No [MENTION=21077]Aike[/MENTION]. The time for you to go was before your arrogance led you to insult me about things that you do not know me well enough even to have more than a half-assed assumption about.
It's interesting that people like yourself with the political beliefs that you've already let us know you embrace fell you have a monopoly on "free-thinking" when in actuality your minds are as narrow or narrower than the very people you routinely insult as you did me.
I would like to know how you believe you can act as an authority on this issue from 7500 miles away.
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To the authority issue, debates are not necessarily a first-person advocacy of our own plights. I don't have to be an engineer to have a view on architecture or its aesthetic merits. I don't have to be a chef to like or dislike certain cooking shows. I don't have to be a Puerto Rican to put forth an opinion on Puerto Rico's sovereignty or lack thereof.
Aike doesn't have to be American to opine on Ferguson's riots. Virge doesn't need to be Black to discuss crime statistics of Black Americans.
The debate is the the debate. The discussion needs to move to the topic, not to the qualifications of the champions of the opposing views. Ideas should be countered with ideas, not personal slights.
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Discussing statistics and talking about how they're brought up and their supposed world view is another.
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Abstractions are not personalities.
Both parties could return to the events and their causes, not describing one another's lenses for viewing the events.
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[quote=Virge]The only true injustice committed in Ferguson was by the professional exploiters and creator of racial issues who did everything in their powers to incite mob mentality that always leads to violence. A new one gained national attention as the attorney for the family of Michael Brown. His name is Benjamin Crump, who started his career as an exploiter, promoter and profiteer of racial tension and violence in the Trayvon Martin case <snip>
I agree with everything you say, but I'm wondering how all of this fits in with the idea of "structural violence" in the way anthropologist, Paul Farmer, means in it in "Pathologies of Power." What's interesting to me, when he talks about the kinds of social justice that fails in terms of human rights approaches, is that, among those systems which have shown an abysmal failure rate are charities and entitlement programs. He quotes Janet Poppendieck, another anthropologist who has studied this failure in "Sweet Charity?: Emergency Food and the End of Entitlement" Essentially such entitlement programs fail because they are based entirely around the idea of the superior vs. the inferior. That charity is something noble from those decent to those indecent and inferior, which is a completely condescending approach. history is my major, but anthropology is my minor, and Farmer's approach is entirely unique to achieving social justice, but he takes a very unpopular and hard look at the grinding failures of popular approaches to social justice by well-meaning but mis-directed stake-holders. He's extremely successful and a medical anthropologist and his applications are hailed globally.
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[quote=Hardheaded1]We need to re-learn the wisdom of the civil rights movement as it coalesced in the 60's. This fight between non-violence and rioting was already addressed then, and the Black Panther movement was more or less shouted down by the efficacy of Dr. King's successes, his martyrdom notwithstanding.
This isn't even a movement now....
Just wondering to what you would attribute the rise of these kinds of violent reactions? I think they are tied to the rise in black militancy fomented in the 1960s and 70s which has now coupled itself to a commodification of this new breed violent mob action. By commodification, I mean, who really stands to economically benefit when these kinds of riots take place? Historically, they are reminiscent of the kind mob action displayed during our colonial period. Look at, for example, how British subjects in Boston destroyed property in reaction to the Stamp Act. These were angry subjects will real complaints. However, today we have religious leaders using mob action as a threat against their perceptions of social injustice. And some of these leaders have become stars on TV programs while making enormous salaries all the while profiting from their own 501©(3)s which they plunder to advance their agendas. Interestingly, those agendas are never clearly stated, but the threat of militancy is always there, and often breaks out when the so-called social justice doesn't materialize. Again, who is benefitting from these outbreaks?
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So tired of these morons that think racism still exists in this day and age. It's just a myth, everyone loves and nobody hates. Just like all these people saying nobody likes Obama because he is black and they won't pass anything because he is black is absurd. All these cops killing black kids are not racist, they are just scared police officers that fear everyone and hide behind a gun. Just like all the people that don't want Mexicans in the United States aren't racist either, they just don't want them to take our jobs that they are more than happy to do like work at red lobster, cleaning other people's pools and yards, working the fields, being janitors and house keepers at top of the line resorts. Racism is overplayed just like the excuse that people are still homophobic these days, another myth.
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