Tag: nice people

“AND SOME, I ASSUME, ARE GOOD PEOPLE.”

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You can be racist to the marrow and yet declare that each of your bones is bigotry free.

Racism gets results. Racism garners votes. Racism even improves approval ratings.

Trump’s approval with Republicans rose by 5 points in a poll taken after his racist tweets

Reverse racism is as prevalent as Marxist Fascism. Literally.

Nice People — a short post I published on July 16, 2015, exactly one month into the Trump Era, the original essay of the same name was written by Bertrand Russell in 1931.

I have never seen so many nice people as I am seeing today. Racism finds comfort in White niceness, traditions, heritage, genealogy, histories. Any complicity with this nation’s wanton acts of evil gets glossed over with thick coatings of wash. Is genocide a sad but necessary concomitant of destiny? The price of progress, culture, and civilizations forged by the European? “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs” has convinced many an apologist of genocide , including Walter Duranty, Pulitzer Prize winner and fervid Stalin apologist.

History is taught to bow to the founding fathers: to the White men who conquered the Lands to serve the greater cause of manifest (if you are White) destiny. Destiny led to the genocide of Indigenous Peoples by the million, eliminating tribes by the hundreds, and destroying wild animals by the billion.

Remember why we really remember the Alamo — to nationalize Mexican land to the Rio Grande and up the Pacific sand, but to keep the cool-sounding Spanish town names.

The proper study of mankind is (White?)man, according to essayist Alexander Pope (1799), a self-referential congratulatory assumption by an author who just happens to be a White man. White men define Western Civilization to represent millenia of advances, that you have the White man to thank for all discoveries, inventions, science, technology, art, literature — including the plunder and pillage that happened along the way. The history books of the 1950’s credited a single Black, George Washington Carver, with the invention of peanut butter. End of story. Never was Eli Whitney and his cotton gin ever forgotten. History classes are always propaganda mills. Reverse racism is spirit-deadening stuff.

Erasing racism requires nothing short of recompense, retribution, and reparation. How much stolen principal and long-term interest has accrued in the coffers of the descendants of White Europeans who eviscerated the lives of Blacks stolen from the very birthplace of mankind.

My ancestors arrived from Catholic Europe. They left a worse place for a better place, but not in the holds of slave ships. Does that matter? Yes. Enormously. “Send the back” rewards the liar and the echo chamber resounds with the latest racist soundbite. The number of Black voices in the U.S. Catholic presence is miniscule in size, and you’ll never hear any programming that addresses the “inexplicable” absence of Black congregants. EWTN raged at Obama, the worst POTUS conceivable. With a plurality of 5 Catholics on SCOTUS, their affection for Trump is more than palpable.

Black citizens were lynched by the thousand in this country — hate can be very self-righteous. Lynchings were a public spectacle that drew large crowds. Newspapers would announce their commencement for the convenience and edification of their readers. Did you know that the majority of the curious attendees were White? Does it matter that the majority of attendees were White, that there just may have been a few reverse racists in those public gatherings at the town square? Of course, it is impossible to rule that out statistically.

Nice, respectable, hardworking, decent Americans who enjoyed law and order, voted for judges who were tough on crime. The nastiest criminals get away with it while remaining “pillars of society.”

The police could not (or would not) protect the victims from the mob. This is still the case. Racism defends the guilty while destroying their victims and making their victims serve the time.

White-Supremacist identity politics is jealous, sensitive-to-criticism, it is a privileged brand of entitlement. White Supremacy is a never expiring card that has its privileges. In short, it is a wild card, a Trump card — THE race card.
White-Supremacist identity politics wages endless war to fuel the most profitable economy on the planet: Munitions. A bullet expended, or a bomb exploded, or a drone destroyed triggers a purchase order for replacement. “The Defense Department” is an ugly misnomer, another piece of propaganda in the wall.


K-12 is Whitewashed propaganda served up as patriotism, disinfected of any facts that do not fit the White narrative, delivered in soundbites approved by a Texas textbook-approval mill and taught in all 50 states in the same bland white-bread way. No one wants to be lied to, to be confronted with opposing views that question the narrative.

Blacks have access to fewer-and-fewer decent schools, yet are blamed for being undereducated. Always.

Blacks get sent to prison early and often, incarcerated for minor infractions or trumped-up infractions, or for existing while Black. Kalief Browder was not the exception to that rule. Private prisons operate under the principle: one prisoner, one unit of profit.

Black youngsters such as The Central Park Five fear the police for profoundly good reasons. Trump is the poster boy for racists wannabes from coast to coast. A vaunted and respected voice that speaks not a word of decency.

Thanks for reading.

“In Praise of Idleness” and Veganism

40 years ago I read Bertrand Russell’s “In Praise of Idleness,” an essay he published in 1932. The piece was already 40 years old when I got around to reading it — 40 years later I reread this essay, perhaps under visitation of some Jungian synchronicity. Reading it this morning allowed my imagination to stagger — where have I read a better statement on redressing an injustice: the theft of productivity gains? My tentative answer — “nowhere more succinctly.”

First of all : what is work? Work is of two kinds : 
first, altering the position of matter at or near the 
earth’s surface relative to other such matter ; 
second, telling other people to do so. The first kind 
is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant 
and highly paid. The second kind is capable of 
indefinite extension: there are not only those who 
give orders, but those who give advice as to what 
orders should be given. Usually two opposite kinds 
of advice are given simultaneously by two organized 
bodies of men; this is called politics. The skill 
required for this kind of work is not knowledge of 
the subjects as to which advice is given, but know- 
ledge of the art of persuasive speaking and writing, 
i.e. of advertising.

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I’ve alluded to Russell’s essay “Nice People” several times now. Actually it’s becoming a commonplace theme here.

I checked out the marvelously titled “Why I am not a Christian” from a West German library in 1971 Giessen — the librarian was not, not, not in the least amused. Not.

Das ist Blödsinn. Totaler Blödsinn.

how.to.love.and.eat.animals

I took up my practice of living iconoclastically shortly (about ten minutes) after graduating from high school — I’d completed 12 years of mandatory Catholic education and needed to discover why free thinkers were so despised by non-freethinkers.

By my estimation vegans are free thinkers who believe that all sentient beings are fellow free thinkers, Genesis 1:26 notwithstanding. Being a vegan just may qualify you as iconoclast. Hold that thought a moment. I’ll be right back…

Hey, it does qualify you as iconoclast.

26 Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals,[a] and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

I am convinced that veganism is the gentlest means for solving the ever unaddressed need for addressing global warming. It might even nip a certain extinction event in the bud: The Anthropocene. Is it possible that 7 billion homo sapiens consuming 70 billion animals (from fur to marrow) annually — a practice sanctioned by most religious institutions — might warrant more than a shrug?

Look here, Bill. Humans are created in the image of their maker. Read Genesis 1:26. ’nuff said.

Today’s bumper sticker suggestion:

Meatism kills. Veganism nourishes.

Was Venus once a lush planet? Are we preparing to become a one such once-lush planet?

Thanks for reading.

 

 

Nice People Explained: Bertrand Russel

I first read Bertrand Russell’s essay collection Why I am not a Christian In the early 70’s. One essay that affected me in particular, and that still intrigues me is Russell’s “Nice People.”

Skeptics Guide to the Universe Forum excerpt:

— Quote from: “Mike Foster” —I’ve been reading Why I Am Not A Christian, And Other Essays by Bertrand Russell. In it, he launches a fairly sarcastic – even scathing – attack on ‘nice people’ in a c1931 essay called . . .’Nice People’! He talks about people who think they are nice as often indirectly selfish, unappreciative, aloof, deceptive and inclined to exercise power indirectly through gossip etc.

It’s been a few years since this essay was published, but I am quite humbled at its timeliness. A great touchstone indeed.

Bertrand Russell

“Nice People” rather reminds me of Jonathan Swift’s bombastic apologist in Gulliver’s Travels. Swift’s finely pompous character is merrily describing the land of his birth. His pride at its prowess is figuratively exceptional: sufficient to pop his vest buttons, had he been wearing a vest. Let’s imagine they are gold buttons to polish the metaphor. So he extols the virtue of his beloved British Empire at considerable length. Russell waits, as did Swift, until the very end of his writing before telling us the salient distinguishing feature of these very nicely described Nice People. Unfortunately, they have nasty minds.

Thanks for reading.

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