thinking the other day about how I hadn’t seen your nym in a while and was hoping you were okay. Those Jem’Hadar might not be all that clever but they sure are persistent (and have no sense of humor).
AxelFoley
@Another Holocene Human:
Real talk right here.
boatboy_srq
@Mudge: Please explain “the Southern Way of life” in terms that do not translate to blatant racism.
…
…
…
Didn’t think so.
Another Holocene Human
@Goblue72: Alan Keyes has a thousand brothers. Sadly, not a sane one in the bunch.
catclub
@The Other Chuck: I think, no (except perhaps at the very smallest scales), until you move the card. They are static magnetic fields.
The Other Chuck
@Another Holocene Human: Chip readers are finally starting to make serious inroads in the USA. Every Walmart has them, and their terminals actually insist on you using the chip instead of the stripe if they can tell your card has one. It’ll still take 20 or so years for the magstripe readers to disappear, but we did eventually get rid of zipzap machines (most new CC’s I see don’t even have raised numbers. Mine doesn’t even have the number on the front)
Iowa Old Lady
@Matt McIrvin: I think W plus the insane R debate crowds damaged their brand to the extent that some people call themselves independents, though they still vote R. It was one of the things leading Rs to say the 2012 polls were skewed. They looked at the samples and saw fewer Rs than they expected and thought the pollster had undersampled them, so they pumped up that result. In the meantime, they looked at independents who declared the intention to vote R in higher numbers than they expected and took that at face value, not realizing those were their missing R voters.
Goblue72
@Another Holocene Human: Certainly. I just think this thing was a stunt organized as ragebait for liberals and nothing more.
BobS
@Another Holocene Human: Yes, however forced labor is used not only on plantations but also in agriculture, service work, industry, construction, and fisheries.
Malaysia is one of the countries included in Obama’s beloved TPP.
bemused
@slag:
What is that “southern thing” that they say is not racist about the flag? I don’t hear them explain exactly what they mean by that. Now, no one should be able to say the flag isn’t racist, not if they are listening. I get that a lot of people just didn’t pay a bit of attention to the history before but there is just no excuse anymore.
boatboy_srq
@Kropadope: Sigh.
CONGRATULATIONS!
My family was from the South, both sides fought for the Confederacy. And we surrendered like everyone else did, did not take up the Lost Cause, and went on to distinguish ourselves in World War I, II, Korea and Vietnam. That’s real “Southern Heritage”.
This guy is full of shit. We have never flown the Traitor’s flag, nobody owns a Traitor’s Flag, we’re fucking Americans and we do the stars and stripes and that’s the end of the story. My late grandfather, who did D-Day and died last year at the age of 92, would have shot any family member who showed up wearing or flying that piece of garbage on the spot.
I, thankfully, was born in California and never left. My “heritage” is a surfboard and packed bong, not some stupid-ass flag and a pregnant first cousin.
RaflW
“It’s just a southern thing, that’s it.”
In a rather backwards way, he’s sort of right. The north, and the west and really all of the U.S. is still shockingly racist. It was baked into our cake 100s of years ago, if you will, and we’re not culturally ready to give up the cake.
However, his predicate sentence, that the flag isn’t racist, is obviously wrong since this country is far, far from being post-racial. If it ever could be. And I’m not sure that’s a thing to try for. Post-prejudice, that’s something I could get behind.
I mean, this country was rabidly homophobic 50 years ago, and is now, I’d say, over 50% post-prejudice on gays and lesbians. Bi’s I’m really not clear on, and Trans folk are not there yet, so I wouldn’t say LGBT. But we are moving pretty swiftly to post-prejudice — certainly institutionally — here in the 20-teens.
But I still see absurd levels of racial disparity and prejudice right up here in Minnesota. So to claim that the south and southern-proud folk are not racist? Of the charts absurd.
rreay
@dmsilev:
The engineering answer to this is that reading the mag strip is easiest when the bits go past the sensor at an steady rate. It’s easier to have that steady rate moving faster rather than slower.
Kropadope
@Matt McIrvin: Actually, I know a lot of people with a strong affection for both Rand Paul and Bernie Sanders, completely disregarding their distance on public policy. Rand Paul is also a phony baloney, which I usually make a point of mentioning.
@Another Holocene Human: I see that too. Honestly, I really hate seeing people struggle with the machines, though I also feel bad when I take it from them and get it on the first try.
One thing I don’t completely understand is the plastic bag trick. Put a plastic bag over a card and, as long as it will fit, it will work. Is this just because it creates a clean reading surface or does the bag help carry the magnetic signal somehow?
dmsilev
@The Other Chuck: Yes, but it’s very small. Reading the magnetic field directly is a lot easier than looking for the transient electrical field.
The Other Chuck
@catclub: Right, that’s what I meant, and what I assumed the OP meant: when you move the card, the changes in polarity of the magnetic domains induce a current on the read head. Same idea as a tape or hard drive.
Another Holocene Human
@catclub: I love the creativity. Outkast was the #1 musical act in the US in the early 2000s.
heckblazer
@Another Holocene Human: OTOH, slavery was legal in the Territory, the Confederacy annexed it, and allied Native American units totaling a bit under 8,000 served the Confederacy. So there actually were Cherokee Confederates.
dmsilev
@Kropadope: Most plastics are pretty close to non-magnetic, so the field from the stripe would just pass right through. It’s more likely a mechanical thing, pressing the stripe closer to the actual sensor inside the reader.
Kropadope
@boatboy_srq: That was a funny exchange, never saw Babylon 5 even once, though. My taste in fantasy is less futuristic, more modern to medieval.
boatboy_srq
@bemused: There’s plenty of excuse so long as the Texas BoE has input into the textbooks and teaching materials…
@Iowa Old Lady: So if “R” is “b#tsh!t-crazy”, and “D” is “ni-CLANG”, “I” is “unwilling to publicly admit insanity, but still White”.
Another Holocene Human
@Kropadope: It must have something to do with the surface being uneven (scratched) so the card isn’t being drawn through smoothly. Plastic bags aren’t magnet or paramagnetic and they should be weak insulators as well.
eta: could be too large of a gap and uneven distance from the read heads while being drawn through … I don’t know how the read heads work which is why I asked
Germy Shoemangler
@FlipYrWhig:
We moved into a house in a small city a few years ago. Our next door neighbor had a gadsden flag mixed in with all his U.S. flags (He has about ten flags in front of his house).
The gadsden flag came down the day after that psychotic girl and guy killed those cops and draped that flag on one of their faces.
The Other Chuck
@Kropadope: The bag is transparent to the magnetic field, and might help keep it clean and minimize abrasion. Personally I’ve never had a card stripe go bad except for one that literally wore out on an old ATM card (they didn’t replace those as frequently back then). I don’t understand people who go around with beat up cards and cracked cell phone screens, and I’m even fairly clumsy myself.
RaflW
@mai naem mobile:
I for one am feeling almost German these days. ie: enough with the transfer payments to southern, taker states. (I’m snarking on the German/Greece thing, I think the Germans are being awful as are all the austerian idiots. But I digress.)
Most of the donor states in the US are progressive and Dem and most of the begging recipient states are red and full of bootstrapin’ conservatives who would shit two bricks if we pushed to balance transfer payments. (As an aside, I do wonder how the calculus has changed in recent years as the bootstrappers have rejected ACA Medicaid funds?).
Anyway. Cut ’em off. Those states are moochers and takers.
Kropadope
@The Other Chuck: I’d like to introduce you to my four-year-old, battle-scarred Blackberry.
Another Holocene Human
@heckblazer: I knew that Cherokee kept slaves and from slave narratives I learned that they didn’t have the slave laws that made life increasingly galling and dangerous for Black people in the South leading up to the Civil War and that, combined with cultural differences, made life for slaves of the Indians very different than life for slaves of whites. I didn’t know about taking up arms on behalf of the Confederacy, though. :(
AxelFoley
@BobS:
Oh, we have a new troll here.
The Other Chuck
@Kropadope: At the risk of inciting a mob of bat-wielding Narns, I thought Babylon 5 was one of the most overrated shows ever. With the notable exception of the phenomenal on-screen chemistry between Peter Jurasik and Andreas Katsulas, nobody on that show could act, and it became very clear in the later seasons that JMS also couldn’t write. Firefly and Farscape were far far better shows, which of course is why they couldn’t last :(
Another Holocene Human
Thanks for the wiki link. That clears some stuff up. Cherokee had a big fat grudge against the U.S. of A. Stand Watie sounds like an opportunistic scumbag, though.
The Other Chuck
@AxelFoley: Same troll, same name theme. Portland and Brick Ovens ring a bell? At least he’s not one of the stalker trolls.
boatboy_srq
@Another Holocene Human: That’s brilliant.
chopper
@BobS:
i knew it was obama’s fault.
Mudge
@boatboy_srq: Irony dies at your doorstep..but you did in fact take the words right out of my mouth…
NorthLeft12
Agree 100% with you about Obama’s demeanor and ability to handle the crazies. I would be strongly considering ordering an armed drone to be standing by in case the confederates decided to “pose a threat” …..if you know what I mean.
Another Holocene Human
@The Other Chuck: You know the show nearly got canceled and JMS had to compress seasons 4 and 5 into one season. Then it got renewed at the absolute last minute and he was low on material and polling crew members for feedback. (Seriously, JMS went online and said one of the crew really like Byron and he should appear more often.) He wasn’t able to easily pivot to having more guest writers as he had in Season 1 because he was trying to write everything AND do producery stuff, which included way too much bullshit from the network. He was tired. Just tired. You can skip most of Season 5.
Another Holocene Human
Love it or hate it, B5 was enormously influential on dramatic television. No, he didn’t bring back space opera but lots of the nuts and bolts of what he did are all over the landscape of TV today.
srv
Germy Shoemangler
Sign the petition to have Outkast carved onto stone mountain’s confederate memorial:
http://dangerousminds.net/comments/hey_ya_sign_the_petition_to_have_outkast_carved_onto_stone_mountains_confed
BobS
@AxelFoley: And the dumbest motherfucker on the internet predictably shows up. Just how are you signaled whenever Obama is criticized on Balloon Juice?
SatanicPanic
@FlipYrWhig: yes, the Gadsden Flag is the same thing- “Don’t Tread on Me” comes from exactly the same place and it’s no coincidence that it suddenly became popular after Obama was elected.
gene108
@Elizabelle:
Can’t hoist a swastika in the Western world because of how Hitler co-opted it for his platform of hate. You can’t separate the two in the West, where Neo-Nazi’s still rally around the symbol.
Why rednecks can’t understand the same applies to the Stars and Bars, I do not understand.
Too many hateful things have been done by people flying that flag, therefore all the non-hateful things – whatever they might be, if they actually exist – do not off-set the bad.
Another Holocene Human
@rreay: Why not hold the card in place and have the reader move?
(I know, I know, broken parts, but given how bad the users seem to be at imitating robots….)
Germy Shoemangler
From the NYTimes:
boatboy_srq
@The Other Chuck: Just two words: Berman/Braga.
Elizabelle
NY Times magazine: You just got out of prison. Now what?
About Carlos Cervantes and Roby So, ex-offenders, and their work with the Ride Home Program, picking up paroled inmates, helping to reacclimate them during their first day outside prison walls and regimen.
One of the best articles I have read in ages.
BobS
@chopper: You’re right. It was the other TPP – the one that didn’t turn a blind eye to slavery in Malaysia – he was lobbying so hard for.
srv
J R in WV
@Kropadope:
I think anyone who is anti-US-government is plain old anti-American – because our government is us, we the people, who elect the people who control the activity of the government. Norquist and his minions attack you and me every time they attack the government – this is the meaning of living in a democracy, we are self-governing! These anti-government folks are actually against the things we, the vast majority of Americans, wish our government to do for us, protect us from natural disasters with FEMA, industrial disasters by way of regulations forcing industry to operate safely, etc.
The power here in WV (in our neighborhood at least) came back on last night during a late dinner, around 8:30 pm, As we went to town yesterday for my appointment with the surgeon we saw many small groups of utility service trucks from areas near us but not affected by this particular storm. Many times after severe weather has destroyed the power grid, we and the neighbors have given out-of-town crews pastries, pies, drinks, etc in gratitude for their hard work in terrible conditions. At least this time the climate was comfortable to work in, not even very hot or humid after the flood.
Surgeon gave me go-ahead to begin physical therapy, additional pain killers to help deal with PT. Appointment made to see the same therapist who worked on my first shoulder, but I know it will be much harder than the first time through, as everything about the second surgery was more punishing than the first one. The joint itself was more damaged, more difficult to reach, and took much longer.
I still have healing puncture wounds from retractors used to hold open their work area, which I did not have after the first operation.
The surgeons have acknowledged that things are harder for me this time by prescribing more strong painkillers, unasked. Wishing it wasn’t so won’t make things better, though. Just glad the constant joint pain is over now! Medical miracle number 7 !!
I’ll stop now, as I expect to improve steadily from now on.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@heckblazer: Truth. Sadly, our indigenous people were the first slaveholders in America, and they sure as hell didn’t learn the practice from us. It was traditional.
The Other Chuck
@Another Holocene Human: I know about the scheduling, but frankly the cracks in the writing were showing well before he wrapped it up. Mira Furlan is reputedly a great actress, but he had her hissing out all her lines chock full of inanity. Hell, if he just had eventually given “The Shadows” a better name, that alone might have given them a little more gravitas.
The show had moments of genius though, like the “Babylon Squared” episode (a masterful homage to Kurt Vonnegut). I just think JMS was too mercurial to pull off the whole series without filling it full of clunkers.
boatboy_srq
@Another Holocene Human: Season 5 was all-TNT-all-the-time (very heavy studio pressure for less storyline and more b00bs and explosions). Season Two got similar treatment from PTEN (they wanted the Handsome Swashbuckling Hero, so JMS gave them Keffer – and promptly killed him off). O’Hare suffered from some horrible physical/psych ailment, and only had one good working day in three, so any scene he’s in that actually worked translated to about 5x normal effort – and that stayed under wraps until after he passed. Plus the show was produced with <10% the DS9 budget.
Another Holocene Human
@SatanicPanic: Those motherfuckers ruined the Gadsden Flag for me. Before the tea party shitstains took it, it was a symbol of pride in the Revolution, and even a symbol of unity. Remember this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Join,_or_Die
They fucking ruined dorky Colonial cosplay too. And no lefty worth their salt will be engaging in tea-party-themed attention-seeking actions now. (Couldn’t find a link, buried by 2009 and after news stories even though I used “bush” as a search term.)
SatanicPanic
@CONGRATULATIONS!: there are some problematic parts of our state’s history, but it’s not like we made a flag celebrating Chinese exclusion or the LAPD.
The Other Chuck
@CONGRATULATIONS!: Nearly every civilization practiced slavery at one time or another. The very concept of “human rights” is a pretty recent advancement in philosophy. It’s not about what a people did, it’s whether they wise up and get with the program now, and the South needs some remedial classes…
Mudge
@CONGRATULATIONS!: They could have learned slavery from the Spanish.
Matt McIrvin
@dmsilev: The electric field from a moving magnet is one way of describing the EMF created by a moving magnet, which is how an electric generator works. It doesn’t have to be all that fast, the magnetic flux just has to be appreciably changing. Yes, you can describe it as a Lorentz transform but the electric field comes from a first-order, “Galilean” sort of term.
Another Holocene Human
@boatboy_srq: I didn’t know that about O’Hare. See that he passed away in 2012 :(
It was a sad day when Doc Franklin died. Andreas Katsulas, too. (Man could that guy act.)
Hungry Joe
My mother-in-law was born in Oklahoma and raised by Progressives. (There was a strong Progressive movement in OK once upon a time.) She was also raised a Mennonite, but she gave that up. Kept the progressive part, though. Of course, she hasn’t lived in Oklahoma for about 65 years, so …
Elizabelle
@J R in WV: Best wishes for a full and speedier than you expect recovery.
You’re right about government for the people.
Another Holocene Human
@Hungry Joe: There were some real radicals in Oklahoma. Sadly, my family is not and was not among them.
Woodie Guthrie. Will Rogers.
bemused
@boatboy_srq:
If they refuse to take down their precious flag, they will just have to get used to people instantly tagging them as racists.
History classes are lacking in K-12 in most schools, imo. A liberal teacher friend told me a story about her high school daughter’s boyfriend at the time flying a confederate flag from his pickup truck. She proceeded to lecture him about the history. He, his friends and many classmates really didn’t have a clue. They just associated it with beer drinking, country living, etc. This is in MN. The ignorance definitely isn’t just in the south.
A couple of years ago, a young state Dem representative proposed adding union history to history classes. It went nowhere even though the Iron Range has a long union history beginning with mining and I can’t remember when we ever elected a Republican to any office until Chip Cravaack. The Iron Range teaparty types had their panties in a big twist over even the suggestion that union history should be taught.
Then there is also a big hole in the history of whites and native americans here.
Too many conservatives don’t want inconvenient historical facts taught or talked about.
jayjaybear
@Goblue72: A quisling’s a quisling, no matter what they call themselves.
Another Holocene Human
@SatanicPanic: The LAPD doesn’t have a flag? What do they cart around with great ceremony at funerals? You don’t have jackasses with police benevolent donor stickers on them in prominent places or police benevolent society license plates because the sticker wasn’t cop-fellatey enough? The People’s Lege banned them? Now that’s progressive.
Another Holocene Human
@bemused:
Yup.
Kay
@slag:
I love “mansplaining”. It needed a name. I can’t be the only person who had the shock of absolute, immediate recognition.
“That’s what that is!”
rikyrah
Children of Immigrants Denied Citizenship
For nearly 150 years, the United States, under the 14th Amendment, has recognized people born here as citizens, regardless of whether their parents were citizens.
But Texas has other plans. In the last year, the state has refused to issue birth certificates to children who were born in Texas to undocumented parents. In May, four women filed a civil rights lawsuit against the Texas Department of State Health Services alleging constitutional discrimination and interference in the federal government’s authority over immigration.
Jennifer Harbury, a lawyer with Texas RioGrande Legal Aid, who is representing the women, said the deluge of birth certificate refusals began last winter. “I’ve never seen such a large number of women with this problem,” she says. “In the past someone might be turned away, but it was always resolved. This is something altogether new.”
According to the lawsuit, the women who requested birth certificates for their children in Cameron and Hidalgo counties were turned away because of insufficient proof of their identities. State law allows the use of a foreign ID if the mother lacks a Texas driver’s license or a U.S. passport.
But local officials, which issue birth certificates registered by the Texas Department of State Health Services Vital Statistics Unit, told the women they would no longer accept either the matricula consular, which is a photo ID issued by the Mexican Consulate to Mexican nationals living in the U.S., or a foreign passport without a current U.S. visa. Undocumented Central American women are also being turned away because they only have a passport without a U.S. visa. “They are locking out a huge chunk of the undocumented immigrant community,” says Harbury…
http://www.texasobserver.org/children-of-immigrants-denied-citizenship/#.VabEeQeg6yc.twitter
SatanicPanic
@Another Holocene Human: I’m sure there is, I just don’t see it being flown all over the place.
Paul in KY
@Another Holocene Human: My cousin used to be a long haul trucker & he was slagging Kansas one day. Did not like Kansas. Then he interjected: ‘But Kansas is like Paris, compared with Oklahoma’. Said he met some of the meanest people in OK.
CarolDuhart2
@Goblue72: I don’t get that. If he is the age I think he is-he has to remember that MLK died so that he could at least safely stand near those folks without being lynched. IF it were up to those flag holders, he wouldn’t even be allowed downtown except to work.
Some black people so crave white acceptance that they will stand with people who secretly hate them. I think of Alan West, of Keyes, of Judge Thomas. It’s as if they think that if they play the fool enough, somehow they will seen as members of the club.
But are they?
CONGRATULATIONS!
@Mudge: Predates even the Spanish by centuries if not millenia. As noted above, slavery was just…a human thing up until a couple of centuries ago.
What the Indians got from the Spanish – the Indians who lived through the diseases, anyway – were horses. Which revolutionized their lives in a way nothing else ever had.
Paul in KY
@Kropadope: Keep on calling them ‘Republicans’. If they can’t handle the truth, fuck em.
Matt McIrvin
@Kropadope: The Rand Paul love from people who are basically lefties is usually because they think he’s a foreign-policy anti-imperialist/anti-national-security-state guy. Lots of self-declared radicals in the US mostly care about foreign policy, and would be willing to see US society ripped apart if it meant the American global empire came down. I have to give it to them, a President Rand Paul might actually do that.
Tim in SF (iPad)
@boatboy_srq:
I’ve been reading this blog daily since Terri Schiavo and that’s the first B5 reference I remember seeing. Thank you for that.
Another Holocene Human
@The Other Chuck: I was watching DS9 and VOY as well and I felt like B5’s good days to clunkers ratio just killed the other two.
DS9 seemed to be copying anything B5 did as if they didn’t have a clear sense of what they wanted to do with the show. It has a good rep now because Ron Moore saved it. (In my admittedly biased opinion.) Michael Pillar is a stupid ass. (Actually, I really liked the first season and a half of DS9 except for Terry Farrell, who was miscast, but they decided to go all war porn all the time instead of dealing with difficult topics.)
VOY had Braga and the horribly narcissistic Jeri Taylor. Braga sucks donkey dick as a boss* so the writing was just uneven and awful, and Taylor was so up her own ass she hired her own no-talent son to play a bit part several times. If you read her novels what she envisioned for the series didn’t always translate to the screen but guess what, all that condescending Native culture appropriation all over the place? All Taylor.
*he also needs someone to exercise editorial control over what he writes, too, because like a certain producer I could mention he loves the flashy episode start but then can’t write his way out of his impossible scenario … on TNG he had Snodgrass over him and some of his eps are still talked about to this day. After she left the quality took a nose dive.
Villago Delenda Est
The heritage of hate continues to taint this country.
Paul in KY
@Bobby Thomson: I’m hoping The Donald will slag him.
Mudge
@CONGRATULATIONS!: This is a nasty link..but 1903..Cherokees and flag..
https://www.google.com/search?q=1926+confederate+reunion&rlz=1C1LENP_enUS496US496&es_sm=122&tbm=isch&imgil=pM8OU5cnVsNqeM%253A%253BSpwn8puHnd9qNM%253Bhttp%25253A%25252F%25252Ftngenweb.org%25252Fobion%25252Frecords-data%25252Fmilitary%25252Fobion-county-confederate-soldiers-reunion-circa-1926%25252F&source=iu&pf=m&fir=pM8OU5cnVsNqeM%253A%252CSpwn8puHnd9qNM%252C_&biw=1366&bih=643&usg=__XDxk2P4NvmpI9YXd6-BjQ6n0e00%3D&ved=0CCgQyjdqFQoTCNydjPeH4MYCFcoZPgodnZwB_Q&ei=ktqnVdyME8qz-AGduYboDw#tbm=isch&tbs=rimg%3ACaTPDlOXJ1bDIjjstQi1evWFNUqsWtcnxyGp45wYJkOO_1WtxzoDDuZQ7sBLJv0lBlM_1Ll0BULKyh-5UgLcSYxw_1x-CoSCey1CLV69YU1EZ3FVM1Ue-ZmKhIJSqxa1yfHIakRq1TCjbMtk3cqEgnjnBgmQ479axFEibn7hyqggCoSCXHOgMO5lDuwEarD7XVUajAMKhIJEsm_1SUGUz8sRxjwv2uIgYVwqEgmXQFQsrKH7lRHcsEyQhiz8yCoSCSAtxJjHD_1H4EXKgc6pnE70I&q=1926%20confederate%20reunion&imgrc=IeU_-BW8uR2zvM%3A
Kropadope
@J R in WV:
They shriek about government ineffectiveness, destroy the government’s capability to handle shit like this, then say “See? Told ya so” when the government fails to protect us.
Don’t you know the only way to effect positive change in the world is to vote with your wallet? One person riding their bike every day will change the world!!!!!!
Another Holocene Human
@SatanicPanic: Sorry to pick on you. There are police asslickers everywhere and I have never cared for police asslickers.
Paul in KY
@Another Holocene Human: It can make your head hurt trying to come to grips with their stupidity.
bemused
@Another Holocene Human:
Yup, it’s a big tell that they get so offended when someone inserts facts into their rosy colored fantasies about America.
Sherparick
@Another Holocene Human: My Mom grew up in Oklahoma and been back there many times to visit my many relatives. And it is very southern, with a western tang. Just google “Tulsa race riot.” In the 21st century it appears to be a thing that people will wave Confederate Battle Flags at a Black President of the United States or post on Facebook an allege joke calling the first lady a gorilla and the president a monkey and then turn around and say “but I am not a racist.” Really, are you that stupid or do you think we are that stupid. What do you think this “Heritage” thing is that you are so proud of? It is a heritage of 400 years of white supremacy (I could quibble a bit about this as racial trope around slavery did not really start until the late 17th and early 18th century in Virginia, and did not go on steroids until after the Revolution when the dissonance between national ideology of freedom and equality started colliding with the powerful self interest of wealth built on the enslavement of your labor force.) Finally, from “the nuance and irony of history department,” Oklahoma, as “Indian Territory” primarily fought with the South during the Civil War, as the elite of the Cherokee owned slaves and sent a brigade to fight with Confederate Army in Missouri and Arkansas and this force was the last organized Confederate force to surrender. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conclusion_of_the_American_Civil_War#Surrender_of_Cherokee_chief_Stand_Watie_.28June_23.29 (The traditionalist Cherokee and other Indians led by John Ross and his family sided with the Union. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ross_%28Cherokee_chief%29.)ided Nd. The last organized Confederate force to surrender
Another Holocene Human
@rikyrah: More REAL ID chickens coming home to roost.
They know, like an abusive parent, that without identity documents in the US, you’re fucked.
JPL
@rikyrah: I saw that yesterday. There is only one amendment, that the assholes recognize and that’s the second.
Paul in KY
@raven: My nose isn’t out of joint, but they did it & I think it is somewhat newsworthy & I want to comment on it.
Probably a gardening thread you can hang out in…
Another Holocene Human
@Sherparick: Funny, the Confederate wankers in Olustee don’t celebrate the “last Confederate force to surrender”. Wiki said there were Seminoles on the force. lololololol
Paul in KY
@Elizabelle: Tom is pretty cool. He grew up in Gainesville, so he knows all about Southern ‘Heritage’.
raven
@Paul in KY: So comment, did I try to stop you?
Another Holocene Human
Monuments to Confederate “glory” in Florida are uniformly hilarious, because there was none but they cherry pick instances that they “won” temporarily and hide the bit where the Union came back and whipped dat ass.
J R in WV
@Elizabelle:
Thanks, Elizabelle, I’m sure it will go well, I’ve had the best and most professional help you could dream of.
We the People, that’s how the founding documents start!
CONGRATULATIONS!
@Sherparick: I know about that one. Basically the white citizenry ganged up and decided to Fallujah the shit out of the black part of town, and then did so. Not really a “riot” in the traditional sense.
raven
@Another Holocene Human:
gian
After amazing grace Obama could cause some cardiovascular distress by singing John Brown’s body or the song which used the tune. The Battle hymn of the republic
Archon
@The Other Chuck:
Farscape was so low budget it verged into camp which distracted from a decent premise. Firefly was obviously brilliant but I don’t think you are giving Babylon 5 enough credit for how ahead of it’s time it was in terms of serial drama with a sci-fi bent.
Paul in KY
@Goblue72: There were a few (non-observant) Jews in Nazi Party as well….
Chyron HR
@raven:
I had no idea that the concept of being “salty” was around way back then.
JPL
Another day, another shooter. This time in Chattanooga.
Tree With Water
Right now I’m looking out my office window at two fawns not more than 10 yards away from me, eating fallen plums from a tree.
Goblue72
@CarolDuhart2: As I noted above, this seems more like a stunt designed as ragebait for liberals, which stunt most commenters here fell for.
Paul in KY
@catclub: If they ever did that, I would drive down there to visit Stone Mountain.
Saw Outkast 3 times last year. Great shows. The one they did in St. Louis was a bit subdued, though (compared to what I saw at The Hangout & Voodoo fest).
Another Holocene Human
@CONGRATULATIONS!: Let’s talk about this, okay? Native North American slavery in the 19th century was a very different institution from the one being practiced by whites. Just as 18th century West African slavery was a very different institution from what African slaves were sold into. (Plus, the notion that West African kings were just selling West African slaves to friendly neighborhood European slave traders is a total lie. Parties were traveling inland to kidnap people. It happened all over Africa to feed a rapacious demand in the Middle East and in the Caribbean and South America.) Serfs were basically slaves and while nobody would celebrate the conditions they lived under they still did not, for the most part (maybe parts of Poland and Russia are the exception, under German or Prussian rule) compare to American slavery in the decades approaching the Civil War. Only Brazil and some Caribbean countries could probably boast of worse conditions. I’m tired of the equivocation. We’re not talking about some sort of genteel slavery like Saint Patrick becoming the thrall of the Vikings. It’s not even indentured servitude. In fact, after the servant revolt in the Virginia plantations, the planter class made sure it was not indentured servitude. Just look at how the free Black population of the South shrinks leading up the Civil War. How free Blacks in the North and South systemically lost their civil rights. It was racial, it was ugly, it was cruel and violent. It was bound by no traditional taboos (because the enslaving society hadn’t had that condition as part of their culture for 800 years), or by interlocking obligations, as the slaves were far from home and far from any patron or protector. Many times slaves were prevented from holding religious services, banned from reading even the Bible, for if slaves were fellow Christians would that not imply an obligation towards them?
kc
Assholes.
Peale
@rikyrah: Was that even an announced state policy? You’d think the governor would want to take credit for that.
Paul in KY
@CONGRATULATIONS!: Preach it!!! Also, God bless your grandfather & the other members of your family.
Another Holocene Human
In one slave narrative (this guy escaped twice), the author was a Cherokee’s slave for a while. He hated his master but was biding his time. He was astounded by the behavior of the Cherokee and their long-time slaves. One slave and his master got in an argument at night and the slave kicked the master’s ass. The next morning, all the Cherokee were gossiping and laughing about it. The author explains that where he was from, that slave would have been executed and they probably wouldn’t have stopped there.
raven
@Paul in KY: They played at half-time of a Ga Tech-Virginia Tech game a few years back and I think my wife and I were the only ones who had no clue as to who they were!
Another Holocene Human
@Goblue72: Witness my rage.
Oh yeah, I have none.
raven
@CONGRATULATIONS!: More than one lost cause in that list.
catclub
@Matt McIrvin:
Sure. Assuming that 1/2+ of the House and Senate are no longer GOP or neocon. In Other words: Not likely.
Another Holocene Human
@Archon: I kind of was attracted to Farscape as camp that didn’t (totally) suck. Jim Henson Co I think had a lot to do with that. Rygel I forever!
Tree With Water
The two fawns just split. All told, they were here for about 10 minutes.
Villago Delenda Est
@JPL: And they ignore the first clause of the 2nd Amendment. Pointedly. As it radically modifies the meaning of the part they do like.
raven
@Tree With Water: Big RATS!
Another Holocene Human
@gian: Yes!
That song originated as the war began. Everyone knew what it meant. Tired of Confederate apologists screaming both sides do it. Even if there were other motivations for the powers that be at play, the folk knew that this war was going to finish what John Brown started. It was inevitable, the South had bet literally everything on preserving the “Peculiar Institution” forever.
Omnes Omnibus
@raven: They taste good.
Another Holocene Human
@CONGRATULATIONS!: Criming while white.
raven
@Omnes Omnibus: That’s what I hear!
Another Holocene Human
@BobS: You haven’t answered my actual question, Sparky.
raven
@Omnes Omnibus:Lyme Disease Danger Zones Are Spreading Throughout Northeast & Midwest
Repatriated
@Germy Shoemangler: Hence the big-money hijacking and promotion of the TEA Party. Before ’08 it was a small batch of Libertarians; it then became a well-financed and heavily-promoted alternate flag for disaffected Republicans to rally around.
Omnes Omnibus
@raven: We’ve been finding more deer ticks up at our cabin over the past couple of years.
raven
@Omnes Omnibus: That is one nasty ass disease too.
Patricia Kayden
@Goblue72: So?
boatboy_srq
@bemused: True. But TX BoE seems to have a special h#rd0n for uberWhitewashing US history – to the point of glamorizing Hoover and Jackson, diminishing Grant (a/k/a the drunk general/president who screwed up reuniting the
ConfederacyUnion) and papering over Jim Cro and all sorts of other ills simply to preserve Ahmurrcan Ecksepshunulizm. The latest pass on their textbook “requested edits” is horrible (not that the ones before were significantly different). There’s blissful ignorance like your example and there’s deliberately misinforming the kids to promote an agenda.boatboy_srq
@Mudge: Wasn’t aiming at you; just sick’n’tired of white-eyed-southern-white-boys (apologies to .38 Special) trying to get away with “it ain’t racist it’s just how I was done brung up”.
dww44
Tis O/T but seeing the locale of this post is Oklahoma, have their been any recent updates from or about Soonergrunt? I’d love to know if he’s okay and/or making progress towards being ok.
chopper
@BobS:
you don’t get it, scrot – i’m agreeing with you. everything is obama’s fault, so ergo this one is also. it’s science.
bemused
@boatboy_srq:
Definitely not as nuts as Texas.
Jeffro
@Matt McIrvin: So I read “President Rand Paul” and just about died laughing inside. Let’s try this out and see who if anyone passes the Laff Test:
– President Rand Paul
– President Ted Cruz
– President Scott Walker
– President Marco Rubio
– President Ben Carson
– President Carly Fiorina
– President Donald Trump
– President Jeb Bush
– President John Kaisch
– President Mike Huckabee
– President Bobby Jindal
– President Rick Santorum
– President Lindsey Graham
– President Chris Christie
– President George Pataki
– President Rick Perry
(don’t read the list twice, you’ll rupture something)
Davis X. Machina
@The Other Chuck:
Not so. Stoic cosmopolitanism. Paul didn’t make up “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” out of his own head. (Galatians 3:28)
It’s also not a recent development in law: Ius gentium
wenchacha
@Another Holocene Human: I don’t know if I interpreted this the same way as you. I agree that Obama was taking hits from pony-wanters and lukewarm guys like Minchin and other DINOs. Then the Cornel West “radical” left or whatnot.
POTUS definitely kept his cool so many times when I wish he had just lost it. Then so many people would call eleventy-dimension chess, and others claim he was always the Corporatist, etc. Without saying “both sides do it,” my guess is that the President makes mistakes, learns from them, is trying pretty much to do the best he can, and that he sees pragmatism as the wise Long Game.
I wish there were journo/opinion shows where I could hear real discussions and not just campaign slogans and put-downs.
The pony that would make me happy is if the President could put a halt to plans to drill in the Arctic. Can he make that happen, and for good? I will still say he has been a great POTUS if he doesn’t, but it’s a big fucking deal to me.
Matt McIrvin
@Jeffro: I think my ability to laugh at these things has been burned away by the phrase “President George W. Bush”.
Davis X. Machina
@wenchacha:
Anything he does, a Congress can undo. And much of the Arctic is in someone else’s EEZ
wenchacha
@Davis X. Machina: That sorta figures.
I know everybody who is SMRT about bidness wants to drill up every last drop, but I sure wish they would put a moratorium on it for a few more years, to hold off fucking up all of that remaining wilderness.
JaneE
My family is from Oklahoma. Racism is the heritage. Anyone not white doesn’t count for anything.
The amount of ingrained prejudice that is just normal back there is astounding. Everyone just assumes the worst about anyone who is not exactly like them, instead of actually looking at the individual and seeing them as a person.
My dad could have been Archie Bunker, only not funny. Anything bad happened, he had a bigoted, racist rant about the ethnicity of the perpetrator. One time the bad guy was white, and he started ranting about whites the exact same way he ranted about Blacks and Mexicans. It was just reflexive, and he stopped dead when I asked him if we weren’t white. I blame it on his growing up in Oklahoma.
ET
This is a perfect example of why I don’t believe those who say the confederate flag is not a racist symbol. They are waving that at an African American president and they are doing it for very, very explicit and implicit reasons. If our current president was white they wouldn’t be doing it and I dare anyone who was, to actually admit that. And do it with a straight face.
That said, it doesn’t matter whether someone feels it is a racist symbol because it is even if they doesn’t want admit it, it has been for many decades used as such by pretty much 99.99% of people waving it even if they don’t explicitly say so.
Another Holocene Human
@JaneE: I dunno, his ranting about whites sounds pretty funny to me.
Jeffro
@Matt McIrvin: Half of the names on this list are people so profoundly nutty and/or offensive to most of America, it’s okay to laugh (really!)
Just realized, too – it’s going to be fun as the first 8-10 of them drop out, who they try and throw their whopping .5% support to. Even more fun will be watching some of the more electable ones try to avoid getting the drop-outs’ endorsements. Good times!
Bobby Thomson
@Matt McIrvin: I’m old enough to remember the laughable President Ronald Reagan.
Duke of Clay
@chopper: I grew up in Mississippi in the 1950s and 60s. Yeah, it’s racist!
Paul in KY
@Elizabelle: Thank you for posting that. Best wishes to those guys who are helping these ex-cons.
Hungry Joe
@CONGRATULATIONS!: @CONGRATULATIONS!: If you want to read a great, GREAT book about Native Americans and horses, check out “Empire of the Summer Moon.” The Comanches were a small, ineffectual, picked-upon tribe … until they got their hands on some horses. Within a generation they were dominating the entire south/central part of what is now the U.S. They drove the Apaches all the way to New Mexico and Arizona, and kept the whites at bay for fifty years. Larry McMurtry’s “Lonesome Dove” and other books in that series get the point across (without the history) pretty well; the Comanches terrified EVERYBODY. Toughest dudes ever.
aimai
@Kropadope: Call them “The solipsists.” Because that is what a libertarian is, at this point.
Paul in KY
@J R in WV: Glad to hear you are getting fixed up!
Paul in KY
@raven: No, you just seemed to think that anyone posting comments here (and the story itself) were wasting time.
Paul in KY
@raven: I had only ever heard the ‘Hey Ya’ song before I saw them the first time. Knew generally who they were, but really nothing beyond that.
Kropadope
@aimai:
It doesn’t matter what I call them, they will be insufferable.
Paul in KY
@Another Holocene Human: Sorta like the blind black man who’s in the KKK (famous Chappelle skit)
Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant)
@Another Holocene Human: I’m ok, but Mrs. Cisco has had some health issues that have required my exclusive attention. Will probably be scarce for a time.
brantl
@Ryan: Maybe they can relocate, either the camps, or these people. They are blindingly white, aren’t they?
glory b
I’m late, but wanted to mention Sandra Bland, a Black Lives Matter participant,pulled over in Texas for “failing to signal a lane change” while black, and wound up arrested, in jail for three days, and found to have “committed suicide” by hanging herself with a plastic bag.
She was 28 years old and traveling to Texas to take a job at Texas A & M Prarie View. Her family does not believe she wsa suicidal.
boatboy_srq
@Kropadope: Of course they’re insufferable. To them, you’re just a figment of their imagination constructed to add color to the universe in their heads. That’s the dictionary definition of solipsist.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@Elizabelle:
Petty seems to be yet another example of what Molly Ivins said about Southern liberals: “Once you figure out they’re lying to you about race, you start to wonder what else they’re lying to you about.”
Brachiator
@Another Holocene Human: Even though it’s obnoxious, I don’t much care that a small group of fools waved the Confederate flag. First amendment, and all that jazz. It would be as obnoxious, but allowed, if fools waved Nazi flags. But this is NOT the same thing as having the flag fly as an official or unofficial state symbol on state buildings.
Again, racism is American; it’s not just the special evil of the South. Yep, Oklahoma was absolutely NOT the South. And people came all over the US and the world to live there. The largely bad movie “Far and Away” had Irish immigrants played by Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman participating in the Oklahoma Land Run of 1893.
There was also a number of prosperous black communities in Oklahoma. And even though you would never know it from novels and movies like “True Grit,” there were also a number of black and Latino US marshals operating in the territory. There is some weak evidence that the Lone Ranger may have in part been based on a black marshal, Bass Reeves.
When Oklahoma was a territory, there was racism, but it was part of a larger loose atmosphere of territorial attitudes. When Oklahoma became a state, they decided to formally embrace racism and segregation. For example, it was decided that you simply could not have black men serve as policemen for white American citizens, so the nonwhite US marshals were retired.
The Tulsa Race Riots was a deliberate and successful action to kill black people and to reduce them to poverty. As the Wiki notes, it resulted in the Greenwood District, also known as ‘the Black Wall Street’ and the wealthiest black community in the United States, being burned to the ground.
These actions contradict the lie that black poverty and disadvantage is only the residue of slavery, or laziness.
Stupid ass white people are worried that Obama want to put them in detention camps. Must be racist white memory. Another action during the Oklahoma Race Riots: singling innocent black people out for persecution, and inflicting terror on sympathetic whites.
Yeah, people waving the flag in Oklahoma are celebrating “heritage,” a heritage of intolerance and racism. This is compounded by the fact that a lot of the history of racist terrorist actions has been expunged from the history books used in public schools in favor of bland fantasies.
Chris
@Paul in KY:
“Libertarian is what Republicans call themselves when they’re trying to get laid.”
Chris
@Archon:
I love Firefly (my intro to Whedon). The only thing I found jarring was how literally it took “space Western.” Star Wars and Star Trek had a lot of the space western in them too, but not to the point of carrying Civil War type sidearms, wearing longcoats, cowboy hats and bonnets, riding horses… etc.
Farscape was just an absolute blast. Not much rewatch value for me, but great while I was watching.
BobS
@Another Holocene Human: I believe your “actual question” regarding palm plantations was answered, Spanky.@chopper: Well thank you, cumpkin, but lighten up on the president — not everything is his fault. For instance, he wasn’t responsible for your mom’s drinking while she was pregnant with you.
BMAC
Actually, it’s about ethics in treason in defense of slavery.
Sad_Dem
Speaking of the Osage, I’ll never forget this book: The Deaths of Sybil Bolton.
slag
@Kay: Seriously. We need more words to describe the various lengths to which people go to pretend that they’re not racist/classist/sexist while they kindly explain how a whole group of people is simply wrong about whatever the subject happens to be this day.
“I’m not racist, and I know this to be true because I just happen to know more about racism than those people who have been persecuted by hundreds of years of racism do.”
Personally, I get depressed when considering how much we’ve allowed white guys to be misled into believing that they are superior to everyone else in just about every circumstance. It’s a shame, really, that such ignorance is the only self-perpetuating machine that the laws of physics will allow.
mclaren
On the contrary: Obama isn’t a better man than you are, just a better politician.
If Obama is really smart, he’ll stand out in front of these assholes so the press can film him with the confederate flags in the background. This is exactly what you want, as politician. Stupid enemies who make a spectacle of their hatred and no-neck bigotry while you stand above them and look urbane and smooth and sharp.
If Obama gets very lucky, one of these assholes may scream a curse at him or throw some rotting fruit in his direction.
Enemies who publicize their own stupidity and viciousness are the most precious gift anyone can have — like, oh, say, eemom or Mnemosyne or Martin or omnes omnibus on this forum. People like that make you look suave and brilliant by comparison. They’re more valuable than gold.
Another Holocene Human
@Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant): Damn, missed you! Best wishes for you and the missus.
Another Holocene Human
@Chris: Before Firefly there was Cowboy Bebop. Amazing series, and the show runner was a woman, very unusual in Japan.
Whedon stole, er, borrowed, some of the aesthetic wholesale.