In response to this comment
Some Texans are arrogant and have got some backward thinking policies, but they're still Americans
I said:
IN NAME ONLY.
They are not even worthy of the title.
They are ignorant and they are hateful.
The hateful commenter retorted:
I stand by my comment, and my donut.
geOrge is an incoherent nusiance, who doesn't know when to quit.
There is nothing incoherent (or hateful) about calling hate what it is.
I concede that "some backward thinking policies" is a little vague,
but it is not vague enough to stop people in general (especially here)
from knowing EXACTLY WHICH "backward thinking policies" are being talked about.
Racial disparities in criminal justice constitute hating black people.
Denying LGBT citizens equal protection of the laws constitutes hating them.
Given that this is a progressive Democratic site, it is rather amazing to
see which way all the HRs wind up flowing when somebody decides to stand up for the good American values of bigoted Texans.
E.g. here.
It is even more offensive when these bigots' anti-American values are alleged to need defending because they have "fought and died for this country". They have done nothing of the kind. John Kerry himself asked, when testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee after returning from VietNam,
"How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"
The only problem was, VietNam wasn't a mistake: it was an intentional decision to support the colonial power and monied interests over a people's will to self-determination,and _as such was typical
of the use to which the American military and American CIA ARE GENERALLY put, since WW2.
There is way too much laissez-faire here in terms of who gets away with insulting whom. There are allegedly guidelines against certain kinds of attacks, but they are largely pretextual: they are capriciously enforced on a basis of social popularity that is not determined by anything factual about any issue, not even when the facts relate directly to the site's alleged goals.
For an even better example, try the following exchange on reparations:
Suppose, just hypothetically, that a rich white planter has a white wife and a black concubine, and has a son by each,
and both sons spend their youth working to develop the plantation and make it productive. When he dies, ALL the property goes to the legitimate white son and the black half of the planter's progeny must make do with NO wealth and NO property
Allegedly in the name of defending women, this got DISMISSED with the following racist retort:
So the black son is treated the same as the white daughter, in other words.
You don't even mention the daughter, and what her rights would be of any color. She's invisible and dismissed by you. What about the wife? Now she has gone from depending on her husband to depending on her son for her welfare. Same with the concubine. You don't mention that this is the treatment women have received for thousands of years, not just a couple of hundred, albeit in less a severe form.
I find this highly ironic. Now you need to start worrying about the benefits you've received from women's suppression.
This response was a complete hijacking of the topic.
The discussion was about INTEREGENERATIONAL debt and ABOUT racism.
The WHITE women in this scenario are THE WIVES AND DAUGHTERS of PRIVILEGED WHITE men! What the daughter is going to do in this situation is be happy about being in a social class that allows her to marry a privileged white man OF THE SAME social class! Racism is inherited: gender is NOT: you are GUARANTEED to be a of A DIFFERENT gender from at least one of your parents! Almost every woman who lost something because she was a woman has the option of getting SOME of it back BY being the loved daughter, mother, or wife of some man. Sexism is evil and wrong but that does not mean I was ignoring it just because I wrote something about racism and inter-generational disparity and debt! Sexism is INHERENTLY UNrelated to THAT!
The issue here is not that the concubine is dependent because she's female.
The issue is that the concubine IS A CONCUBINE AS OPPOSED TO A WIFE
because she is BLACK !!
But here, an attempt to say something real and relevant gets dismissed by an ad hominem attack against the sayer because he/me is obviously a sexist.
Well, the person who said this committed an extremely racist act by saying it, especially by choosing to say it in this context.
Moreover, she needs to be very aware that the white wives and daughters of the era when this was happening WERE THEMSELVES USED as THE PRIMARY REASON WHY black men needed to be disfranchised: the racist propagandists of the day (some of them white women themselves -- Rebecca Felton in this case) insisted that black men NEEDED to be forcibly restrained in order to protect the flower of southern white womanhood from being ravaged by them. So for ANYbody, in the context of THAT debate, to allege that I as a black man have not been sensitive enough to the plight of white women in this context, IS RIDICULOUS.
The only white women to which this fool's point actually applies are lesbians or others who for whatever reason were systematically denied a chance to reap the benefits of relationships with their own privileged fathers, husbands, brothers, or sons. It is of course YET ANOTHER example of RACISM that WHITE women found this easier to do THAN black ones, whose men were (and still are) often too oppressed to BECOME economically well off enough to support a wife and family.
The full 241 comments under the original diary are here:
http://www.dailykos.com/...