Posted on 05/23/2015 12:14:57 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
Universities and think tanks really need to stop smelling the fumes coming from social science/gender/women/justice/sexual/racial studies. Time to push the basics, reading (the classics), writing (not tweets), arithmetic (the real kind), science (the real kind) and history (the truthful stuff).
Note: Many of those Waco bikers scum were Hispanic (which I only mention because this author is so bent on making this a black-white issue, when in fact it is nothing of the sort).
People who can't move beyond thinking of themselves only as members of isolated groups, and not as individuals who can achieve, will never escape blame, anger and self imposed isolation.
Wiki List of riots - I do not see Waco Biker Brawl listed.
Our great "sin" (those of us who do not define ourselves by our skin color - or gender or....) is that we don't join progressives (whatever stripe they tightly wrap themselves in - color, sexual orientation, gender, disability, nationality, etc) and wallow in "guilt."
If you haven't read the article linked below, it's a good time to check it out.
The perils of designer tribalism - On the bane of “Third Worldism” and Roger Sandall's book The Culture Cult.
"..........[French writer Pascal] Bruckner’s book is a vigorous indictment of “Third Worldism”—the odious species of romance that glorifies everything foreign, exotic, and primitive while simultaneously railing against civilization, science, and modernity. (That other social philosopher, W. S. Gilbert, was right to save a place on his famous list for “the idiot who praises with enthusiastic tone/ All centuries but this and every country but his own.”)
The very power of Bruckner’s indictment helps to explain its neglect. The message he brought was distinctly unwelcome music to the ears of politically correct intellectuals, whose smugness and sense of moral superiority, then as now, was inextricably bound up with the mendacities of Third Worldism and kindred specimens of emotional blackmail. (Just listen to Susan Sontag on Kosovo or Michael Ignatieff on Rwanda.) “Solidarity with oppressed peoples,” Bruckner wrote,
is above all a gigantic weapon aimed at the West. The logic of aggression is at work in Third World solidarity, and this has made it a continuation of the Cold War by other means. Being non-European is enough to put one on the side of right. Being European or being supported by a European power is enough to make one suspect. The bloody messes in banana republics, and butchery of political opposition and the dictatorial lunacy by their petty chieftains are all brushed aside. Such trifles will not restrain the progress of these peoples toward socialism. What seems criminal in Cuba, Angola, and Guinea has the real purpose of washing away the far greater crime of colonialism........
Part of what makes The Tears of the White Man such an important book is Bruckner’s sensitivity to the aerodynamics of liberal guilt. He understands what launches it, what keeps it aloft, and how we might lure it safely back to earth. He understands that the entire phenomenon of Third Worldism is fueled by the moral ecstasy of overbred guilt. Bruckner is an articulate anatomist of such guilt and its attendant deceptions and mystifications. “An overblown conscience,” he points out, “is an empty conscience.”
Compassion ceases if there is nothing but compassion, and revulsion turns to insensitivity. Our “soft pity,” as Stefan Zweig calls it, is stimulated, because guilt is a convenient substitute for action where action is impossible. Without the power to do anything, sensitivity becomes our main aim, the aim is not so much to do anything, as to be judged. Salvation lies in the verdict that declares us to be wrong.
.... Sandall's real target is the assumption—common coin among anthropologists—that “culture” is a value-neutral term and that, as Claude Lévi-Strauss put it in 1951, one had to “fight against ranking cultural differences hierarchically.” In his book The Savage Mind—which argues that there is no such thing as the savage, as distinct from the civilized, mind—Lévi-Strauss spoke blithely of the “so-called primitive.” (It is significant that Lévi-Strauss should have idolized Rousseau: “our master and our brother,” “of all the philosophes, [the one who] came nearest to being an anthropologist.”) One of Sandall’s main tasks in The Culture Cult is to convince us that what Lévi-Strauss dismissed as “so-called” is really “well-called.” Sandall does not mention William Henry’s In Defense of Elitism (1994)—another unfairly neglected book—but his argument in The Culture Cult reinforces Henry’s accurate, if politically incorrect, observation that
the simple fact [is] that some people are better than others—smarter, harder working, more learned, more productive, harder to replace. Some ideas are better than others, some values more enduring, some works of art more universal. Some cultures, though we dare not say it, are more accomplished than others and therefore more worthy of study. Every corner of the human race may have something to contribute. That does not mean that all contributions are equal. . . . It is scarcely the same thing to put a man on the moon as to put a bone in your nose.
Henry’s quip about the bone in the nose elicited the expected quota of outrage from culture-cultists. But the outrage missed the serious and, ultimately, the deeply humane point of the observation. What Sandall calls romantic primitivism puts a premium on quaintness, which it then embroiders with the rhetoric of authenticity. There are two casualties of this process. One is an intellectual casualty: it becomes increasingly difficult to tell the truth about the achievements and liabilities of other cultures. The other casualty is a moral, social, and political one. Who suffers from the expression of romantic primitivism? Not the Lauren Huttons and Claude Lévi-Strausses of the world. On the contrary, the people who suffer are the objects of the romantic primitive’s compassion, “respect,” and pretended emulation. Sandall asks:
Should American Indians and New Zealand Maoris and Australian Aborigines be urged to preserve their traditional cultures at all costs? Should they be told that assimilation is wrong? And is it wise to leave them entirely to their own devices?
Sandall is right that the answers, respectively, are No, No, and No: “The best chance of a good life for indigenes is the same as for you and me: full fluency and literacy in English, as much math as we can handle, and a job.” ......
How does the ten year total compare to a year in Baltimore and Chicago?
I do not even know why we still consider these brain-dead humans to be actual humans. I think they must be some off-shoot of humans, maybe a re-emergence of neanderthals
couldn’t get too far into the article before I started getting nauseated. Is it lost on the writer that nine people died in Texas while none died in baltimore, Including one who set fire to a pharmacy and cut the hose so firemen couldn’t put it out. and again with a nonsensical story that deals with just you acting out. They took off from their day jobs is doctors lawyers engineers and scientists to riot and loot throw bricks at cops and start fires
.@MichelleObama Worst ever black mob violence? Commentary from First Lady https://t.co/q0iTdGoCwj via @YouTube #tcot— 1st Native Americans (@Solutrean) May 23, 2015
The reason these incidents are described differently is because they ARE different, both qualitatively and quantitively.
This writer is grasping at straws, and his pathetic and feeble attempt to graft some kid of profound racial context onto two totally different situations is altogether transparent, laughable and ignorant.
9 non-black bikers were shot and killed by the police and no riots, no looting and no property burned down and this guy wants to whine about whiteness!
The Fed Govt burned down and killed many Branch Davidians and no one rioted, looted or burned down property...
What’s this guy’s issue with white people again? Is it they need to riot, loot and burn down property too???
As of the best reporting at the moment the score is:
Dead by Police: 9
Dead by Bikers: 0
There does appear to have been a shoot-out, but it wasn’t between motorcycle “gangs’.
“slate” seems to have been getting their news from the usual unreliable sources.
[June 20, 2015] “......Autopsy Reports Released
Preliminary autopsy reports released Tuesday identify the nine bikers who died Sunday afternoon in a shootout with rival gang members and police at Waco’s Twin Peaks restaurant, and at least two of them have local ties.
The nine bikers, all of whom were members of either the Bandidos or the Cossacks, all died of gunshot wounds.
Jesus Delgado Rodriguez, 65, died of gunshot wounds of the head and trunk.
Jacob Lee Rhyne, 39, died of gunshot wounds to the neck.
Richard Vincent Kirshner, Jr., 47, died of gunshot wounds but the report did not specify where he was shot.
Richard Matthew Jordan, III, 31, died of gunshot wounds to the head.
Wayne Lee Campbell, 43, died of gunshot wounds to the head and trunk.
Daniel Raymond Boyett, 44, died of gunshot wounds to the head.
Matthew Mark Smith, 27, died of gunshot wounds to the trunk
Manuel Issac Rodriguez, 40, died of gunshot wounds but the report did not specify where he was shot.
And Charles Wayne Russell, 46, died of gunshot wounds to the chest.
...........Eight of the dead bikers were members of the Cossacks and one was a Bandido, authorities confirmed.
About 50 weapons were recovered at the shooting scene including guns, knives and a chain with a padlock that could be used to beat someone, police said Monday.
Other weapons have been discovered in some off the vehicles towed from the shooting scene, police said.
.....The shooting investigation will take weeks if not months, Waco police Sgt. W. Patrick Swanton said during a news conference Tuesday morning.
He later said investigators hope to clear the crime scene by mid-morning Wednesday.
Crews continued to remove an estimated 135 motorcycles and at least 80 cars and pickup trucks from the restaurant’s parking lot Tuesday, a process that started Monday evening.
Police are escorting the flatbed trucks carrying the cycles and vehicles from the scene to an impound site, Swanton said.
Seven of the 18 bikers injured in the shootout remained in hospitals Tuesday, Swanton said.
All of them are in stable condition and most are improving he said.
He declined to release the names of the nine bikers who were killed, however, because investigators are having trouble locating family members to notify, he said.
Swanton discounted media reports that four of the nine bikers were killed by police, saying that will be impossible to determine until autopsies and ballistic tests have been completed.
“Is it possible? Yes. Is it a fact? No,” he said.......”
http://www.kwtx.com/home/headlines/Waco-Shooting-Near-Twin-Peaks-In-Waco-304043711.html
120 Guns?
Really?
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/05/its_not_race_that_divides_us_but_culture.html
“The racialists in power have again called us to an “honest discussion” about race. As they foresee it, this honest discussion will involve those of us who do not practice racism, but are not black, to come forward, confess our inherent racism, and be duly chastised or punished. Dialogue is not going to be part of the process, since non-blacks have already been found guilty, and the president’s jury is not remotely interested in evidence.
The trap in the president’s faux invitation is that it focuses our attention on the wrong component. The emphasis on race assumes too much, but does so because it advances the agenda of dividing us on grand scales, which is more conducive to the illusion of victimhood and the cure of entitlement. To divide by race in the way practiced by the president and the left enables them to hide one set of social realities from scrutiny, while predetermining the fault of another social set, based entirely on the colors of their skin, as long as it is understood that the guilty are not black. How is it possible that two or more groups, coincidentally divided by skin color, live in the same country but do not live in the same reality?
To hear our black, democratically elected president tell it, our dystopian nation is a hellhole of virulent racism. Thus, every thought, word or action that is critical of the president, and those who peddle racial victimhood and entitlement, is inherently racist. This is the rationale of a leftist, of a simpleton, because there is far too much history and evidence to the contrary to entertain it as serious. No nation on Earth more consciously ensures equality of treatment than ours.
So, if it’s not race that divides us, what is it? In a word, culture. For decades, a segment of the population that is black has drawn much attention, and critical scrutiny, for the culture that has become synonymous for many with what it is to be black. Not just what whites or non-blacks think constitutes blackness, but what many blacks think it is to be black. However, this is not true of all blacks, which is a critical distinction. There are many blacks who do not subscribe to black culture as it has been manifested in innumerable ways over the prior few decades. Even so, the ones who do, and whose practice of black culture is so visible and overt, make it easy for the lazy to think it is a representation of blackness in general, when it is not.
The president, for example, has no interest in representing the black citizens who live in stable family units, who work hard, provide for their children, encourage success, obey the laws, go to church, and try to do what’s right. He never speaks to their reality. His people, and Eric Holder’s people, are the ones who both celebrate and are imprisoned by a dysfunctional form of black culture. Within that culture there is self-segregation, hostility to other races, paranoia, anger, resentment, bitterness, victimhood, entitlement, crime, poverty, disinformation, deception, exploitation, broken families, destruction of religious faith, and failure..................................................”
Yeah, this is the biggest pile of media horsecrap I’ve ever seen.
#StopBlackViolence
#StopBlackCrime
While the Waco mess meets the legal definition of a riot, it does not fit the standard use of the term.
If a similar conflict had happened between black gangs and police, the charges by liberals of it being a police ambush would have been universal.
Odd how the writer doesn’t seem to understand what “riot” means. Obviously the biker incident wasn’t a riot. Is this even debatable? The writer’s craving for moral equivalence doesn’t mean that we just toss the meaning of words out the window.
I actually do find the biker incident fairly disturbing — the fact that you could have that kind of violence at a Hooters by the mall. But guess what? It’s not part of a pattern. Which is why there’s no “national freakout” over it.
And of course the writer ignores the most obvious bit of reality, which is that perceptions of black lawlessness are supported by the crime statistics and therefore neither racist nor irrational. Again, it’s the pattern thing.
A mind is a terrible thing to waste.
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