Ta-Nehisi Coates spittin' fire

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

One of Cam's many foibles is he is incapable of understanding how American Islamophobia is closely tied to race.

Which race is Islam again? Who's making it racial? Oh. That would be you.

Also, I thought race was an artificial construct? So. Is it or is it not an artificial construct?

- Doc

[_The CCC]

It is an artificial construct with very real world implications.
SEE https://images.search.yahoo.com/yhs/sea ... tion=click

Just like we divide the world into Old World, and New World. But the reality is there is but the same one world we all live in.

[_Black Moclips]

BMC,

How do you feel about upticking the 5%'ers' tax rate so we can get some infrastructure projects done, some Americans to work, and reduce our national debt a bit?

- Doc

I don't think we have a tax problem (well we do, but for purposes of this argument lets say we don't). We are getting record tax revenues. Its a spending problem. We need an overhaul of what the federal government should spend money on.

I think until we have a deficit of $0.00, not one cent should leave this country to subsidize other nations for anything. A bright light needs to be pointed at every program the federal government spends money on, including the military. I'm pro-armed forces, but the black hole in spending needs to be closed. A friend of mine used to work for the government, working on contracts and procurement for the armed services. He said what floored him was the overlap and redundancy in their spending. Each branch needs the same things, but no, the Army had to have green water coolers, and the Navy had to have blue ones, the Marines needed camo water coolers with a machine gun attached, and the AirForce cooler needed to levitate (tongue and cheek examples). The amount of money spent designing and creating the same things was mind blowing.

We need to get an army of independent, non-partisan forensic accountants to unravel the knot and I think you would find more than enough money for infrastructure spending. I would also whack as many federal "departments" as I could (Agriculture, Education, and HUD to start) and let states manage their own affairs.

If after all of this, we still come up short and need infrastructure spending, then maybe increase certain taxes.

[_subgenius]

Notice how suddenly it's not the Russians that won Trump the election but rather it was a veiled racism that won the election.....but before that it had to be xenophobia that won it.... and before that it was Hillary's campaign absence in Wisconsin that won it.....and the gerrymandering....don't forget the gerrymandering....and of course, the original sin -the electoral college.

[_beastie]

Wait Who in the world could pull that off?

- Doc

Oh, I think if Bill O'Reilly had been a big proponent of birtherism and hooked up with Steve Bannon and Robert Mercer, he would have won as well, for just one example.

But at no time in history could a black man have said and done the things Trump said and did and be elected president.

AND, in most other moments in history no white man could have gotten away with it, either.

Obviously there was something unique about that particular moment in history.

[_beastie]

Notice how suddenly it's not the Russians that won Trump the election but rather it was a veiled racism that won the election.....but before that it had to be xenophobia that won it.... and before that it was Hillary's campaign absence in Wisconsin that won it.....and the gerrymandering....don't forget the gerrymandering....and of course, the original sin -the electoral college.

Sometimes I wonder if you're as simple minded as you appear.

[_Chap]

American Islamophobia is closely tied to race.

Which race is Islam again?

As you imply, it's a religion, whose adherents are to be found in a large number of different nations and ethnicities.

Who's making it racial?

In the US and in Europe? Ignorant people who think that all Muslims are basically what they call 'Arabs'. (A category into which they lump Iranians, Kabyles, and anybody who wears a turban, including Sikhs.)

That is, in the common usage of the term, 'racist'.

[_huckelberry]

Notice how suddenly it's not the Russians that won Trump the election but rather it was a veiled racism that won the election.....but before that it had to be xenophobia that won it.... and before that it was Hillary's campaign absence in Wisconsin that won it.....and the gerrymandering....don't forget the gerrymandering....and of course, the original sin -the electoral college.

when you become an adult you will grow to understand that an event may be a result of multiple causes.

[_The CCC]

And adults usually rank causes as to their effect. IE; Having the worlds most punchable face(backpfeifengesicht). But still no excuse for actually punching their face.

[_honorentheos]

https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2017/ ... New Testament/539976/

When you construct an entire teleology on one cause—even a cause as powerful and abiding as white racism—you face the temptation to leave out anything that complicates the thesis. So Coates minimizes sexism—Trump’s disgusting language and the visceral hatred of many of his supporters for Hillary Clinton—as background noise. He downplays xenophobia, even though foreigners were far more often the objects of Trump’s divisive rhetoric and policy proposals than black Americans. (Of all his insults, the only one Trump felt obliged to withdraw was his original foray into birtherism.) Coates doesn’t try to explain why, at one point in the campaign, a plurality of Republicans supported Ben Carson over the other nine candidates, all white. He omits the weird statistic that slightly more black and Latino voters and slightly fewer whites went for Trump than for Mitt Romney. He doesn’t even mention the estimated 8.5 million Americans who voted for President Obama and then for Trump—even though they made the difference. No need to track the descending nihilism of the Republican Party. The urban–rural divide is a sham.

That 46 percent of voters, overwhelmingly white, chose Trump—that some chose him because of bigotry and some while overlooking it—that more than a third of the country still supports him: all this is hideous enough. But we live in a time of total vindication, when complication and concession are considered weaknesses, and counter examples are proof of false consciousness. This spirit has taken over Coates’s writing. In this essay and other recent work, he’s turned away from the self-examining quality of his earlier writing to a literary style that’s oracular. He has become the most influential writer in America today; this latest Atlantic essay is already being taught in college courses. He has never written more powerfully, and the sentences sweep you along because they don’t yield for a second to anything.

But the style of no-compromise sacrifices things that are too important for readers to surrender without a second thought. It flattens out history into a single fixed truth, so that an event in 2016 is the same as an event in 1805, the most recent election erases the one before, the Obama years turn into an illusion. It brushes aside policy proposals as distractions, and politics itself as an immoral bargain. It weakens the liberal value of individual thought, and therefore individual responsibility, by subordinating thoughts and individuals to structures and groups. It begins with the essential point that race is an idea, and ends up just about making race an essence.