Comments Posted By Richard Bottoms
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BUCHANAN AND HIS 'WHITE MAN'S LAMENT'
That is also the reason why you would see more Nigerians or Ethiopians in science or engineering because they grew up in an all black society just like me in an all white and nobody told them not to go into certain fields.
I worked as a consultant off and on for several years in St. Croix and it wsa always culture shock to go from Silicon Valley where I was always the only black guy in the room to where almost everyone running the show was black.
As a solider I spent over ten years in Germany and frankly didn't want to come back to the US.
At least there if I was denied admittance to a club or otherwise shown some measure of discrimination I understood I was an outsider, and it might be as much because I was an American as my color that was the reason. And it mainly didn't bug me because I wasn't a German citizen with an expectation that I should be treated just like everyone else.
It never took long on a visit back home to find the eternal disrespect, fear, and loathing. I came home on leave after Basic Training in 1978, a proud solider in my best dress greens only to be denied entrance to the Stoplight Disco. By the time I left for AIT, I had every news outlet in the city on their a**.
My father rode the Jim Crow car home from Washington, D.C. after getting his Lieutenant bars back in World War II. Despite the fact he was an Officer, ready to go to war to defend this nation he was treated with disrespect by the very people he was ready to go save.
All I know was I wasn't about to ever submit to the crap he took, and thanks to LBJ I have the vote as a weapon to make that change happen.
The GOP has done nothing but earn out disgust and our loathing since the beginning of the Southern Strategy and nothing much at all has changed. I'll listen to their lectures on equality and conservatism when they find a way to have more than zero blacks in the party in Congress.
I'll bet not a single one of you know who Earl Graves Jr. is and how much it says about the GOP that the man has not been put forward as a Senator or Congressman in the 40 years I know the man has been a Republican. The Democrat's record speaks for itself, but in Hillary's run and in Obama's elevation to the highest office in the land.
Comment Posted By Richard bottoms On 22.10.2009 @ 14:02
Lest we forget: the real reason she wouldn’t have got into Harvard and Yale (which did not “admit” women until 1973 and 1969 respectively!!!)was because of SEXISM which is still going strong today.
And the party of Teri Schiavo, anti-contraceptives, anti-abortion, anti-Violence Against Women Act are the ones who will champion fixing those problems?
They thought so much about women that they ran Sarah Palin over dozens of truly qualified women in 2008 and the party has made a cottage industry of attacking Hillary Clinton.
The Democrats actually care about equal pay. We're the party that introduces actual legislation to attack pay discrimination, gender inequity and inequality in the workplace.
It wasn't the GOP that supported Title IX, it was the GOP that opposed the ERA.
Comment Posted By Richard bottoms On 22.10.2009 @ 11:57
As far as I can tell, many blacks would rather work at the DMV or be cops and have slow but steady promotions and defined-benefit pensions.
Jesus H. Frakking Christ, do they send Republicans to some kind of class to teach them to be insulting.
For roughly 100 years after slavery our options were severely limited in what jobs and what physical locations we could occupy as a people. So naturally since the laws changed our entire social structure should change over night?
If no one in your family has ever been to college how likely is it you will go to college? If an entire race was encouraged to mop floors and shovel sh*t for 100 years, there's some work to be done to elevate them into a better class.
You picked safe jobs because you could get them and because the white man didn't harass you of maybe even kill you for rising above your station. My sister had the highest scores of anyone in her school district back in 1967, do you think she was steered towards Harvard or Yale and showered with help from administrators to become an Ivy League grad. F*** no she wasn't.
This country changed, but it was fast enough and it wasn't soon enough to serve the needs of someone as bright as she was. She made something of herself but it sure wasn't with help from any of the whites in our part of the world.
There I go, being angry again.
Comment Posted By Richard bottoms On 22.10.2009 @ 06:33
The impression I get - or maybe it’s “prejudice” - is that American blacks prefer large organizations with lots of structure and formalism over small, dynamic organizations where rules are less well-defined or being “made up as we go along”.
Then you haven't met me. Software is the one industry where it comes down to skill and dollars, period.
The reason the market is full of Chinese and Indians is a willingness to work for less and access to off-shore support systems.
Americans are no less capable of writing code, it's that we expect to be paid a living wage.
The reason you don't see many blacks is we just gained access to the system, really gained access in the last 20-30 years.
It doesn't take one generation to build engineers. It takes your father and his father and uncles and cousins going to college providing a leg up, references, inherent knowledge and risk capital that only comes from savings and equity.
Most cloud based ventures and social applications have very little in the way of start up needs as far as cash goes. What you really need is an uncle who works at Sun who can get you face time with an angle investor when the critical moment comes.
We are just now making those connections and it will be several decades before it becomes routine for blacks to do what whites have been able to do for years.
If my home is barely worth what I owe on it and I live in a red lined neighborhood where am I going to get money for a risky venture? If my paycheck just covers living, how do I take a year off to pursue a dream?
You think we're any less willing to try for the gold? Bulls***t.
Call me in twenty years when we have a dozen Oprahs, and ten or twenty former congressmen and Senators, heads of major corporations able to provide that vital introduction you obviously take for granted.
It's not about intelligence or race.
It's about class and cash.
Comment Posted By Richard bottoms On 22.10.2009 @ 01:06
Does my belief in capitalism and free markets make me a racist?
The so-called conservative belief in capitalism as it has been practiced the last 25 years or more represent a gigantic blind spot.
No matter that millions are without basic access to health care or that their wages have shown little growth or have even regressed, all that matters is that business be allowed to charge whatever they can get away with and damn any other consideration.
All taxes are considered theft and any regulation of business intolerable oppression.
The portion of the population that will approach the $250,000 a year barrier is just a few percent of the population, yet Republicans have even the poorest trailer park denizen convinced that only the GOP can save their offspring from the "death tax".
The insurnace industry rejects coverage for any reason at all which charging staggering premiums for those can manage to qualify and the biggest fear for the teabaggers is that the "gubment" will be more of a hinderence to achieving a healthy life than Aetna. The horror stories of rejections and rescissions ought to make anyone with a conscience ill, but that doesn't see to be a working area of the conservative brain.
I don't give a damn about whether you are a racist or not. I care about whether E. Coli taints my vegetables and which ways banks have found to gouge me for fees.
I don't have much faith the Democrats will make those problems go away, but I sure tell you I have zero confidence the GOP gives a rat's behind about it. If it means business will make one penny less by ensuring my safety or health then the GOP is against it. Period.
Comment Posted By Richard bottoms On 22.10.2009 @ 00:53
What bugs us the most is having to not only justify even being angry in the first place, despite full citizenship occurring not even an eye blink in historical context.
No other ethnic group's pride is seen as an indictment of others. The slightest bit of detectable anger is seen as an insane overreaction.
Conservatives seem to have internalized their late to the game conversion to the true tenets of MLK's philosophy as something they have always had making any criticism as unfair as hell.
Their champion William F. Buckley wrote openly about Negro inferiority, opposed integration, Brown vs. Board of Education and came out in National Review in favor of the stand of White Citizens Councils, a stance they maintained well into the late sixties. The reason why blacks despise them and the GOP is a mystery to them.
To them Rush isn't just provoking and insulting black leaders (poverty pimps as he calls them), he's evening the scales in a wildly out of control reversal of fortune.
Despite there being no blacks elected to national office under their banner, they see the GOP as the bastion of equality. People we see as obvious lunatics like Alan Keyes are bold men of courage willing to call a spade a spade.
At least some of them are starting to ask the question in a year that's not divisible by four since they only seem to even care when it's the presidential election year.
Their strategy up to now has not been to present a real message to the black community, it's to work like hell to throw us off voting rolls and make finding polling place as difficult as possible. To ensure the longest lines and least reliable equipment are in districts heavily populated by African-Americans. Rather than give us a reason to vote for them they work to keep us from voting at all.
Demographics and the economy has finally caught up to them and the reality of the GOP being a regional party of mostly white men in the South is catching up to them. There's maybe one more election cycle to go before the whole machine goes tilt.
Comment Posted By Richard bottoms On 21.10.2009 @ 17:51
Dammit
What I see written most often is, Rick stop being a racist.What I rarely see written is, Rick stop being a racist. It’s, Rick stop excusing these particular racists as rabble rousers, or provocateurs.
Comment Posted By Richard bottoms On 21.10.2009 @ 14:08
Oops
What I see written most often is, Rick stop being a racist.What I rarely see written is, Rick stop being a racist. It’s, Rick stop excusing these particular racists as rabble rousers, or provocateurs.
Comment Posted By Richard bottoms On 21.10.2009 @ 14:07
I think the problem is you are afraid that to accept Limbaugh, Beck, and Buchanan are racists means defining yourself as one too.
What I see written most often is, Rick stop being a racist. It's, Rick stop excusing these particular racists as rabble rousers, or provocateurs. The GOP is a party that built its strength on the Southern Strategy crafted by the man in question and that strategy consisted of offer white racists fleeing the Democratic party a home. All we are doing is pointing out the damage done to the home and pointing out who is currently residing in the home with you.
What possible reason other than racism can explain this:
Comment Posted By Richard bottoms On 21.10.2009 @ 14:05That’s according to a new national poll due out tomorrow from Public Policy Polling. The firm gave TPMDC an early look this afternoon.
PPP polled 766 registered voters nationwide. Of the GOP respondents, 27% agreed that Obama “loves America,” 48% disagreed and 25% said they weren’t sure.
It’s a swell combination: a party of corrupt, gutless simpletons on one side and a party of nihilist loons on the other.
The party of gutless simpletons gave the country Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid so I am betting that between the two the Democrats are more likely to deliver a system that is intended to work.
At least the Democrats start from the premise that government can work and try to reach a good outcome.
The GOP believes government cannot be run efficiently or well, and they set out over the previous eight years to prove it.
Comment Posted By Richard bottoms On 20.10.2009 @ 11:47
