Breaking News: Traced Slur May Have Originated from Senate Staffer

¡Hola! Everybody...
I was hanging out on the comments page of one the blogs I follow, Joe.My.God, a blog dedicated to LGBT issues.

The author says that someone left the following comment on his post: “All faggots must die.”

of course, we old school flame warriors know this par for the course in the blogoshpere, except that Joe added:

“The above comment was left today by “Jimmy” on my post about the DADT cloture vote. The IP address *appears* to resolve to the neighborhood of GOP U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss’ Atlanta office. The ISP is “United States Senate.” I’m confident that the JMG internet sleuths can get to the source.

Here’s the IP: 156.33.20.72. Get busy, geeks!”

Check out the blog for updates. At least one reporter from the Atlanta Journal Constitution has picked up on the story (click here) and people are busy tracking down the origin of the comments. If this is from a senate office, hopefully someone will get reamed.

Eddie

Bigotry Dressed as Research

¡Hola! Everybody…
This is the goober redneck muthafuckas (yeah that reads correctly) attempting to disguise their xenophobia as concern for “the rule of law,” or passing out propaganda dressed as “research.”

* * *

-=[ Bigotry Dressed as Research ]=

The anti-immigrant faction hide their bigotry mostly as “concern” for the largely fabricated crises attributed to immigration. In effect, they’re demanding that my rights (or the rights of any person of color) be abridged in the name of “national security.” In this way, they hypocritically hide behind the racism of the “show me you papers” Arizona immigration law (AZ SB1070) and other such measures.

Never mind that a large body of research on undocumented immigrants from a broad range of institutions show the allegations of the anti-immigrant crowd are groundless. Disregard that the most vocal anti-immigrant organizations are hate groups -- documented nativists and white supremacists. No! Don’t look at that! The anti-immigrant bigots assure us that all they want is to make us all safe from the feces-smearing, disease-ridden, promiscuous, lazy, shiftless messakins, and their third world ways, who come here to live off welfare and (paradoxically) take away all the good jobs.

Two organizations, FAIR and CIS (actually, they are one organization, both founded, funded, and run by documented eugenicists, nativists, and white supremacists) are often cited by the goobers as viable, credible supportive evidence for their claims. (I will have more to say about the historical connection between immigration and white supremacists, xenophobes, and racists at a later date.)

Anti-immigrant hate groups' studies make the wildest claims and if you're debating a goober anti-immigrant bigot, you can be sure they will try to slip by a FAIR or CIS-backed study. The problem is the studies are hugely flawed.

Notice that a broad range of credible research organizations, using well-known and accredited social scientists, largely dispute the findings of CIS, FAIR (and also NumbersUSA). Notice also these organizations have documented ties with white supremacists, or actually have these cretins in positions of power. This should make anyone looking to honestly inform themselves about immigration think twice. But conservatives have never been known for their moral reasoning or honesty (though they love to pontificate on morality).

Take, for example the following FAIR “study,” which makes the claim regarding the economic impact of immigration:

“The fiscal costs of illegal immigration do not end with these three major cost areas. The total costs of illegal immigration to the state’s taxpayers would be considerably higher if other cost areas such as special English instruction, welfare programs used by the U.S.-born children of illegal aliens, or welfare benefits for American workers displaced by illegal alien workers were also calculated.”

Yet, when a credible researcher looked at the FAIR study on the economic impact of the children of undocumented immigrants, he found it made many unsupported claims and that its numbers crunching just don’t add up:

“... the report’s own statistics do not support this claim. Even if the report is correct in its assertion that the cost to states was $7.4 billion in 1999-2000, this represents only 1.9 percent of the $381.8 billion spent nationwide on public elementary and secondary education and a minuscule fraction of the roughly $1 trillion in total spending by state governments. Moreover, the report neglects to mention the estimated 1.1 million undocumented K-12 students in 2000 comprised a mere 2 percent of the total student population and that many state governments -- including California’s -- were running budget surpluses at that time. [emphasis added] It is no more plausible to claim that undocumented students are somehow largely to blame for current budget deficits than it is to claim they deserve most of the credit for the budget surpluses of three years ago.”

“... the FAIR report argue[s] that ‘communities’ limited tax dollars are being diverted to accommodate mass illegal immigration.’ This conveniently ignores the fact that immigrants are part of the taxpaying community. The report attempts to get around the issue by saying that while it ‘is reasonable to ask whether the costs of educating illegal alien students is offset by the taxes paid by their parents…study after study shows that immigrants cost taxpayers more in public services use than they pay in to the system via taxes.’”

Notice that last sentence. The FAIR study makes the factual claim (without documentation) that undocumented immigration has a negative impact on the US economy. Not only is this a false claim, the exact opposite is true:

“However, this simply is not true. In the most authoritative study to date on the economic costs and benefits of immigration, 1997’s The New Americans, the National Academy of Sciences estimated that ‘the average immigrant pays nearly $1,800 more in taxes than he or she costs in benefits’ and that immigrants make a net contribution of “as much as $10 billion a year” to the U.S. economy.”

But here’s the kick in the ass:

“It also is worth noting that The New Americans emphasizes a key fact overlooked in any analysis, such as FAIR’s, which tries to estimate the net “costs” of immigration by taking a single-year snapshot of the economy: ‘Children who consume services and pay no taxes today become contributing taxpayers tomorrow.’” (click here for the brief take-down of FAIR's shoddy research practices)

In short, FAIR and CIS are not so much “research” organizations, but a part of a loud and hysterical anti-immigrant movement given free reign on mainstream media though they are thinly veiled racist organizations spewing hate propaganda.

And I have found the same methodologically flawed tendency in most of the studies done by anti-immigrant organizations. For example, there was the one study claiming that Mexicans were responsible for a spike in rates of leprosy. That study’s “findings,” repeated for weeks on the now defunct Lou Dobbs program on CNN, and done by someone with no real social science, or epidemiological training, was later found to be totally false. When Dobbs was confronted by this on a 60 Minutes segment, he refused to acknowledge the mistake and continued airing segments connecting undocumented immigrants with fabricated “disease plagues.” The same was found to be true of studies blaming immigrants from everything to crime to the theory that undocumented immigrants are part of a conspiracy to retake the southwest (click here for a full expose of the hate groups featured on mainstream media as credible organizations)

Whatever your position on immigration, the one criteria for a sane public discourse should be a discussion based on the facts, not the hysteria of bigoted goobers masquerading as legitimate organizations.

Fuckin’ redneck muthafuckas dressed in labcoats. SMH

-- Eddie

Right Wing Hysteria & Moral Cowardice

¡Hola! Everybody...
Life is a celebration -- each day is another opportunity to deepen that celebration... or not. LOL

* * *

-=[ Moral Cowardice ]=-

Man, you are a died in the wool dumb ass. Please tell me that you do not consider the killer of DR Teller a move by a right wing extremist.....it was a crime by a CRIMINAL, plain and simple, and ALL efforts to make it into something it was not, the lone action by a lone gunman, not associated with any conservative movement, have failed.

-- An example of “reasoning”

This was the opening salvo from a twat who, when confronted with facts tying recent killings to the White Nationalist Movement, ran crying to his site, wrote a blog about me, and then cried and whimpered that I was mean (and a racist to boot! LOL I just love it that neocons are now experts on racism). I believe this individual and individuals like him are moral cowards...

But before I continue, I must admit to a huge mistake. After some thought, I have come to the conclusion that classifying the perpetrators of recent hate crimes by white supremacists as “mentally unstable,” does a disservice to all those Americans who suffer from mental illness. The vast majority of citizens suffering from mental illness never go out on killing sprees. Most, in the face of debilitating illness, go out and function just as the rest of us, never harming a soul.

These so-called “lone gunmen” are not crazy, psychotic, or mentally imbalanced. They knew exactly what they were doing. They are definitely angry -- but they are angry about very specific things, and in very specific ways. For example, each one picked targets that suited their political goals -- political goals shared by massive movements. They stashed weapons and they carried out their premeditated acts of violence.

There’s a consistency to the ideology of these angry, armed, white males and the common thread that ties them together is white supremacy and right-wing hysteria.

If we heard the exact same story of a black or Latino/a and it was discovered that the individual had ties to a Black or Latino/a Nationalist movement numbering in the tens of thousands, I’m willing to bet this fool and people who think as he does would be shooting black and brown people on sight, no questions asked.

They are not crazy, solitary gunmen and women; they are part of a fascist movement composed of moral cowards. No... These fascists -- America’s homegrown terrorists -- are not unhinged; they are perfectly sane individuals taking neoconservative ideology to its conclusion. In this way, they are an extension of fascist ideology in the same way that groups of Klansmen are extension of that ideology. It is an ideology undergirding a well-organized and sizable political movement in America.

In the coming days, I will show that the neocon movement is predicated on racist notions of white superiority. The core thrust of modern conservatism comes from modern-day pseudo-scientific “research” no different in empirical validity from 19^th century eugenics and head measuring. Furthermore, these attempts to scientifically validate racist ideology have been given almost free reign on the editorial pages of some of the most influential newspapers and journals.

Georges Santayana famously said that those who refuse to learn from the past, are condemned to repeat it, and we ignore the actions from the well-organized far-right at our own expense. One need only take the lessons Santayana was referring to -- the lessons of fascisms and the hell they wreaked during WW II. Hanna Arendt wrote extensively of the symbiotic relationship between propaganda and fascists movements. One cannot breed without the other. Even shit needs flies...

Speaking of which, here’s an interesting response to my link on the White Nationalist Movement (quoted verbatim):

By and large it is liberals who have as much in common nowadays with this guy than do most conservatives. After all it is popular to be anti Israel, and pro hama's. -- An Idiot

I chose this particular nugget of “reasoning” because it is a prominent meme running rampant on the neocon blogosphere these days. It is really quite simple (or simplistic):

Right-wing propagandists are pro-Israel.

The American Left is anti-Israel.

Therefore, a white supremacist is a left-wing extremist!

Or as one responder put it:

All cats die.

Socrates died.

Socrates was a cat.

The dire lack of logical reasoning by the talking heads and their sheeple on the right is par for the course. Limbaugh has made millions using logical fallacies, as has O’Reilly and the rest of their hate talk comrades. Recently Glenn Beck of Fox News stated that, “What they’re missing is: The pot in America is boiling. And this is just yet another warning to all Americans of things to come.”

Actually, Beck has it right: the pot is boiling, but it is boiling because of people like Glenn Beck, ranting hysterically every night about impending apocalypses of various forms -- looming “liberal fascism,” the “economic meltdown.” Obama, every white supremacist’s nightmare, is coming for your guns and a class of inferior people has stolen the America that you once knew. In this way, fascist ideology, interchangeable with neocon principles, gets credence and emboldens those on the far right. Guns sales since Obama’s election going through the roof -- and it ain’t happening in East LA or Brownsville, Cabrini Green, or Harlem.

Propaganda and fascism -- one cannot thrive without the other. In creating the black and brown face of evil, we help dehumanize those faces, making it easier to justify their extermination.

This is taking neoconservative ideology to its logical conclusion. In this way, frequent MSM commentator Pat Buchannan, a Holocaust denier himself, can advocate setting up snipers on our southern borders with nary a whimper from journalists.

Combine hate radio, hate websites, hate podcasts, and a crisis economy where people feel they are losing all they have, and we see the beginning of a perfect storm of hate crimes and murders committed by a significant percentage of millions of stable, hate-filled who have been primed to move from sullen bigotry and anger to violent criminal action

A social security check arrives late. A bounced check starts bank charges that end up costing hundreds of dollars and the movement gains momentum, blaming immigrants, blacks, Jews, gays, war protester-- and the next thing you know we are seeing dead people on national TV. And those millions of other Americans afflicted with fascist hate are seeing one more case of a person letting go, unleashing the hate that the extremist media has built up...

Anti abortion people attempted to put on a “shocked” face, publicly denouncing the murder of Dr. Tiller.

The Washington Post reported that John de Nugent, white supremacist friend of the Holocaust Museum murderer James W. Von Brunn, “called von Brunn a genius but described the shooting as the act of ‘a loner and a hothead.’” “The responsible white separatist community condemns this,” he said. “It makes us look bad.”

Yeah, right... Sounds like my man up there in the epigraph, doesn’t it?

What it does is it exposes such thinking as the moral cowardice that it is.

Eddie

Niggerology

¡Hola! Everybody...
I find it interesting that some believe Blacks shouldn’t be offended by the use of the word nigger because they (blacks) use the word. What does this say about an individual’s morality? Furthermore, I find it offensive, as well as the height of arrogance, that an individual would presume that people “should get over it” when exposed to hate speech.

* * *

-=[ Reflections on Niggerology ]=-

“I advance it there fore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to whites in endowments of both body and mind.”

-- Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 1785

There is no other word in the English language more closely related to the notion of White Supremacy and racial hatred than the word nigger as uttered by a bigot. Indeed, the word is so central to American history that it has its place right up there with loftier phrases such as freedom, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

While Jefferson expressed doubts about the shameful institution of slavery, he apparently had no qualms about expressing his views regarding the inferiority of Blacks. And he dressed it in “scientific” prose, paving the way for a long and shameful history of scientific racism. This is where we can begin to see the roots of the word nigger -- in the dialectic of white superiority versus black inferiority. This dialectic continues today, kept alive in the pseudoscience of Murray’s Bell Curve and the modern conservative movement’s racially coded language of “individuality,” “the underclass,” and “self-determination.”

In his Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson fashioned the excuse he and his peers needed: a “rational” explanation for blurring the inherent conflict of a free nation built on the institution of slavery. According to Jefferson’s “observations,” blacks were little more than childlike, animalistic creatures doomed to lives of permanent subservience. Sadly, this is not much different from the assertions of conservative social scientists, both black and white, who blame enduring racial inequality on people of color and their white liberal “enablers.”

His ridiculous and inflammatory observations framed in scientific and “learned discourse,” lay down the foundation for what Josiah Nott, a 19th-century scientist who sought to prove blacks' inferiority, described as “niggerology.” Journalist Jabari Asim links widespread acceptance of this pseudoscience to anti-black campaigns evident in courtrooms, congressional committees, churches, and the popular media.

Nigger, and all the historical baggage of that it comes with, is irrevocably tied to this ideology. Some whites would argue that nigger is merely an invective, but they do so at the expense of ignoring centuries of history. Just as some pooh-pooh the hanging of a noose as a mere prank, conveniently ignoring the implications of a lynching. The dominant view from this ahistorical perspective is that black people should just “get over it.” To me this is the same as saying, “Get over it... nigger,” because it’s saying that the issue isn’t hate speech itself. Rather, such logic situates the problem on the individual or group targeted with hate speech. Of course, others will accuse me of attempting to give blacks and people of color special consideration.

Now, having somewhat set the table for all this horrible word, let me address a more volatile issue: when, or is it ever right, to use the word nigger, or any other racial epithet. Asim does not believe the word can or should be expunged from our language. I tend to agree with him. He applauds black artists, such as comedian and actor Richard Pryor and poet Sonia Sanchez, who have used the word for aesthetic, historical, and ethical purposes. However, he calls black people’s casual use of “nigger” even in an attempt to reclaim it, unimaginative: “As long as we embrace the derogatory language that has long accompanied and abetted our systematic dehumanization, we shackle ourselves to those corrupting white delusions -- and their attendant false story of our struggle in the United States.”

Determining when use of the “nigger” is permissible -- even constructive -- and when it is harmful is a delicate matter. I believe Asim contradicts himself. If the word can be used by artists for redemptive and ethical purposes, then why can’t a people similarly reclaim and redefine the word? After all, is it not true that who gets to wield power over language and how we define words (and ourselves) is at the core of self-empowerment.

In my personal life, among my friends, I use the word. Publicly, it would be more than stupid for me, to call a group of athletes “nappy-headed ho’s,” especially if I were an old white guy like Imus, with a history of documented racialized and bigoted views.

Imus tried to retaliate by suggesting that rappers use such language and it’s accepted, and it’ a double standard to suggest that his using it is wrong. This is the same white knee-jerk response from bigots who use or refuse to condemn the word. Niggers use the word, why can't we?

It’s not a Black thing, a White thing, a woman thing, a man thing, a Latino/a thing, or even an American thing.

It’s called “boundaries,” something individuals saddled with a sense of entitlement often find hard to grasp. I know when some words are okay and not okay. And to misconstrue it and the context is playing with fire. As much as I identify with black culture, I would be a fool to go up to a black person I don’t know and claim him as, “my nigga.”

Just as it would be foolish for a black man I don’t know to walk up to me and call me a spic. It’s about membership, first. In the case of Imus, his true feelings got in the way. He actually believes that he was somehow entitled to use a racial slur (on the radio in front of tens of thousands of listeners, no less). And then he cried foul (irony!) because he felt he was being judged unfairly. Or, as a white person here noted, “I think if blacks continue to use the word nigger then perhaps they should not be shocked/offended/outraged when others do.”

Huh? Why not? It’s idiotic to justify one transgression by pointing out another perceived transgression. It is a shallow, child-like sense of morality -- They do it, Mommie! Why can't I!

Believe me, as a public speaker even I know the use of “ nigger” or “nappy-headed ho’” in a public situation would get me fired -- and rightfully so.

Women can say certain words to women. Gays can say particular words to gays. Blacks can say some choice words to one another. In fact, individuals who are friends of different ethnic groups may consider it just fine to use racial slurs among themselves -- if they all agree to it -- but if a Black person is speaking to an Asian and isn’t a part of their concentric circle, then he might have some trouble on his hands. And vice versa.

But it goes deeper than that. Take my sister, for example. While growing up, my sister and I did not get along at all. We were constantly caught in a power struggle. One day, I was complaining to my best friend about her and he happened to express agreement with me, which caused me to turn on my friend: I can talk about my sister, but you can’t. It’s the same with team sports. Someone on your team can ride you, but watch out if it’s the member of an opposing team doing the riding.

However, even familiarity doesn't give you a free pass to use certain words. As a journalist friend of mine -- an African American woman -- pointed out, “I feel in no way comfortable ever using the N-word. Not just because it is not a regular part of my vocabulary, but because I can’t just walk up to any stranger using it either... Black people don’t just walk up to each other indiscriminately using that word with one another; that's suspect and you can get a proper ass-kicking if you do it, even if you’re the same race.”

It’s all about context. What’s appropriate in one context is inappropriate in another. Furthermore, if an individual expresses displeasure over my language, then it’s up to me to give some respectful consideration.

This is not to say that using nigger is perfectly fine. I might use it when in the company of some my friends, but that’s with friends with whom I have a certain unspoken agreement with. They know I’m not calling them nigger in the context of Jeffersonian niggerology as a way to assert my racial superiority. They know me and we have a shared history and know that my usage of the word nigger comes more from the sentiment expressed by Felipe Luciano’s poem Jibaro! My Pretty Little Nigger Man, or the Last Poet's Niggers Are Scared of Revolution, than from Charles Murray’s attempt to justify indefensible social policy decisions based on the erroneous assertion that blacks are intellectually inferior and thus doomed to life as a permanent underclass.

To you, it may not be right and you may not think it’s fair. That’s just the way it is. If a black person expresses displeasure at you calling him or her a nigger, then you need to get with the program.

Paz,

Eddie