Hate Sells category archive

Badtux points out that nothing beats calling something new and improved, when all that’s new and improved is the label. A snippet:

The Breitbart gang that Trump has around him? They’re smart. They realized that being a neo-Nazi wasn’t cool anymore, what with all those Hitler salutes and such, so they re-branded themselves as “alt-right” and removed the obligate (sic) Nazi paraphernalia from their brand. And it worked!

(Open tag fixed.)

At The Roanoke Times, Maurice S. Fisher explains the differences. Here’s a bit (emphasis added):

. . . hate is not a mental illness. Hate is learned and it’s behavioral manifestations of bigotry and prejudice are socialized in people when they are young by the adults who reared them. To be sure, inculcating hate in young children has the effect of weakening their minds. For example, weak-minded people are susceptible to white supremacist ideology because it has the power to make these individuals feel less worthless and inadequate. Historically, white supremacy has been attractive to disenfranchised white men, because it gives them a cause to rally around. Said differently, hate is a family value for many — the in-group is solidified by hating the out-group. There is no biological basis for hate; it, too, is learned.

I don’t think the demarcation is quite as sharp as Mr. Fisher makes it. Nevertheless this is a newspaper column, not a scholarly work, and he has a point.

Hate may sometimes be an outgrowth of illness, but it is also its own thing with its own dynamic. If hate is an illness, almost the entirety of the white South has been mentally ill and needing to be put in a “home” since 1619.

In related news, Leonard Pitts, Jr., takes down those who would pretend that Dylan Roof was not motivated by pure racism.

In The Guardian, Ed Pilkington ruminates on the rationale for Utah’s return to the firing squad and America’s fascination with the death penalty.

Just read it.

The polite always act like gentlemen.

Police in Myrtle Beach have ruled an early morning shooting outside a strip club was an accident.

The Sun News of Myrtle Beach reported Saturday (http://bit.ly/1OjItMd ) that 24-year-old Christopher John Clarida was charged with unlawfully carrying a weapon after a gun he had discharged about 4:30 a.m. Wednesday outside Derriere’s Gentleman’s Club.

Why the hell would one need a firearm at a strip club? Oh, I forgot. There’s a reason it’s called ammosexuality.

John Cole puts words to my inchoate feelings of earlier today.

The white power structure in Missouri wants themselves a riot in Ferguson so as to justify their racism.

It’s an effect–>cause thing.

Aside:

I used “inchoate” correctly in a blog post.

Kevin Horrigan comments on fear and the mongers of fear. A nugget:

Unreasonable? You say my fears are unreasonable? That all we have to fear is fear itself? I fear fear itself, but I fear lots of other things, too. Nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror, that’s the ticket. I fear all the things Republican politicians say I should be fearing.

To judge from the news, we Americans are the most fearful people on Earth. We’ve come to be proud of how afraid we are, strapping on our guns and parading through the streets.

Southern Beale sums up the hysteria, which, you will note, is being ginned up by the usual right-wing fear mongers.

It is truly amazing to hear the same people who bitched and moaned about how TSA body scanners at U.S. airports violated their civil rights now attack nurse Kaci Hickox for not submitting to a 21-day house arrest on her return from Africa.

We are a society of stupid.

Afterthought:

I was agin’ the body scanners, mostly because I considered them a waste of money and effort, silly security theatre, not because I thought they violated civil liberties. Civil liberties are no more; corporations have stolen them. For example (via Bruce Schneier):

Adobe’s Digital Editions e-book and PDF reader—an application used by thousands of libraries to give patrons access to electronic lending libraries—actively logs and reports every document readers add to their local “library” along with what users do with those files. Even worse, the logs are transmitted over the Internet in the clear, allowing anyone who can monitor network traffic (such as the National Security Agency, Internet service providers and cable companies, or others sharing a public Wi-Fi network) to follow along over readers’ shoulders.