I’m still #NeverTrump, but I have some neighbors that I like who are voting for The Donald. They placed a Trump sign on community property; the corner of our two streets.
A neighbor down the way drove over the sign rendering it bent and mangled. Now, while I’m not voting for Trump I found this behavior horrible. So I stopped and tried to re-purpose the sign and put it back, but this time next to an electric facility box – to prevent driving over it again.
When I drove by the corner 25 minutes later the sign was pulled out and thrown into the grove. My neighbor pulled it out and again placed it next to the facility box.
This morning the sign above was placed in front of the Trump sign.
I have virtually no idea what folks are protesting at Missouri – something concerning a culture of fear I think. Or oppression. Or bigotry.
All things we should agree to want to see less of rather than more of, to be sure.
But this post isn’t about the cause or the reason or the specific event; it’s about the protest itself, the people that protest and the tactics they employ.
First, watch this video:
Not sure how I’d react if I was the dad of one of those wilting daisies in the video. At first I was pretty irritated at those college kids in the footage, but having had time to reflect, I can see that these kids are being driven by the adults in the confrontation.
But really, these people, this protest movement; how are we supposed to take them seriously? How do we interface and converse with people who have completely lost their mind? How do you have a conversation with people who have NO room for debate? Any dissension from their perfect point of view is met with HATE and INTOLERANCE.
How do you have a conversation with someone that can’t see a journalism student has the same right to the square as the protesters?
How do you have meaningful discourse with someone who advocates “No bad touch” and yet is quite willing to assault a photographer?
How do you debate the tender mercies of tolerance with someone who has none?
What kind of meaningful conversation regarding institutional intimidation can be had with people who very clearly mean to intimidate?
The answer? None and you can’t.
The only, and I mean ONLY, upside to this whole thing is the incestual nature of the fight. We don’t have liberals fighting conservatives or dems and repubs. We don’t even have the 99% vs the 1%. Here we have intellectual elite vs themselves. We have privileged college administrators squaring off with the frankenstein they themselves created.
It reminds me of the old saw: “Mr. President, in a war between Iran and Iraq, who do you root for?”
Casualties.
These university administrators have fostered and coddled this behavior. They have created it. And nurtured it. They own it. I shed no tears for those administrators that lost their jobs.
Dr. Melissa A. Click earned her Ph.D. from the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her research interests center on popular culture texts and audiences, particularly texts and audiences disdained in mainstream culture. Her work in this area is guided by audience studies, theories of gender and sexuality, and media literacy. Current research projects involve 50 Shades of Grey readers, the impact of social media in fans’ relationship with Lady Gaga, masculinity and male fans, messages about class and food in reality television programming, and messages about work in children’s television programs.
Click’s dissertation for her Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts Amherst was about the “commodification of femininity, affluence and whiteness in the Martha Stewart phenomenon,” according to her CV. You can read the full dissertation here.
This the woman screeching for more ‘muscle’ to handle the ‘free’ press.
MANKATO, MINN. — Marty Lewis, owner of Blue Bricks, 424 S Front St. in the City Center of Mankato was shocked to find that he had to close down the patio at Blue Bricks on Thursday, May 28th due to not having enough live plants.
“My managers told me that City of Mankato Associate Civil Engineer Landon Bode came into Blue Bricks on Thursday during lunch hour and told the servers that we did not have enough flowers on our patio and we were out of compliance with the City,” said Lewis “After the lunch crowd cleared, my managers went up to Drummers and picked up some shrubs, planters and hanging baskets and put them on the patio.”
Wanting to make sure Blue Bricks was in compliance, Lewis then called City of Mankato Associate Civil Engineer Landon Bode, who did not answer his phone and left a message.
“Landon Bode did not return my calls and I assumed that everything would be alright,” said a frustrated Lewis “Then at around 5:30 p.m. that day, two Mankato Police Officers came into the restaurant and told me that the patio was closed and we would have to clear the patio because we were out of compliance.”
Many things wrong with this picture, but two stand out: One – Who thinks it is a governing bodies decision to dictate plant cover in a bar patio and Two – The enforcement of the rule is simply ludicrous.
Last night I posted on the ridiculous reaction of the attorney complaining that making it illegal to allow college admissions to base their decision on race is racist.
A thought on that – consider the opposite of the position.
If it’s okay to allow students with lower test scores in because we want more black kids in a school then it should be okay to allow students with lower test scores in because we want fewer black kids in school.
Preposterous.
Since posting I’ve been following the story of the LA Clipper’s owner. The man was quoted:
“In your lousy f**ing Instagrams, you don’t have to have yourself with — walking with black people,” the man says.
“If it’s white people, it’s OK?” she [the other individual on the phone] responds. “If it was Larry Bird, would it make a difference?”
Bird, the longtime Boston Celtics star, was Johnson’s NBA rival.
“I’ve known (Magic Johnson) well, and he should be admired. … I’m just saying that it’s too bad you can’t admire him privately,” the man on the recording says. “Admire him, bring him here, feed him, f**k him, but don’t put (Magic) on an Instagram for the world to have to see so they have to call me. And don’t bring him to my games.”
Horrible. Ugly and horrible.
No one disputes this – but what to do about it?
The first and obvious answers are fairly easy.
Quit going to his games
Quit watching the team
Quit advertising with or sponsoring the team
Less easy:
Quit working for the man
But can anything be done to punish the man legally or by the NBA? And if so, what should it be?
The first first – Can we punish him legally? I’m not sure how labor laws work during private conversations unrelated to on the job activity, but if they do, specifically in California, any black employee has a case. If such laws do not include private speech between a man and his girlfriend, then there is little recourse available.
In either case, I have long maintained that an individual retains the right to personal preference – even if that makes him an ass. In fact, BECAUSE it makes him an ass is why we need to protect individual liberty. So, should it be illegal to hold bigoted beliefs? No – it should not.
But the NBA is not the government ans the league can do damn near whatever it wants. It can suspend Silver, fine him or both. In fact, there are probably a ton of things it can do beyond either of those two options.
And I admit, I’m not sure the right and best course of action. Thoughts include:
Release the players from their contract to the team
Ban Silver from all team operations
Buy the team from him and sell to the highest bidder
Again, I don’t know what the best answer is – perhaps after all is said and done, the damage will occur without any intervention: players won’t sign with him, sponsors will flee and advertisers will vanish.
I have a sense that the younger generation is more accepting of socalism than the rest of us:
Which, on the balance I guess, shouldn’t be surprising. After all, the brain functions of an individual are not fully formed until sometime after 24-25. Combine that with the constant praise and bubble of “failure-less” living that today’s parents provide, we shouldn’t be shocked to learn that our youngest citizens are fully accepting of the fact that other people should labor for their benefit.
The White House on Friday said President Obama had “in a very honest way addressed” questions over his statement that individuals could keep their health care plans under ObamaCare, named by fact-checker PolitiFact as “Lie of the Year.”
“The president, in an interview earlier this fall, took this question head-on and expressed his concern for those individuals, those Americans, who received cancellation notices and were potentially adversely impacted by or affected by that,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said.
But the White House spokesman went on to jab the fact-checking organization, who in 2012 had declared the president’s statement “half true.”
“You know, end-of-the-year categorizations like that are always fun, even when they don’t jive with past characterizations of the very same statement, but we’re focused on implementation of the Affordable Care Act,” Carney said.
Stones. Right there; that’s stones.
This isn’t the normal political “lie” where a candidate campaigns on “lower taxes” or “increased help for middle-class families” where the guy honestly will try and achieve the “campaign promise”. No, this here, this is different.
In this case, the White House, Obama specifically, knowingly knew that millions of people would lose their plan well ahead of time and in a deceitful and purpose of mind, lied to the American people.
Not only my home state but my adopted home state are involved in this crazy man’s story:
MINNEAPOLIS — A member of the Minnesota National Guard and self-described commander of a militia group was charged Wednesday with stealing names, Social Security numbers and security clearance levels of roughly 400 members of his former Army unit in Fort Bragg, N.C., so he could make fake IDs for his militia members.
According to a federal complaint and affidavit obtained Wednesday by The Associated Press, Keith Michael Novak, 25, of Maplewood, threatened to use violence if authorities came to arrest him.
“I’ve my AK in my bed. If I hear that door kick, it’s going boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. I’m just going to start putting them through the (expletive) wall,” he told an undercover FBI employee in July, according to the affidavit unsealed Wednesday.
Novak was charged with committing fraud in connection with identification documents. He was in federal custody Wednesday and unavailable for comment. His father has an unlisted number, and attempts to reach him were unsuccessful. The federal defender’s office has the case, but an attorney had not been selected to represent him by Wednesday evening.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
I am more convinced that Obama either didn’t know who he was shaking hands with or that his advance staff failed to tell him who he was. Such an explanation is far more likely than Obama making a conscience statement with his actions.
Sebelius told Congress earlier on Wednesday that a team of tech whizzes working through nights and weekends to fix the troubled health insurance marketplace website will be hard-pressed to finish repairs as promised by the end of November…