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A great Gumbo story oh, and an interesting lecture to boot.
Oh and epic quote of the day – “Responsibility is what you take because of who you are.”
Homemade Canadian Fail Incoming.
Some people who express racist sentiments just don’t know any better, their peer groups are racist and the sentiments are a shared group meme that is still wrong but at least understandable. The educated though, should just fucking know better. This half-wit brings the supernovae like stupidity with her critique of Handel’s Messiah. As this article was posted on Pharyngula, I’m going to screen shot her lovely quotes; I have a feeling this post may be disappearing fairly soon.
Racism and stupidity, now all in one place!
Wow.
“I don’t think this is simply a cultural phenomenon (as in misunderstanding the Messiah’s content, message, meaning, etc…). I think it is a physio/cerebral problem. I’ve seen it happen in art and design, and even in science – a friend of mine was a Korean PhD student.”
Oh, you’ve got a Korean friend, it must be totally true. Did you share the first little fun fact with your friend that you find them cerebrally challenged as well? Did you put it into small words so they could understand your sane rational discourse?
“So this is what multiculturalism is bringing us. I think it is a mixture of aggressive Asians pushing their way in everywhere, and a liberal white public that wants these multi-culti influences to dominate in its cities and institutions.”
Damn those aggressive Asians for being so darn talented and ruining Western Classical Music Forever!1!!.
No, Camera Lucida it is you who need to go away and stop ruining the world the rest of us.
Media lens is currently calling another Independent reporter on their uncritical treatment of Tony Blair and his sentiments toward the Palestinians. Go to the Media Lens website for the entire deconstruction.
A snippet from John Pilger caught my attention, I will repost it here:
In similar vein, Macintyre made a cryptic reference in his article to the “tragically abortive peace talks at Camp David in 2000”. This “tragic” episode is “Israel’s most important contemporary myth”, John Pilger writes. The myth states that Ehud Barak offered the Palestinians the return of “90 per cent” of the Occupied Territories and that Yasser Arafat turned him down. Arafat’s alleged rejection of this “unprecedented act of generosity”, to quote the myth once again, became the launch pad for renewed abuse of the Palestinians, including the building of an apartheid wall.
Pilger writes of the peace talks in 2000:
“There was no ’90 per cent’ offer. At Camp David, Barak promised a token military withdrawal from no more than 12 per cent of the Occupied Territories. He also made it clear that Israel had no intention of giving back any part of Greater Jerusalem, which covers some of the best Palestinian land and is the administrative and cultural heart of Palestine. Most of the illegal settlements, which controlled 42 per cent of the West Bank and Gaza, would stay, leaving the Palestinians with fragments of their original homeland, or 15 per cent of pre-Israel Palestine.” (John Pilger, Freedom Next Time, Bantam Press, London, 2006, pp. 107-108)
“In practice,” wrote Barak’s chief negotiator at Camp David, Shlomo Ben-Ami, before taking up his negotiator’s role, “the Oslo agreements were founded on a neo-colonialist basis, on a life of dependence of one on the other forever.” (Quoted, Pilger, ibid.)
It is nice to see we are giving the Palestinians a fair shake with our obvious generosity.
Israel is basking in the glow of yet another effective public opinion campaign, but this time rather than brutalizing the Palestinians it is the Bedouins turn.
“Israeli authorities have demolished the homes of about 300 Bedouins in a village in the southern Negev desert.
The entire village of al-Arakib was bulldozed on Tuesday, with many of the former residents’ cattle, trees and belongings lost.”
I wonder what would happen if the Palestinians decided to bulldoze an illegal Jewish settlement?
“Haia Noach, director of the Negev Co-existence Forum, was present at al-Arakib during the demolition and said that at least five Israeli bulldozers arrived around 5:30am (0230GMT).
“It took them about three or four hours to destroy all the houses,” she said, describing the scene as “appalling.”Scuffles erupted as the villagers and around 150 rights activists tried to stop the police from carrying out the demolitions, with several people wounded and a handful arrested, activists said.”
At least no one tried to get in front of a bulldozer.
“Police spokesman Mickey Rosenfeld confirmed the early-morning operation, saying the homes had been “illegally built” and were destroyed in line with a court ruling issued 11 years ago which was never implemented.
Around 30 shacks were removed and several hundred people were taken back to the Rahat area where they originally came from,” he said, referring to a nearby Bedouin town in Israel’s arid south.”
Well at least they deported them back to where they came from. No mention of compensation or any sort of help from the government, just the police and the ‘dozers. How nice.
“Noach said Israeli authorities had first given residents of al-Arakib a notice to evacaute on June 15, but that no action had followed, so the residents began to doubt that the demolition would occur.
But this morning, Israeli police arrived and forced residents to leave their homes within minutes, Noach said.
The demolition team destroyed water tanks and removed generators.
“It’s like a declaration of war. They don’t want you here,” Noach said. “It’s unthinkable.”
Unthinkable is in the eye of who is behind the bulldozer. Is this issue as cut and dried as just the courts taking 11 years to get moving on a decision? Where there other motivations present, did this group of Bedouins piss off the wrong people? Just speculation of course, but I would not be surprised if there were other less savoury aspects to this story.
Israeli continues withe bulldoze first and answer no questions later policy, although full marks to them for not contravening international law on this one.
Marginalized Native Canadians protesting for radical reforms; like School!
I’m not sure where Al Jezeera was going with this piece but I do find it interesting to get a non-official look at how we treat our Native Canadians.
“In 2007, the Mohawk community at Tyendinaga, 200 kilometres east of Toronto, blocked the trans-continental rail line and Canada’s largest highway in protest at the government’s failure to address land rights and basic issues of survival within First Nations – including safe drinking water, which the community lacked.
That episode was a hint of the leverage indigenous peoples in Canada possess, as hundreds of millions of dollars in cargo was stalled by simple barricades placed across a rural stretch of the Canadian National railway’s mainline between Toronto and Montreal.
They are referring to the standoff at Oka, I did not realize that it qualified Canada to become home of insurgents.
“In recent years in particular, Canada’s indigenous communities have shown the will and potential to grind the country’s economic lifelines to a halt through strategically placed blockades on the major highways and rail lines that run through native reserves well outside of Canada’s urban landscape.”
You tend to forget about things that are not happening directly to you. I was stirred by the power of Shawn Brant’s words:
“The message resounded,” said Shawn Brant, a high profile Mohawk activist involved in the 2007 blockades.
“We are not going to live in abject poverty, to have our children die, to have our women abducted, raped and murdered without any investigations. We are not going to live with the basic indignities that occur to us daily. We would bring them to an end.”
Yah, good ole’ Canada. We keep our Native Canadians in a deep dark memory hole, we bring them out to apologize once and awhile, but once we are done with them; back to the hole.
Oh and while you are in the hole, we will forget about nasty little statistics like these:
“These root causes, these abysmal conditions for some of the aboriginal people are serious.”
There are more than 800 outstanding native land claims held against the Canadian government. And in many First Nations communities there is deep crisis, with poverty, unemployment and overcrowding the norm.
According to figures from the Assembly of First Nations, more than 118 First Nations lack safe drinking water and some 5,500 houses do not have sewage systems.
Almost one half of homes on native reserves are in need of “major repairs”, compared with 7 per cent of non-native homes.
Natives suffer a violent crime rate that is more than 300 times higher than Canada’s non-native population, while natives represent 18.5 per cent of the male prison population and one-quarter of the female population, although natives only constitute 4 per cent of the total population.”
If my people were being systematically mistreated like this, I would be mighty annoyed as well. The sad thing is that I’m betting most Canadians have little idea what life is like for many Native Canadians. The lack of information or curiosity is a hallmark of imperial populations who are fed only the happy news about their great empire and how amazingly benevolent they are.
Hurrah for privilege! Hurrah for the subtle racism that continues to marginalize our Native Canadian populations!
Hurrah for the invidious status-quo indeed.
This story will not make very many people happy. If you happen to believe in left-wing media bias and that Israel is an undeserving oppressed nation (and other farcical notions), please stop reading now. Things will only get worse for you the farther you read into the article.
The story of the Canadian NGO Rights and Democracy has recently received media attention for the firing of three new appointees to the board of directors. As the CBC says:
“Three senior managers at the federal government’s human rights agency who were suspended for publicly declaring their lack of confidence in three Conservative appointees to their organization’s board of directors earlier this year have been fired.”
To understand the how and why this is so particularly egregious requires a fair amount of back story.
“Rights & Democracy, created under Brian Mulroney’s Conservative government to encourage democracy and monitor human rights around the world, has been in turmoil since the Harper government appointed new board members [the ones mentioned in the first quote] last year.
The new members challenged grants being made to three human rights organizations known to be critical of Israel’s human rights record.”
One of things that you do NOT do is criticize Israel (despite the country’s atrocious human rights record), especially if you are in a government funded organization. It appears that these firings stem from this defacto political axiom. Furthermore, if you do have the temerity to question Israeli policy you may be hounded into an early grave:
“Federal opposition politicians and the family of former president Rémy Beauregard, who died in January, are calling for an independent inquiry into the organization. […] Beauregard bore the brunt of the new board members’ outrage over the grants. He died of a heart attack after a stormy board meeting.”
From the CBC:
“Emergency crews have found a second body in the wreckage where a small plane smashed into an Austin, Texas, office building that houses a U.S. Internal Revenue Service office.”
Okay, flying a plane into a building. We’ve seen that before. But what is different this time? It seems that it is taking awhile to classify the act itself. Would there be as much confusion if the pilot was of Arabic descent or had a Arabic surname? That is the question ‘Big man” poses at the blog ‘Stuff White People do“.
Big Man says:
“I’m watching the coverage of this plane crash in Austin. The one where a dude flew a plane into the IRS building after burning his house.
And everybody is falling all over themselves not to call this cat a “terrorist.”
It’s “possible terrorist-related activity” but it’s not terrorism and he’s not a terrorist. What the hell?
How can you fly a plane into a building out of spite, and have folks call it “suicide by plane?” That’s like calling it “suicide by portable chest bomb.”
We often think of racism is a in your face type of action. Overt discrimination, the name calling, the hiring practices but here we have a possible example of the more subtle systematic nature of racism and what that entails. Patriarchy sneaks up on one like this as well.
I tend to agree with BigMan that the story would have been framed quite differently if the pilot was not Caucasian.
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