November, 2013 archive
Put Down that Cell Phone and Back Away. Keep Your Hands Where I Can See Them. 0
Reg Henry counsels selfie-restraint. A nugget:
But that wasn’t about the photography or the egotism; it was about the squeezing. Not the same thing at all.
Do read the rest.
On the rare times that I see myself in a web cam, cell phone, or tablet pointed at my face, I think, “What a stupid looking pose. Don’t. Just don’t.”
And I listen to me.
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
More news from the confluence of guns and stupid:
According to WXII, deputies believe that 27-year-old William Monroe Simmons’ daughter was in a playroom unattended when the other 3-year-old shot her with a .22-caliber rifle that was left in the room.
. . . more evidence that an intelligence test should be required for owning firearms.
We had guns in the house when I grew up. They were always out of reach of children and unloaded, with the ammunition stored elsewhere, as anyone with enough smarts to own them would be sure to do.
His Name in Vain 0
Any fool can call himself a “Christian.”
Many fools do, even as they know not of what they speak.
It’s late. I’m tired. I’m old, and my outrage meter red-lined more years ago than I care to remember.
As my two or three regular readers know, I was raised Christian, Southern Baptist before Texans took over* and turned the Southern Baptist Convention into something I do not recognize.
This is no Christianity that I know.
I shall shut up now. I do not trust myself to still my rage.
________________
*Texas is one messed-up place.
“The ‘Knockout’ Game” 2
I’ve had an uneasy feeling about reports of the “knockout game” since I first heard them.
They sound too much like the “wilding” hoax of a generation ago, which led to a lynch mob-like conviction of five kids for something that they did not do. I see that Will Bunch also has qualms.
Chauncey Devega sees the stories of the “knockout game” as yet another in a long tradition of attempts to dehumanize Not White persons and dress them in menace.
I will not try to rewrite what he has expressed so well. Here’s a nugget:
(By the way, both as a trained historian and as a Southern boy who knows bigotry when he sees it, Devega is quite right–when nothing else works, or even when everything else works, bigots foment fear. Fear is their friend, their tool, their go-to weapon against good will. And now back to the nugget, already in progress . . . .)
Moreover, the way that the knockout game moral panic has been circulated by the news media is a very chilling echo of how race and rumor were historically used to incite white racial pogroms, spectacular lynchings, and other types of terrorism against African-Americans. Of course, there is an important distinction: the knockout game is an example of wanton street thuggery by criminals; the lynching tree and racial terrorism were rituals of mass white violence against innocent black Americans.
Follow the links–both of them. Read the rest(s).
Twits on Twitter 0
Reminder: Once the stupid is on the internet, it stays on the internet.
Black(hearted) Fridays 0
You Ain’t Seen N-N-Nothing Yet 0
In the Las Vegas Sun, Dan Thomasson wonders just how low television can go.
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
Be polite in Sunday service.
Flowood Police Department Lt. Ricky McMillian told the paper that the bullet lodged in the concrete floor and a woman was hit by the shell. WAPT also reported that “[f]ragments from the bullet shell grazed a woman nearby.” WJTV’s report said that the shell “barely broke skin.”
Jesus must be so proud.
