Politics of Hate category archive

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has a long and detailed analysis of the legal reasoning leading to George Zimmerman’s getting away with murder.

Elmer Smith reduces it to one question:

Does the law allow you to kill someone because you are losing a fight that you started?

What Atrios said.

At Asia Times, Matthew Harwood wonders why law enforcement focuses on the American Muslim community when evidence shows that the danger of domestic terrorism lies elsewhere. A nugget.

The idea that American law enforcement’s mass surveillance of Muslim communities is a necessary, if unfortunate, counter-terrorism tool rests with the empirically false notion that American Muslims are more prone to political violence than other Americans.

This is simply not true.

According to the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), right-wing terrorists perpetrated 145 “ideologically motivated homicide incidents” between 1990 and 2010. In that same period, notes START, “al Qaeda affiliates, al Qaeda-inspired extremists, and secular Arab Nationalists committed 27 homicide incidents in the United States involving 16 perpetrators or groups of perpetrators.”

Last November, West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center published a report on America’s violent far-right extremists. Its numbers were even more startling than START’s. “The consolidated dataset,” writes report author Arie Perliger, “includes information on 4,420 violent incidents that occurred between 1990 and 2012 within US borders, and which caused 670 fatalities and injured 3,053 people.” Perliger also found that the number of far-right attacks had jumped 400% in the first 11 years of the 21st century.

Don’t think it could have anything with how easy it is to single out persons who are different, now, do you?

Know them by the company they keep.

Lexington’s ban on flying the Confederate flag — and other non-governmental colors — from city-owned light poles does not violate a heritage group’s right of free speech, a federal appeals court ruled Friday in upholding a lower court’s 2012 ruling.

The Sons of Confederate Veterans, Virginia Division, sued the city after its passage of the ordinance in 2011. U.S. District Judge Samuel Wilson dismissed the lawsuit in June 2012, calling the city’s ban “eminently reasonable” because it banned all non-government flag displays, not just the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

You know my opinion of the Stars and Bars, the cause it represents, and those who would honor it.

Just in case you don’t, it is the flag of slavery, oppression, and Jim Crow. Any other attempted explanation is sophistry and delusion.

This was a good decision. The city of Lexington should not have to participate in promulgating the propaganda of sophistry and delusion.

(Bonus: Follow the link and read the comments–and those are the ones that were passed by the mods.)

Not if the Republican Party can help it!

The King of Outreach.

Here. Nothing to add.

They flock together.

More here.

Noz pokes himself into Peter King’s fantasy world and finds, well, fantasy.

When I walked into the Student Center at my college, that’s how I announced the murders at Kent State to my friends.

It was true then, and it is true now.

Will Bunch considers Kent State’s lasting import.

It resonates until today.

Aside:

I seldom read the comments to his posts.

He seems to have a marvelous capacity for attracting haters.

If you wish to wallow in hate, have at them.

Bill Maxwell on the Republicans and race cards. A nugget:

The irony is that Obama was America’s best hope of finally improving race relations and perhaps having some honest dialogue. That hope has been squandered. From the beginning, Obama has done his best to avoid racial issues. In fact, he’s angered and disappointed many blacks precisely because he hasn’t given them special attention.

In her book, The Obamas, Jodi Kantor writes that a close friend of Obama told her this: “The first black president doesn’t want to give any insight into being the first black president.”

That friend was right. Obama has tried to govern as an American. Conservatives are the ones who play the race card. In his dignified way, Obama is serving as the president of all the people.

Read the rest.

A long time ago, I read this, from the Scholastic Book Club.

Some want us to forget or even to deny.

Do not. Instead . . .

Now I ask you to take a much smaller bit of time to read this, then this.

In the Roanoke Times, retired professor Jim Marchman fears that fear has conquered all.

Fear has become the primary motivational tool throughout our society, employed by politicians seeking to convince us their opponent’s election will result in the end of civilization as we know it and by virtually every piece of electronic or snail mail we get from groups urging us to contribute to their cause to help ward off the evils they believe to be standing at our doorsteps.

Today’s political and social discourse is crippled by fear. Many live in fear that some deranged killer will mow down our children or grandchildren unless we turn our schools and churches into virtual prison camps. Others have been convinced by self-interest groups that, despite constitutional guarantees and Supreme Court rulings, the federal government is intent on taking away all of our guns, even our single-shot .22 rifles.

Read the rest. It’s worth a look.

The reason is simple: fear sells.

Leonard Pitts, Jr:

“Trust us,” says the South. And the whole weight of history demands a simple question in response.

Why?

One of the tactics of bigotry, in addition to the obvious over-the-top ones, is the little, repetitive chipping away at the dignity, even at the personhood and individuality, of others. Bill Maxwell poses the question:

What prevents a white male from simply asking: “Good evening, sir, what can I do for you?” What compels him to use “boss” or “boss man” or “buddy” or “bud” or “chief”? I often stand aside to observe how the white clerk who just called me “boss man” treats white male customers. In almost every instance, the whites are called “sir.”

Read the rest. Learn to recognize the vocabulary.

Via Bob Cesca’s Awesome Blog.

Chancey Devega on race and Republicanism:

Obama’s election, and the demographic changes associated with it, i.e. the oft-discussed “browning of America,” have been a political enema for the Right. As such, the presence of a black man and his family in The White House has brought to the surface what were thinly disguised–and apparently quite deep–veins of bigotry, xenophobia, and intolerance on the part of the Tea Party GOP.

Michael Tesler details this nicely. His article contrasts “OFR” or “old fashioned racism” (the belief in the inherent biological inferiority of non-whites) with modern racism (a belief that blacks are “culturally” deficient and lack the “American values” of hard work, civic duty, and loyalty) and how the former has returned to prominence in the Age of Obama.

The old school is the new school (again)…it would seem that political fashion is cyclical.

Read the rest.

Delaware Liberal reports on “The Unpermitted.”

Also, the comments.

My two or three long-time readers will remember Milford as where I took to the pictures of the C-5As.

Words fail me.

Addendum:

The signs came down.