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Waron and Annie-Himself, I had to take care of some things and didn't elaborate on why I feel that "race" as we know it is BS.
I really didn't have time to delve into all of the history of it in our country (still don't) because it's so entwined in everyday life. It's just a messy situation and posters like Observation, Killah, Ckhthankgod, etc are already aware of this.
Take Jefferson for example, he learned this stuff from Europe and he was a pretty influential guy, wouldn't you say? A passage from Notes on the State of Virginia. Henry W. Grady was a "product of his time" (cough[whitesupremacist]cough) and he was deemed as the "Spokesman of the New South." It's so ingrained in society and I feel that a lot of the literature (sources) we have dealing with traits are nothing more than sophisms.
Again, this topic is messy and will probably get deleted (like my last legit post) if I stay on this subject but don't you find it funny how: Caucasian is synonymous with White in this country but at one point the Irish, Greeks, Italians, etc weren't considered to be that. It's funny that Caucasian includes Ethiopian (and other Africans), Indian, and even folks of Asian descent (Mongolian).
To me, it's pretty absurd and a lot of this concept is involved with supremacy in some form or another. I can write an entire thesis or two on this subject but I'm off topic already.
Back on Topic
Hey look, they are rioting in Greece: Riots in Greece. You know that if it spreads west and affect Italy, Spain, France then it'll probably affect the UK and I can see it coming over here if anything happens in the UK (I could be wrong, not the first time).
Last edited by David Alleyne; 02-26-2011 at 07:32 PM..
Gas at $4~5 a gallon and Exxon making profits in the $Tens of Billions each quarter with little or no corporate tax. Causing prices of food and other necessities to go higher. Unemployment to continue with no hope for a job in the near future. I don’t think it’s so much the black & white issue or a brown one, but a big problem between the “have’s and have not’s” in the country. Too much wealth at one end of the population and too little at the other end, this is killing the country.
I don't think we'll ever see civil unrest on a nationwide scale, however I do believe it could happen in several major cities at one time.
1968. There was rioting in more than 100 cities in the months between the two major assassinations in the US. The US exploded. I don't think there's a single cause - the contrast between hope and reality involved in things like the Civil Rights Act and the Great Society, the degeneration of the Vietnam War, the development of various other liberation movements (and the battle between pragmatism and impatience within those movements), and the sheer size of the baby boom - there were a lot of young people, and a lot of them were irritated at something. There was also a reaction against the conservatism of the 1950s - with social dynamics as in physics, with every reaction, you'll eventually get an equal an opposite reaction.
And it should be noted, there was near-simultaneous civil unrest in eastern Europe, Mexico, France and Japan (to cite the most intense examples) during the mid-part of that year as well - France ground to a halt, universities in Japan shut down, and the mass shooting of protesters in Mexico City laid the seeds for the Chiapas insurgency. It could be argued that the uprisings in what was then Czechoslovakia were the first hint of the eventual collapse of the Soviet bloc.
Probably in response to the relative conservatism of the period from the Great Depression through the late 50s (or early 60s) in the US, there was a gradual development of social philosophies that were ever more intense explorations of various ideas on the left - the writings of folks like Guy Debord, Malcom X or Franz Fanon were to become quite influential in radical left circles, and in their expression of anti-colonial sentiments, deconstructive social critiques or various kinds of identity politics, they advocated a certain degree of action-not-words, though I would note that those philosophers were also a lot more nuanced and sophisticated in their intellectual foundations than most of their followers. The Weathermen, The Baader-Meinhof, The PLO, The IRA, The Red Brigade, and (most infamously) The Khmer Rouge all drew from some of this sort of rhetoric.
There's a lot of the same kind of thing now - on the right instead of the left, and it hasn't had the same instigatory effect (in the US - it certainly has in fundamentalist movements elsewhere in the world) only (in my opinion) because it's been mainstreamed, and somewhat neutered in the process. If even the extreme right in the US feels that they weild some degree of political clout, they are less likely (there are obvious exceptions: Tuscon, OKC bombing, Eric Rudolph, various abortion clinic shootings) to "go underground" en masse and pull stunts like the SLA: let's kidnap an heiress, brainwash her, and make her rob banks in support of our ideology.
So I tend to think there IS ideology in the US on both the right and on the left that could feed into some sort of violent upswing in internal instability. I just think there are forces - like the media - that tend to defuse the word of it, marginalize the worst offenders, and maintain a certain level of status quo that keeps the vast majority of people unlikely to run around trying to overthrow things.
A month without electricity over a large area would probably do it. Seriously.
This.
You can theorize which side of the political spectrum will freak out first, but when push comes to shove people will be rioting because they have no electricity long before they will over war or taxes or illegal immigration.
I think a problem with accessing fresh water could do it too. But most likely, power outages due to a heat wave will cause already present political unrest to boil over. The lights will come back on and everyone will shuffle back to work.
Location: Cleveland bound with MPLS in the rear-view
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If the president were assisinated, Republicans and Democrats would divide further and this country could see a second Civil War. My biggest fear for this country right now is the political divide and the utmost disdain for the other party's opinions.
If the president were assisinated, Republicans and Democrats would divide further and this country could see a second Civil War. My biggest fear for this country right now is the political divide and the utmost disdain for the other party's opinions.
Half of the country would think it was a conspiracy to kill the first black president, others would jump around, have picnics, and go to the beach in celebration.
Location: Cleveland bound with MPLS in the rear-view
5,509 posts, read 11,870,451 times
Reputation: 2501
Quote:
Originally Posted by annie_himself
Half of the country would think it was a conspiracy to kill the first black president, others would jump around, have picnics, and go to the beach in celebration.
Sounds like Judgement Day!
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