As the descendant of Scotsmen, I want reparations for WWII. Before that, Culloden. And before that, reparations for Boudica and her daughters. And reparations for Rome's conquest. After all, these bad things were done by people I didn't know TO people I didn't know, generations before I was born, and all those people are long dead. If those don't qualify me for money taken by force from people who earned it, I don't know what does.
Agree with the comments here. Slavery happened, not just in the US, but all over the world. Essentially, everyone in the world would be owed reparations. I think this is a ploy that loves to be pulled on when it's convenient.
Meanwhile, we forget to look at how the media and LEFTISTS policies continue to destroy black neighborhoods:
Love the mention about the Civil War. I've written a lot on the topic because I think ALL American's need to know the REAL reason behind it, because slavery is ONE aspect of it. I wrote about that here:
Still going on in the Anglo and Euro - spheres wtf is Human Trafficking but a euphemism for slavery? Why the euphemism? One look at the any of the majority engaged in it will tell you.
Related but not synonymous. Slavers enslave, forcing kidnap victims to work for free. Human trafficking gets “product” from one owner to the next, and the victim generally gets paid to provide sex or other manual labor like restaurant work, picking crops, janitorial, maid work or servants to rich families.
Well not to nit pick but slaves had to be fed, clothed and housed. While you try to draw a distinction that trafficking victims are "paid" those funds usually go to guess what? Housing, food, and clothing. So if anything it is some form.of indentured servitude which is arguably worse because slaves were considered valuable property whereas indentured servants were disposable. It is my understanding that the mortality rates for indentured servants was higher in the America's, North and South, than for slaves.
In a way that’s like comparing the firebombing of Tokyo causing app 75000 dead in 1945 - and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima a few months later causing 90000 dead. When you compare two monstrosities - does it really matter?
I think the distinction, for the United States, is that both indentured servitude and slavery were legal and protected by government but modern human trafficking is unlawful and government will prosecute the perpetrators.
And I want reparations from the UK for taking my ancestor’s land and then letting them starve.
As Scott Adams said a couple years ago, Let’s look at how these descendants of slaves would have fared had they not been sold by their African relatives. Their standard of living in Africa would be far lower than what it is in America today.
You know me, off topic. Here is a story of great unsung heroism, of a time when we had heroes. Men and women of principle who would die for their principles. Where are they now?
Wow! That was heartbreaking and uplifting at the same time. What courageous and great men! I am sure men like that still do exist, but just like their predecessors, they don’t call attention to themselves. We may only learn of their heroic deeds after they are gone. Thanks for sharing!
I think I have seen that video before, but it brought tears to my eyes again. I wonder how many other stories of heroism went untold to family members of those WWII veterans.
How beautiful was that story, you should send it to the Yad Vashem the Israelis must put Roddie on the “Avenue of the Righteous” it’s a beautiful tree lined avenue on the grounds of the museum. Thank you for this it was a great watch.
This, and other things, happened to my uncle. To this day I will tell Germans to their faces I'll only trust them if they are dead or my boot is on their neck.
The Ardennes Offensive of December, 1944, is one of those "Wait...WHAT?" moments of WWII. We had Ultra and Fritz had none of the advantages he'd had for Case Yellow in 1940, and yet we were caught asleep at the wheel when Fritz attacked across pretty much the same ground 4 1/2 years later.
It was sheer accident that he missed the huge gasoline and munitions depot at Stavelot, the fuel at which that would have carried the Panzers and the Landseers to their objectives; instead of having to get out of their tanks and half-tracks and walk back or be captured.
You should perhaps think about getting out of the habit of electing prize numpties President and we of putting idiots in No. 10!
Hey Maureen, do you think that giving you reparations for the UK taking your ancestor’s land is different from providing reparations to an actual living African American person who say experienced humiliation and discrimination during their lifetime? I also don’t think it’s fair to talk about “standard of living” when referring to a class of people who were forcibly removed from their ancestral homelands and imprisoned as slaves.
Reparations won't fix what is ailing America's Black population. It would result in a bonanza of consumer spending without meaningful long term improvement. It would also create decades of anger and resentment among those forced to pay for harm they hadn't caused. Blacks must look within to improve their conditions, starting with good education, paternal involvement and personal responsibility. They need and deserve help, but handouts won't do the job.
If you want an answer to this, consider what happens whenever someone apologizes to a woke mob. Does the woke mob go away? Or do they redouble their efforts because they smell blood?
Rule 1 when dealing with militant Leftists... never apologize for anything.
I agree with some of this sentiment but education doesn't really fit on that list. Because most public school systems are funded by local property taxes, the poorest neighborhoods will continue to get the worst schools and teachers until some kind of reform is made in that area, regardless of the actions that individuals take now to improve their lot.
That is why we need school vouchers. This will break the cycle of unequal education. Here is something the left hates, competition. Vouchers would spur public schools to do better if they wanted to remain in business.
I'd be in favor of vouchers but only for use in other public schools, or schools that agree to have an elected school board. I don't want to pay school tax and then have no say in how the schools are run or what is taught in them, and that's exactly what happens when public monies are given to private religious schools.
I agree Matthew. Inner city public education is the civil rights issue of our era, but Democrats are so in bed with the unions that it’s a non-starter.
California addressed that years ago. State funding is specifically allocated to school districts to make up for property tax inequities. Essentially all schools receive equal funding per pupil. They have some of the worst schools and lowest NEAP scores in the nation.
That is the Left definition of equality: that everyone be equally poor - Except for the Nomenklatura, any one with enough roubles/dirt or willing to suck cock of course.
To empower and rebuild a Black middle class: Federally guaranteed home loans, w/no down payment, for those able to financially qualify. Private school tuition for high schoolers and university tuition for those able to pass the entrance exam, and a stipend based on need for the students attending. Add subsidized counseling services and job training for single parent homes and a UBI for grandparents raising their grandchildren.
To stop the "school to prison" pipeline and gun violence in Black communities end the war on drugs and set up a treatment focused model and, as we are attempting here, begin a new national dialogue aimed toward personal success, responsibility, family and community.
Of course, anyone here, despite the fact that the financing for many of these programs is already in place, can point to the impossibility of the idea because of the heavy investment in chaos and destruction of the Republic, being "perp'ed" by the poseur idiots of ideological utopianism and the narcissistic corporate fascists they serve. They are the antithesis of prosperous order and thriving human American culture. The Globalist DNC/EU/Davos overlay of CCP totalitarianism on free Western culture and society, unless stopped here, will continue until world economic collapse and the enslavement of free peoples every where.
The Ukraine was neck deep in money laundering and European oligarchic grift and graft long before it was exploited by the Bidens. It might be time to consider why our elected political D.C. leadership voted down oversight of the billions in tax payer dollars going into the Ukrainian proxy war with Russia. Baksheesh and the numbered account is the name of the game for the surveillance state bureaucracy and the cartel of international criminals that own it. The plight of Black America is the canary in the coal mine for the peoples of the world. You're not supposed to feel safe. Look up the number of murders on public transportation in major cities across America so far this year. Homelessness and sh!t in the streets, un-prosecuted encouraged open looting, vandalism, drug addiction, riots and murder. Welcome to your home town!!
Hey Mike - You left something important out of your 'Rebuild Black Middle Class' post: What are you going to do about the 67% of black households with no father (or father figure) in the home? Until that problem gets fixed - you're simply rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. NOTHING the government can do will fix that problem. That needs to come from Black leadership which by my observation is MIA.
"To stop the "school to prison" pipeline and gun violence in Black communities end the war on drugs and set up a treatment focused model and, as we are attempting here, begin a new national dialogue aimed toward personal success, responsibility, family and community. "
Check out the article today on Oregon's legalization of all drugs.
Not in Texas. There is an equalization method whereby funds from wealthier districts are transferred to poor districts. Also the top 10% of each graduating high school class are guaranteed admission into any Texas public university.
I love this for Texas. I love hearing stories like this that really upend silly stereotypes about how progressive or backwards any given locale or population is. Another such truth is that Texas is one of the most ethically diverse states in the union. I salute you, TX!
Having worked in a Title 1 school, what most people don’t realize is those schools typically have double the funds (coming from the federal budget) because of the demographics. Money doesn’t solve the problems for schools in communities that do not value education, administrations that deal with neighborhood issues that spill into the school daily, and a victim mindset that prevents families from seeing education as a tool for a better life. Money doesn’t change these things.
In Texas the state takes funds from weatlthy districts and "redistributes" it to lower income school districts. Regardless of wether those districts improve anything. No goals need be met I guess. People that don't care for having large percenteges of their raised funds taken call it Robin Hood.
This is why vouchers are a good idea. Parents can vote with their feet that way and schools are more likely to whip into shape with real competition. Re: funding levels though, vouchers or otherwise, I do think it only makes sense for funding to be equal on a per pupil basis barring possibly some rent/cost of living adjustments - there simply is a cost to educating a child, and that cost isn't lower because the kid lives in a poor neighborhood. If the state can mandate school attendance with truancy laws then the state has an obligation to provide consistent quality in the services they force us to consume.
Hey Big Noise - thanks for your reply. I agree with most of your sentiment; however, where I might disagree is in the case of someone like Mr Weathers. Per the article, he suffered discrimination in the housing market and in education - literal dollars were likely taken away from him or made harder to achieve. He is still alive today and no amount of educational reform or parental structure will help him recoup those loses. Would this be an example of a valid case of some form of monetary compensation?
As I posted elswehere, my white SFPD dad was passed over for promotions he earned because the dept promoted blacks with lower qualifying exam scores. He earned less and retired at a lower rank than he earned and his pension was impacted. Should he have gotten reparations? What about the other white cops similarly treated? Where should it stop?
That is an interesting way to put it...I’m with you most of the way I am just hung up on the fact that the injustices suffered by African Americans are rooted in enslavement and forced removal that occurred over a long time scale, which allowed for lost lasting, generational effects. Contrast this with the resulting “over correction” that occurred recently which may have resulted in reverse discrimination but hasn’t had the same impact timescale. How to account for the real injustices of the past while making sure that others aren’t discriminated upon? I didn’t think so in the past, but some form of monetary compensation could be a part of the solution.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Experienced humiliation. Called bad names. Walked to school three miles in knee-deep snow, uphill both ways.
Things are tough all over. Your "standard of living" today has more to do with your initiative and industry than do things that happened to long-dead people whose names you don't even know. Ask a poor white boy from the Head Of The Holler in rural Appalachia what it takes to get ahead when there are NO legs-up for you, but dozens of them for people with whom you had to compete who had the right skin tone or politically-correct genitalia.
Or ask Ray Croc, founder of McDonald's, who had over fifty - yes, FIFTY - business failures before McDonalds, what it took. Or ask Calvin Coolidge. His take? "Persistence alone is omnipotent."
Ted Roosevelt, - the man in the arena - “It is not the critic who counts, not the one who points out how the strong man stumbled or how the doer of deeds might have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred with sweat and dust and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who, if he wins, knows the triumph of high achievement; and who, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”
Gold-Route, My great-grandparents, grandparents, still living parents , and even I, suffered plenty of humiliation and discrimination in the US (e.g., grandfather denied admission to Med school due to quotas to keep Jews out, parents/grandparents had swastikas painted on property & on their synagogues, I, as a little kid was told by my friend that her mama told her that if you pull my hair back you will find little horns growing; I, unfortunately felt ashamed and hid my Jewishness in my southern town....I could go on and on) but it was not our culture to wallow in victimhood. As long as we keep having this reparations discussion, no matter how we frame it, we, as a country, are not having the discussion we need to have.
Hey G_R, Maureen is alive so that portion of your argument makes no sense. As for the rest of it, I can't speak for Maureen but if she is talking about the Irish, as I suspect she is, they were treated abominably. After their ancestral lands were taken they were essentially peasants who toiled for the gentry. They existed off potatoes. When the potatoe blight came along - in waves - the gentry kept taking the agricultural products and let them starve. People died with green, frothy mouthes and tongues.
from eating grass (which the human digestive system cannot break down - it takes a cow two stomaches to do so). They were not allowed to hunt or fish because the gentry owned all the land. At the time of the Potatoe Famine the population of Ireland, or Eire as we call it, was 8,000,000. Today it is 5,000,000. It was a diaspora. I read once that if you stacked all the bodies if the Irish who died coming to the States you could walk across the Atlantic. The ones who made it were subjected to "Irish Need Not Apply" signs. The Brits thereafter applied the same strategy in India and allowed a series of famines there as late as the mid- twentieth century. Less than a hundred years ago. So suffering is not limited to any particular race or ethnicity at the hands of any particular race. As for slavery, the Arabs were notorious proponents of African slavery up until very modern times, some say including the present. No reparation issues though because their slaves were not allowed to reproduce. Another thing Maureen is right about is that while Europeans absolutely engaged in and fostered the slave trade they did not venture into the African interior to do so. African slavery, all of it, began at the hands of other Africans. So while there is no doubt that some living African Americans have been treated abominably in their lifetime and I am in favor of redress it should come from the resources of those who profited and have never offered a mea culpa, much less one red cent. Like New York financiers, for example who financed the large cotton plantations. Or shipping companies who provided the transport. Or insurance companies who insured the property. Or banks who actively promoted redlining until very recently which was by no means limited to the South. But to ask taxpayers who may well be descendents of immigrants who arrived long after the end of slavery, or descendents of reconstructed southerners for that matter who already paid for their sins, to pony up is in the same vein as asking plumbers, electricians and sanitation workers to pay off student debt. IOW your position is just feel good rhetoric with very little analysis or supporting information supporting it. You know what the road to hell is paved with, right?
Amen, and thank you. My husband and I are both descendants of the Irish immigrants from the potato famine. We took our first trip to Ireland 10 years ago and discovered that it wasn’t overwhelmingly Catholic as we had thought, and that in the 1800’s, Catholics in Ireland weren’t allowed to vote, own property or go to public school. They were serfs basically. The pervasive idea of “Irish Catholic” seems to have grown in the US mind because that’s who the immigrants to the US were. The Irish independence movement portrayed in the movie “Michael Collins”, those guys were all Protestants. They were protesting British rule in general, not how badly they were being treated. One of the few people sympathizing with the Catholics in Ireland was Jonathan Swift, the author and Anglican cleric who was Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin. You’d think that was a Catholic church to hear its name, but you would be wrong. Anglican Protestant.
Hey Lynne, thank you for your well thought out, thorough response. There’s a lot to digest in all of these comments - a lot of good material to throw at my pre-conceptions to help me shape my view moving forward!
Slavery continues worldwide to this day, including in the U.S. where both labor and sex slaves are trafficked. Where’s the outrage? It’s so much easier to talk about yesterday’s injustices rather than confront today’s.
Well what of so many immigrants who "spoke funny" and had hard to pronounce names, were picked on in schools, not-hired by those in power, stuck working in dirty manual labor or low-paying domestic jobs etc.? My Italian grandmother was born here, but still was called a "dirty guinea" and actually passed as French in order to get a job in Macy's! Not to mention "no Irish need apply"!!
Don't think it's fair?? Try telling that to people like Oprah Winfrey, Jay Z and the THOUSANDS of Blacks who are successful in business, entertainment, the arts, education, politics (mayor's, police Chiefs, legislators, etc etc. It comes down to CHOICES - prosper within our society or stand on the sidelines crying about the horrible injustices of 160 years ago.
> an actual living African American person who say experienced humiliation and discrimination during their lifetime
From what time periods would you say that happened? For example, most black people (and a good percentage of white people - especially young ones) believe that there is still widespread "humiliation and discrimination" (TBF, there's definitely still some -- but there's also now quite a bit of legal and social discrimination against whites via DEI policies and the like, so it's not gone away).
Is it just every black person ever should receive a stipend because of perceived systematic/structural racism? Or do you create some cutoff point -- in this story, it was 1969. What's to prevent that cutoff point being moved?
If the goal was and is to achieve equity by breaking the cycle of generational dependency on government handouts, how is another cash handout called reparation will help break the cycle? If the idea is to help the younger generation of Black people in developing a sense of personal responsibility, obtaining better education, and an ability to stand on their own feet, cash reparation payments will do just the opposite.
Call me a white suprematism or whatever, but I have a story to share. Many years ago during recession, when I had no job, I briefly worked for a local government office. I was hired at the time when families with children diagnosed with ADHD won a class action suite and received tens of thousands of $$ in retroactive payments for their children’s disability. My job was to call mothers in and to ask how they spent the money because it was awarded strictly to purchase medical or educations supplies. 99,99% of mothers answered that they took all their kids (sometimes 5+) to Disney, bought video games and expensive snickers. True story. And I think the moral is clear. Now call me a racist.
I think NCMaureen is highlighting the stupid here; has anyone worked out what the "benefit" to the succeeding generations has been against if they were still enslaved as their ancestors were? Looking at the thing whole without emotion and with the cold eye of Surak would probably bear a perspective no one; not even the most determined loony lefty; could not but back away from.
Using that logic, NC, generations of poor whites living in Appalachia should have been enslaved two hundred years ago - they would be better off today..
NCMaureen...I always enjoy your comments. Nobody ever mentions the tribal leaders that sold them...No blame is ever placed there. I’m so glad that he included a quote from Shelby Steele. His book, “White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era,” is an excellent read. I would much rather have his perspective because he speaks truth and common sense. He and his son, Eli, have a substack called Man of Steele’s Substack and I highly recommend it.
I have huge respect for janitors. They do honest work, usually cleaning up the messes left by a class of people who can't be bothered to clean up after themselves, and who may even believe their shit doesn't stink.
I agree, Compost has almost certainly never been a janitor.
Having witnessed the destructiveness of dividing a people into warring classes, the Founding Fathers, men well educated on the history of the world, wanted to avoid this kind of tribalism beyond anything else and were careful to set up our government so that everyone was equal in the eyes of the law. And of course the Democrats, progressives, and communists - but I repeat myself - understand that dividing a happy people according to race, sex, class resentments, and jealousies is the most effective way to foment the unrest and turmoil needed to destabilize a culture and provides the perfect entrê for their evil plans.
I think you ascribe a more nebulous motive to the Democrats than what their actual goal here seems to be.
The most immediate benefit they see to divisions like this are votes. They want to keep a voting bloc intact - my impression from dissident social media is there's some crack of red in the blue -- whether it be the "law and order" opposition to crime, the opposition to gender ideology among the black community, some opposition to vaccine/lockdown mandates, or the recent anti-immigration sentiment you see coming out of inner cities. There was some pretty solid Democratic support among black voters in 2020 after the "summer of love," and reparations are the new carrot they want to dangle for 2024.
The other immediate benefit they see is money. Inflation/wealth redistribution (which is exactly what reparations are) serves corporate entities, especially in certain industries like retail, entertainment, and technology. The idea of someone working hard and saving money instead of spending it is very much the opposite of modern capitalism, which wants us to continue spending money. They think that giving people a lot of money will have them spending it right away - which it will.
A less tangible benefit is that it agrees with their belief systems about systematic/structural inequities. They want to redistribute wealth because many of them simply were taught that's a Good Thing.
You can probably ascribe some additional motives that align with some WEF great resets, Marxism, cultural destabilization, etc, etc. But to the Dem lawmakers at a local level, that's not really on their radar.
And in states run by the Religion of Peace. The same liberals who whine the US is a brutal racists country love the Religion of Peace that practice slavery today. The all black Sudan is run by the Religion of Peace. Just a few years back they raided Christian villages slaughtering everybody except women and children whom they took as slaves.
The snowflakes/woke/PC are vile assholes trying to destroy this country and drive it into the ground.
Settled English law since at least Elizabeth I; you couldn't be a slave on English soil, famously restated in 1772. Something happened almost immediately afterwards but I can't quite bring it to mind. /s
Minor correction England; Ireland; Scotland; and Wales make four. ;-)
But I like how it was repurposed into Segregation/Jim Crow and the national support of regional apartheid states thereby preventing the U.S. from becoming a legitimate democracy until 1965.
Could you do better? Stop acting like an ignoramus and learn to appreciate what the Founding Fathers accomplished. It isn’t easy to create a new nation. A nation that is just. Lots of blood, tears and sweat went into it. Now progressive barbarians like you want to destroy it. Cover up or change history, judge it by today’s standards without learning it first. Sound bites and clever trolling are for losers.
"Cover up or change history, judge it by today’s standards without learning it first."
As a non-ingnoramus you should be able to understand that whereas the FF accomplished a great deal indeed, that does not mean that what they failed to accomplish cannot be discussed. Let's be honest. "All men are created equal" is a noble sentiment but it was no where near what they achieved. And they knew it too and didn't pretend otherwise.
Slaves were only owned in the South, weren't they? John Adams didn't own any slaves. Neither did John Hancock.
And if you possess the historical knowledge to look around the world in 1776, what are you comparing the United States to? For example, were blacks treating other blacks from different tribes magnanimously in Africa? Was there harmony and peace, representative government, statutary rights, and effective means to petition for redress of grievances?
Only a system better than you deserve could enable you to be so publicly idiotic and flamboyantly ignorant.
Yes, slavery was legal in the northern states, except for Vermont which as a colony banned slavery in 1777 (it became a state in 1791).
The other northern states began banning slavery in 1780. By 1805, all of the northern states had either completely ended slavery or had initiated a process by which it would end.
My point was that the "Founding Fathers" were the polar opposite of a uniform, homogeneous group, other than being white males. Jefferson, Franklin and Washington were not even really Christians.
And slave owning was never common up North, which is why it was the South that was screaming about counting slaves in the 3/5ths Compromise.
To my mind, if you want to speak about history, you should understand a bit about it.
He was also the first President in the first major nation in human history not founded on the arbitrary rule of unelected tyrants. You are free today because he did his job well and honorably.
And we both know, don't we, that as an abject conformist you would have made no public objections to slavery when it was difficult?
They STILL use slaves in much of Africa, so quite obviously there is no link between whiteness and slavery. In point of fact, the word slave is derived from Slav, and references a time when most slaves were white.
Nor is the Left REALLY concerned with slavery per se, are they? They are not fighting it in any way where it still exists. If principle were involved, they obviously would be. This is all just mind breaking gobbledy-gook peddled by simpletons for other simpletons, and overseen by crooks and deviants.
It would seem to me you are quoting out of a propagandistic coloring book, and operating at a grade school level. By all means, though, if you have an intelligent and relevant point to make, then please make it. Prove me wrong. Put me in my place through the dedicated operation of wisdom, knowledge and superior rationality.
Stop with the straw men arguments. Again, look at the statement made that I was responding too. What was posted was clearly not factual. As to the history, I taught it to undergraduates, so I am well aware.
I think I see one of the reasons our students in this country aren't doing very well.
You were mocking the idea (put forward by Jim Wills) that our Founders--all of whom were white men and some of whom owned slaves--did not want a country where people had rights only according to hereditary class. That they were sufficiently educated in the history of government to know how badly democracy can go wrong. That they were well aware that only a hundred and some years previously, England had experienced a civil war due to divisions among the English people. That they set up a government based on the rule of law, in which all men were, in theory, equal.
That was a genuinely revolutionary concept. The fact that they did not immediately extend all the benefits of those rights to women and slaves (something that had not yet been done anywhere) does not lessen that vision or weaken that accomplishment.
It is not a straw man to point out that their ideas of who should have the privilege of voting came directly from Britain (the nation of which they had very recently been a colony).
Actually it was factual. Their understanding of "men" was different than the modern use. It did not include women either but the modern use does. To their mind they were greatly expanding freedom and they set up a system to pave the way for ever-expanding freedom. That is admirable. Your problem is that you fault them for not setting up an ideal or perfect world.
There was but the system the founding father's created via the Constitution is what ultimately granted the slaves freedom. It wasn't Sherman or his orders.
My Latvian grandmother fled her native land in 1916 fearing a Russian invasion which subsequently happened. Her father lost their farm and potato mill operation and arrived in the USA penny-less after an arduous trip to England to finally get on a boat across the Atlantic. It never occurred to me that the injustice of her young life would or could be compensated. All the strife our immigrant families suffered was just accepted as ‘bad fortune’, but arriving in America was ‘a second chance’.
The early LDS were driven from the state of Missouri in the 1830s by an "Extermination Order" issued by the governor himself. The governor of Illinois promised protection, but did not give it, with the result that the Mormons were forced to flee to the far West, outside the boundaries of the United States.
After the U.S. gained that territory in the Mexican-American War (in which a battalion of Mormons fought, ironically, on the side of the U.S.), an army was sent to Utah for the purpose of wiping out the Mormons if it was deemed necessary. Fortunately, it was apparently not deemed necessary.
But the Edmonds Act of 1882 was enacted specifically to allow the persecution of the LDS people on the basis that they believed in polygamy (which was not illegal at the point when they began believing in it). One need not actually participate in polygamy (only a fraction of Mormon men actually had plural wives); merely being a member of the church was enough be denied the right to vote, hold public office, or serve on juries in federal territories. As late as 1905, a Senator from Utah was denied his seat, despite not being a polygamist.
In spite of all that clearly unConstitutional mistreatment by the government, the LDS people made the desert of Utah blossom with a functional and largely self-sufficient economy.
I go to Utah often as my son now resides there. It's a wonderful place. I have done a lot of historical reading about Utah. While much of the history you provide is accurate, forgetting the Mountain Meadow Massacre is a common occurrence among LDS members. As is imagining that the US Army set out to slaughter the Mormons. The actual Utah War, never was fought in any conventional sense, except for a few small skirmished and few soldiers were killed. The Mormons cut off supplies to the US Army effectively and that combined with a late summer march from Kansas and with the winter arriving resulted in the army heading back. The majority of the killing happened at Mountain Meadow where 125 immigrants were lied to and then killed by the Mormons as they passed through the territory to California. The Mormons blamed the killings on Indians.
The Utah War was really a comedy of errors from both sides. The federal government sent troops to facilitate the new governor after Brigham Young was fired from the post. They had no intention of attacking the Mormons. While Brigham Young was told they were on their way to take over the territory and move the Mormons out.
The federal government was most concerned that the governor of the territory was head of the church and said he would put the church doctrine ahead of the federal government's laws and regulations. Polygamy was indeed a concern also, with about 1/3rd of Mormon women involved in the practice. Mormon's were understandably paranoid given how much hatred and violence they had been a victim of. This was the stew that led to the killing of innocents at Mountain Meadows.
And again you try to pretend that you know history!
I have not forgotten the Mountain Meadows Massacre. The wagon train that ended up being attacked had people in it who were openly boasting of having murdered Mormons in Missouri and Illinois. They were also boasting that Johnston's Army would, in fact, wipe out the Mormons.
Attacking the wagon train was a shameful occurrence, but in the circumstances, it is not surprising that people who had been driven violently out of place after place took an opportunity to engage in what must have seemed like vigilante justice--the only kind they were likely to ever get with the U.S. Army closing in.
BEFORE the Army was sent, mail service to Utah was cut off. It was not surprising that the Mormons feared the worst. And the Army WAS sent to put down the resistance Buchanan fully believed the Mormons would put up to having Brigham Young replaced as their governor. Indeed, well before the replacement governor reached Salt Lake City, he set up a grand jury and indicted Brigham Young and 60 other LDS leaders for treason--a capital offense.
Rather than meaningfully resisting militarily (although they did their best to slow down the Army with attacks on supplies), the Mormons intended to burn their towns and flee southward. The buried the newly laid foundations of the Salt Lake Temple to protect them from being destroyed by the invading Army, in case they should ever be able to return.
Even when a rough peace was cobbled together out of the "comedy of errors," Utah became a territory under military occupation. That did not change until the Civil War drew the occupying troops away to where they were actually needed.
So many of us are the progeny of ancestors who left difficult circumstances to get to the promised land or as my ancestors referred to it, the Medina. I am forever grateful for their determination to find a better life here.
Back in my ‘youth’ Polish jokes were everywhere. Being Polish, I gave them nary a thought. I knew we were smarter than everyone else (had a proud Polish father). But we were American first.
Ah yes, "Polish" jokes (not the exact term that was used back then.} My brother-in-law, from a Polish-American family, laughed as heartily as anyone at them. For some reason, he did not take offense, perhaps because his family had come from nothing to create a very successful homebuilding company in post-World War II America.
The fact that any policy makers are giving g any real thought to the idea of reparations is the result of our terrible history education in America. Americans only ever learn American history, so it’s no surprise that they believe that racism, slavery, colonialism, and all things horrific started the day a white man stepped foot in North America. If we would teach kids world history, we’d all know that this has been going on from the beginning of time. And the logical extension of that knowledge is the realization that we can’t fix the past with cash handouts today.
It's a little like a nuclear bomb - all you need is to have to have the right ingredients arranged in the right way at the right time. Today young American citizens - with the worst educations in the history of the planet, ignorant of even the fundamentals of how this Experiment works, susceptible to the most transparently fallacious arguments - are at least in titular control of a political system that requires for operation not only intellect but knowledge - being led by the noses by well-educated individuals of evil intent. All the ingredients for the Bomb to end that Experiment.
And yet we have Substack, blogs like The Free Press, and readers like you - and we are gaining strength and influence every day. We Just May Make It.™
Hell with that. As a descendant of Europeans with Neandertal genes, I want reparations for the genocide of my ancestors. Which, because I carry mostly modern African genetics, would involve me paying reparations to myself. Where does the idiocy end?
Good point. Soooo.....how does this work for, let's say, Hussein Obama? Do his white half pay his black half? Since his white mother and grandmother did all the work and bore the expense of getting him educated, maybe his sperm-donor (biological-only) father, who just bedded the old girl and then bounced back to his wife in Kenya, providing zero resources thereafter, should pay.
No, no, NO! You don't understand Identity. If Obama Identifies as Black then he is 100% Victim. Stop bringing your White racism into it. Just as biology has nothing to do with Gender, so it has nothing to do with Race-Identity.
I too would like some raparations. As the descendant of a woman I never had votings rights, land rights, ownership rights until the 1900's...heck, I was a man's property and he could beat me if he chose to. There were juries I was excluded from well into the 1970's! And while we're at it, I'm also LDS and I have ancestors who were driven from their lands and Missouri passed a law saying they could kill us on sight. I'd also like some of that Scotsmen raparation money, as I have Scots ancestors. Give me a minute and I'll think of some more.
I don't mean to be flippant but let's continue to move forward and improve our culture and ourselves as we have been doing. I also want to point out that the article did mention, once, the disintegration of the family, which, to me, is a root cause of a lower socio-economic situation and I'll say what everyone is thinking...why does he have 4 kids and one on the way and a fiance and not a wife??! Statistics show that marriage, stability (both financial and otherwise) before kids create an environment of success for those children...not reparations. Put that money in better education for those kids and FIX THE SWIMMING POOL!
And there you have it. This is how dividing people works in the neverending quest to be king of the grievance hill. The great Thomas Sowell cuts right to the heart of it, viz: "No one can really understand the political left without understanding that they are about making themselves feel superior, however much they may talk piously about what they are going to do to help others."
They had no choice. They were slaves of imperialism themselves. The English military always made sure to maximise Scottish casualties, a species of genocide (incluing women left without spouses and children). Don't forget how Edward Bruce (Robert's brother) saved Ireland from annihilation by the English in 1319-20. Many Scots clansfolk helped the Irish resist the English in Elizabethan times. Don't generalise.
I'm sure he's being sarcastic, but also remember many of those original Highlanders were once Irish themselves, having come over from what is now Ulster.
True, though you have to add Pictish and to a lesser extent Norse admixture in Scotland itself. Eventually the whole country ended up being manipulated and abused by greater powers.
“If you ask me theoretically, ‘Are reparations justified?’ The answer is yes. There’s not much question,” the former president [Obama] said.
Meaning: "But PRACTICALLY...."
America can never repay. It's an outstanding debt of indeterminate value and "currency."
Moreover, Africa owes more, for having sold its own children into slavery. (The Bible doesn't put much blame on the caravaners who took Joseph into Egypt as a slave, but rather on his brothers.)
And finally, we still have slavetraders, vying to broker the sale (reparations), and get rich in the process.
The fact that no one in Evanston who voted for reparations bothered to think about how the city would PAY for them illustrates very clearly and painfully the childish mentality of the Left. Only children (and Leftists) think that they should be able to have anything they want, regardless of the cost. To them, money comes out of thin air.
Don’t worry Jim. Relax. It ain’t gonna happen. No ten trillion of anything on reparations will be spent. It’s what we call a trial balloon - as in let’s float this monstrous idea out there to see the response. After the laughter and indignation dies down, as in sites like this one, it quietly fades. Now I know that the ‘evil’ Dems are everywhere, including under your carpet and in your glove box, but don’t worry - this is such a nonstarter than even an avowed communist progressive like Newsom is walking away. Perhaps we can talk about Scotland’s independence movement. Now that has more traction.
The real tragedy is that American blacks are still being treated like children.
We’re talking about reparations as a way to help blacks, but the only way to really help them would be to encourage the nuclear family in their community.
The black family survived slavery and Jim Crow, but it was the loving hand of government that killed it.
Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan warned about the risk of destroying the black family structure in the 1960's due to social policies that would encourage women on public assistance to raise families without fathers. His analysis turned out to be prophetic. Over 50% of black children don't live with a father in their household.
While I am in total agreement that it is best for children to live in two parent families, the amount of children living in single parent families is rising across all groups. Currently 75% of white children, 69% of Hispanic Children, 43% of Black children live in two parent families with all groups seeing a downward trend over the last generation. So, this is not the result of poverty or the cause of general poverty. However, it is a very concerning factor with regards to the health and well being of our children.
Considering the divorce rate among whites at around 38% and blacks at approx 42% - I think fatherless households are roughly equivalent no matter if one is white or black.
Divorce rates may be similar but you need to look at births in wedlock. Over 70% of black children are born to single moms. So there are proportionally way less black marriages to start with.
Nice Coleman Hughes essay. I like Coleman Hughes and his writing. That said, I'd quibble with some of his 'facts' but his thesis is right on the mark. He says that 25% of Southerners owned slaves; most historians believe that 5% did. He also says in the South substantial wealth was 'inherited'; that's just false. The Civil War decimated the Southern economy and it's destruction by the North was intentional. It took almost a hundred years for it to reemerge as a viable economy, some areas doing better than others. The majority of people living in the USA today are descendants of immigrants who arrived post-1890, many arriving with nothing to their name. (My own ancestors left behind everything they owned no matter where they were from - Latvia, Ireland, Scotland - that is, if they owned anything in their home country). In the USA, people who inherit money do so because they have relatively stable families over decades, with one generation giving to the next. But stuff can also happen and when dysfunction is introduced - alcohol, drugs, immorality, divorce etc - it can destroy generational wealth. (Even religion can upset the apple cart. In my own family, the largest fortune was made in 19th century granite & monument works in the New England area. One relative gave her entire fortune to the Catholic Church is the 1950's!). Hard work and family cohesiveness looms large as one of the greatest factors in 'wealth formation'. You're a lucky person indeed if you're family has kept the thread going.
Coleman's discussion on spending and consumption disparities ring true. I have lived in NYC for 35 years after 20 years of a 'thrifty New England' upbringing. When I was young, I literally had kids in my class who wore rags. But any NY subway, on a daily basis one can observe ghetto kids with the latest phones, sneakers and backpacks, far better outfitted than what I observed as a kid. During Covid, one had to line up to shop in Soho where the tony shops like Prada, MARNI etc are located. It was jaw dropping to see dozens of primarily black kids dressed up in the latest gear worth thousands and thousands of dollars each. It was a stunning sight as least for me. I have not denied my kids anything, but I would not indulge them in such a gross display of consumption (and they know it and have incorporated my thriftiness in their own adult lives today).
It is ironic that the same liberals who wax on about reparations are pushing policies that overwhelmingly hurt the poor and blacks even today. Justice Kennedy's comment from the 90's is a perfect illustration: "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life." While maybe great for a Harvard Law grad who has the drive and ability to seize every opportunity, most people are neither qualified to not interested in doing this. Most of us want a stable (culturally, geographically, economically) location in which to raise a family. Yet the liberal consensus in Washington has been tearing that down for decades: the Right on economics; the Left on culture; and both in geography.
Meanwhile, while wealthy, white, liberal elites preach "defund the police" and "sleep around" and "history is racist" through every institution they control, they teach their own kids very differently.
Don't forget the war on drugs pushed by conservative elites which incarcerated a good portion of the black males in poor communities. That along with the crazy idea that you can house 1000s of impoverished people in large complexes isolated from the rest of the city and not get insular deviant behavior. Creating "The Projects" was part of the Roosevelt's New Deal and combined with the drug wars to create the environment for what we see today.
This woiñf certainly strengthen the black community, but these are also the hardest things to do. I am convinced, the only way to change culture is to shame it. Until that happens nothing will change, unfortunately.
Great point, Sophia! It is NOT the skin color, per se, that is the problem today. Nor is it "white supremacy" (a bogeyman that never dies). It is a culture borne out of prison culture and the pathology of drugs and gangs that has been glorified and spread by music culture and as a protest against past social sins. The "War on Poverty" and the expansion of the welfare state, with its family killing requirements, is the real villain.
I have been mystified for years at the destruction of the black family AFTER slavery and Jim Crow.
You look back and you cannot help but admire the grit and determination it took to survive those things and keep families and communities intact.
Then along comes the war on poverty and the great society and all of a sudden you see this incredible decline. Why?
There are times, in my most cynical moments, when I think that Lyndon Johnson and that whole crew of democrats from the 1960's and 1970's knew what they were doing, and the erosion of the black family and black communities was planned with buying black votes a bonus. Its almost like they knew they were going to poison them with sugar.
Also, "These Negroes, they're getting pretty uppity these days and that's a problem for us since they've got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we've got to do something about this, we've got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference."
That quote alone tells you everything you need to know about Johnson's intentions in "helping" black people.
See my reply above. The New Deal is what created the projects and that combined with the drug wars pushed mostly by conservatives created what we see today. By the time Johnson arrived on the scene the Black family had already been harmed.
The black family was split up across different plantations - husband and wife and children sent to different masters. Strengthening the family is key to success but we can’t pretend slavery didn’t contribute.
Thomas Sowell (90+ year old legendary black economist) does an excellent job of debunking the notion that the breakdown of the black family was a legacy of slavery. It’s an attractive and intuitive idea but not supported by facts.
Black columnist Jason Riley of the Wall Street Journal also disabuses the fact that the black community has always been in turmoil since slavery. He cites pre-1960’s statistics when blacks had higher employment rates, lower divorce rates than whites and far more stability than inner city black life today. Seems like LBJ’ ‘Great Society’ giveaway and new welfare laws which created dependency did quite a bit of harm.
I agree. And sadly, the programs that create government dependency are causing poor results in rural/rust belt white communities today as well. Bad policy and poor cultural choices (undervaluing education, having children early and out of wedlock) increasingly impact both American blacks and whites. We need to have a real conversation about what values and actions result in success or failure. I think economist Glenn Loury’s concept of Social Capital is spot on and needs to be a part of this conversation.
The "Bell Curve" guy? You have to wonder. If there were a Stupidity Quotient, I wouldn't be surprised if Democratic Party voting, and the majority of Independent, White Americans scored 90 or less.
Yes, black families were split up by slavery. And they were grieved by that. And they sought to get back together again when slavery ended.
It only took a few decades for Democrats to destroy even the *desire* to keep black families together. Welfare removed black men from the family picture just as effectively as slave-owners ever did.
You said "Strengthening the family is key to success but we can’t pretend slavery didn’t contribute." Again, that was many generations in the past. And nobody alive today owned slaves in America.
Before LBJ's Great Society 75% of black children were born to married parents and had a father to help raise the children. Because of the rules of welfare more than 72% of all black babies are born out of wedlock and there is no male presence to help raise the children.
Is that because of slavery or bad left wing policy designed to keep the black communities "in their place" and to keep voting for the Socialist Party?
And many blacks are still on plantations created by their democrat masters - inner cities on government 'assistance' payed by all races. See how that is working out by visiting:
Black families were not always split up. A number of slaveholders endeavored to keep them together often forming their own enclaves. Thomas Jefferson had generations of families living together; those who left, Sally Hemings brother for instance, did it so on their own volition after being freed. It’s impossible to generalize the ‘slave experience’ as there was lots going on and situations differed.
If reparations are ever granted, there also needs to be a credit totaling the social benefits already paid out, section 8 housing, welfare, food stamps, Medicaid etc.
This will certainly strengthen the black community, but these are also the hardest things to do. I am convinced, the only way to change culture is to shame it. Until that happens nothing will change, unfortunately.
Shaming will cause further rebellion. Convincing an entire population that education would be beneficial is more difficult but necessary. That education must include valuing family and excepting that work is the way to maintain your life. All crime must be punished until people realize that committing a crime will land them in jail.
If teachers were paid and treated fairly, there would be no need for a teachers union. If the union would act on the teachers behalf when students cause problems in the classroom, a union would be useful. Otherwise the teachers union and most if not all unions only serve to perpetuate themselves. You can't reform employers, so until then, some sort of organization is needed to protect workers. I was in a union for many years and the only thing that they did was, if you paid your dues, they protected you from them. It's a difficult problem without an easy solution.
From the Newark NJ BOE website "For the 2022-23 school year, the starting salary for a teacher with a Bachelor’s in the Newark Board of Education is $62,000, starting salary for a teacher with a Master’s degree is $64,000, and starting salary for a teacher with a Doctorate is $66,000. Teachers with more experience can earn more than $100,000!"
Starting salary in FL. $44,000. They are listed as the 14th highest in the US and it's all downhill from there. If you're going to talk about numbers you have to look at all the states. No one becomes a teacher in public education to build wealth.
Not public housing because we know how much of a disappointment that has become, but real infrastructure to improve quality of life in impoverished neighborhoods. Public libraries, schools, venues, improved street lights, better roads, etc. In poor neighborhoods you’ll have no problem finding a 7-11 but where are the grocery stores? Coffee shop/Internet cafes? Poor neighborhoods often get seen as unattractive for business and as I see it the reason is a lack of care by city planners and public agencies. There’s never a problem with investing in a well lit park for an affluent neighborhood. But drive down the poor part of town and it’s so dark and unattractive you won’t want to stop anywhere even if there was somewhere to stop.
The fact that this ridiculous idea of reparations is even entertained is complete insanity. There is no way on God's green earth that it could be implemented fairly. It would result in a downward spiral of greed, resentment and suffering and destroy the country.
Then again, I think that is the goal of those that are behind it.
It doesn’t stop there. An article today in the Epoch Times features a Princeton scientist and an MIT scientist demonstrating with data, not hyperbole, how global warming morphed into “climate change” primarily as an enrichment scheme for a group of hoaxers, I would provide the link, but it’s paywalled.
You can read the article for free in exchange for supplying an e-mail address. I read it and learned something new: that beyond a certain point, increased CO2 in the atmosphere has little additional warming effect due to saturation. I also recommend the article!
CO2 is plant food; by far and away the leading "Greenhouse Gas" is water vapour; and while this stupid has been floated, an area more than twice the Amazon Basin has greened.
You can also read the article for free by turning off Javascripts in your browser. Brave can do this, I know. I'm sure others can. It works for most paywalls.
JavaScript can be a good thing, so you might not want to do this permanently. I, like many others, use more than one browser, with each set up for different use cases.
Which is why one shouldn’t pay attention to Barack Obama who was for both Affirmative Action and Reparations. That man couldn’t lead his people out of a manicured, well trod park path.
Disagree with your last sentence, Bill. Are the leftists proposing this lunatics? Probably. But its being thrown out there to test the reaction. Their goal is to find out what you think. Not to destroy the country, at least not deliberately. It’s as if you have a car worth five grand, but you ask for twenty five. You’re sneered at and you drop it to six.
“But then, he said, his caseworker got him on the straight and narrow, and he got a job driving a forklift.”
———————————————————
I like this story for two reasons. First, because ‘driving a forklift’ is my go-to job suggestion for what most of the people who go to college should actually be doing. I don’t think I’ve ever referenced Nicole Hannah Jones or Jake Sullivan without mentioning that they should really be driving a forklift.
I also like it because during COVID when there was rioting and looting going on with Democrats explaining how it’s happening because there’s no hope and the rioters just need food and have been stripped of opportunity, and there was literally a billboard not far from my house advertising warehouse positions (forklift driver) that paid $27/hr starting wage with no experience necessary.
The local McDonald’s also has a big sign offering starting pay at $25/hr. And when will there be reparations for the victims of unconstitutional affirmative action programs?
i'll wager its less than that, probably closer to 3 months. so many businesses are short-staffed because no one wants to work other than their pipe dream of being the next tiktoc star/influencer. so many places have shortened hours because there is no one to work them, let alone manage the place. well, at least what i'm seeing and hearing in my neck of the desert.
When I was working my way through college on the G.I Bill in the 70s, I had a part time job driving a forklift (and a truck) for a ferrule manufacturing company. I made peanuts, but I still have fond memories of that job.
“Reparations, Clegg said at last, would “give my kids a different life.””
————————————————————-
No, it would not. Well, okay, ‘different’ but not better.
I guess the main argument against the reparations discussion is that it gives people a false hope and Powerball mentality. Not quite as poisonous as the ‘diffuse inescapable white supremacy is holding you down’ discussion; but still not great.
Unless we are going to argue that Black Americans are a superior and more moral class of human beings, giving people cash basically never fixes their problems. The more cash you give usually the worse it goes.
The Great Society welfare programs were reparations. Trillions so far.
My father was a cop in SF in the 1960s. One night he came home from work, and over dinner he described the “projects” he went into that day. Garbage in the hallways, graffiti, urine smelling elevators, he shook his head and said the taxpayers paid for those buildings, look how these people destroy them. He said people don’t appreciate something unless they earn it. I was ten, I never forgot that conversation.
PS--and I won’t forget the fact that black cops were promoted ahead of my father back in the 1970s, even when he scored higher on qualifying exams. Reverse discrimination was happening even back then.
Check out first year night school class at a community college and a first year day class at a university and this theory is glaringly obvious. People appreciate what they have to work for and they work for things that are worth it.
When I taught English at the local community college, it was the "non-trad" students (people who had been working since high school) who were my best students, because they appreciated the opportunity they were getting. Kids fresh out of high school were often too involved in their social life and their feelings to make much of an effort; college was just "more school."
Considering that I had the same experience--didn't do well in college the first time, despite having been a straight-A student, but returned later to finish my B.A. and get my M.A.--I was not all surprised by any of this.
Yep. I got an A.A., B.S., and M.B.A. all as a non-traditional student and by far the best experience was the AA at my local community college. Night and weekend classes had students who were serious about school and the quality of professors and instruction was by far superior. The professors were actually invested in their students’ success and went above and beyond to ensure their classes were successful. Many of them actually worked at the bigger name state universities and liberal arts colleges in town by day and taught classes at the community college by night.
My daughter was not much of a student in HS. She couldn't get into a four-year college, so she went to a local community college where she learned how to study. After two years, she transferred to a good university and got her BA. If she had been black and had initially received an affirmative action admission to a four-year college, she probably would have not been able to do the work and would have flunked out.
As I sit in my mortgage free home, and with a paid for 2 year-old vehicle, comfortably retired, I must truthfully admit that I wouldn't have been able to do it alone. Along the way there were people who gave me a "hand up", including thousands of dollars, and friends who assisted me and my family at crucial times.
I am no one special, not especially perceptive or brilliant, but even THIS guy KNOWS that any attempt at reparations MUST come with the accompanying hard work for it to succeed. I just cannot see that happening.
I remember watching a report on 60 Minutes back in the late 1970's that showed the horrible, filthy conditions that people were "enduring" while living in welfare motels. I also remember my mom stating that the people living there had plenty of available time to clean up those filthy conditions themselves.
Mom's comments were something along the lines of "If you have a rag and running water available, your floor should never be dirty. If you have hands and a garbage can available, your home // apartment building shouldn't be surrounded by litter".
I remember my Dad scratching his head over the long lineups at the Food Bank. Why aren't they helping? he wondered. My Dad was the sort who would help a waitress clear the table. What also comes to mind is the care people will take of homes they own versus homes they rent. And to add to the mix: where are all the absent fathers?
Hey everyone! Black guy here and here are my comments:
1) I think the reparation topic is one that the LEFT loves to pull on when it needs votes. To be honest, slavery happened all over the world. Yes, it's under 200 years old in America, but it happened and to give reparations to all that where effected is unrealistic. If anyone needs to give reparations it would be the UK and it's colonization of the world.
2) Redlining is a think and that definitely should be eliminated because that is true "racism" at its core.
3) Love the mention about the Civil War. I've written a lot on the topic because I think ALL American's need to know the REAL reason behind it, because slavery is ONE aspect of it. I wrote about that here:
4) For a larger conversation on just black politics in general I think we have to look at HOW THE MEDIA HAS DESTROYED THE BLACK COMMUNITY. From media exploitation and more, once THAT conversation occurs, we can truly start to heal... and not the healing from reparations.
Redlining has largely been eliminated. Also, blaming the media is another scapegoat. Secrets to success: don't have kids out of wedlock; develop a trade or higher education, don't spend money on luxuries until you are financially secure.
I agree with the path to success (although, oddly enough, it did not help me and my husband all that much; I guess things could have been worse?) But the media definitely bears a share of the blame. If only for the promotion of rap music, which celebrates black lawlessness, violence, and misogyny. Thereby warping the minds and expectations of young blacks.
I disagree. That’s a business decision that incorporates business issues - neighborhood risk, affluence of the community, etc. Money is green, and Trader Joe’s is trendy progressive. If they don’t locate in a given area, it’s, not because they’re redlining.
You miss the context, the black community doesn't want TJs to move there because then people with money (White people) will follow - that's what happened in Portland
Wow. Is that what you think? That’s fascinating. If true, someone should interview people and get their thinking around this. I’m skeptical because I think people want the best for themselves, their families and their community, and choice is always a good thing. Why, then, did you make a reference to redlining?
Long debunked by whom? It still isn't settled amongst Ashkenazi intellectuals. There are bona fide arguments to be had on both sides and there is no consensus that I've seen, and I've followed the topic intermittently since Koestler first published. No one has made a case I'd view as slam-dunk and there is toxic ideology to be had on both sides.
I agree that the media is partially to blame. It is quick to show pictures of Black Ghettoes, and promote Rap music that promotes misogynist and violent ideas thru the lyrics. The average white person never sees photos of Black people living in beautiful houses in the suburbs of Atlanta.
I must agree with; why do I owe anything to anyone when my family fought for the Union in the Civil War. The forefather lost everything while fighting and ended up moving North and died in an Old Soldiers Home. The rest of our family came to America long after slavery ended. Almost all athletics, music, movies, commercials, and special treatment for thieves and crooks for one race. When is it enough?
We have always paid out taxes that support those who need assistance. Yet having graduated from a predominantly Black High School, everyone makes their own choices. I choose the military as a means to break my bonds to continuing the poor opportunities in Flint, MI. As did my brothers. Flint forever has been run my Democrats, who, we must remember were the ones in favor of slavery, but now conveniently forget their history. Where are opportunities and infrastructures crumbling or never progressed? Reality is the Democratic controlled areas. It seems those who are the enemy, conservatives, move to areas and vote for the things they want from their government. But now, that is seen as elitist, yet my taxes pay for it. Funny though, I live in a very diverse neighborhood.
Equal opportunity, favorable college selection, tax support for families, and other things provided by tax payers. Yet, what has changed? Somewhere people themselves need to say no more killing of our own in neighborhoods, vote for those who will provide better schools, laws, and infrastructures. The police are bad! Yeah, you want to be in a police car alone at 3AM in Chicago? If not, you know nothing of the true character of the job. Yet, elected officials who encourage crime, theft, and excuses for why everything is bad are the winners. It's those other folks who are doing it to you.
Reparations are just the next bait to hook the clueless voters. No one has that kind of money, well other than the elite world order rich who aren't giving up jack squat for anyone. Where are the rich actors, musicians, and athletes? Oh yeah, they are encouraging money be taken from middle class folks to give away, again and again. It never ends. This is just another form of wealth redistribution and the goal of all to be equal in having nothing, while the elite thrive and rule over the kingdoms. You want wealth, work your ass off, make the sacrifices, and try and integrate into the system that will allow you to do that. It is done everyday, well, not for those who think the money fairy will plant that special tree for you to just pick hundreds off of.
The US infrastructure is a joke and in desperate need of updating, safe guarding, and modernization. Yet a new car for all and shop till you drop is the new motto I guess. It's all free!
You just hit on it!!!! If our wealthy elites want reparations let's give it to them. Funded entirely by a 90% surcharge on their income and a 50% wealth tax. Watch how fast the "reparations" gig wilts. Like hail on a summer's day.
Elihu Yale was supposedly involved in the slave trade somehow (though looking a little further into it, I'm not sure if he actually owned a slave, or what his culpability was as a governor of the East India Company).
But to be both safe and to fulfill the spirit of self-mortification, Yale should dig into its $40 billion+ endowment as penance. I'd say a 50% cut would be a good start.
You make so many good points; allow me to add one more. People keep mentioning the importance of improving black-majority schools. It doesn’t matter how much money you put into the schools if the kids are the ones in charge of the classrooms. I’ve seen numerous videos where inner-city kids are screaming, fighting, and generally raising hell, while the teacher just sits there, too cowed to do anything. The teachers need to be able to discipline (with a hired security guard if that’s what it takes) and the parents need to be on their side. The respect for and value of education must be instilled in the home. Didn’t it used to be there? Remember those commercials where the poor old grandmother was scrubbing floors on her hands and knees to add her grandchildren to school “because a mind is a terrible thing to waste”?
I remember those old UNCF commercials. A mind IS a terrible thing to waste. And yet black minds are being wasted at a far higher rate now, twisted and ruined by a rap-based culture that glorifies crime and teaches young black males to treat women horribly.
England lead the fight against slavery, losing hundreds of sailors patrolling the seas for slave ships. But only the US lost over 400,000 men to end slavery. Liberals act like all 19th century whites were rich plantation owners when many were just poor northern soldiers fighting to preserve the union and abolish slavery.
Will Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who identifies as black, receive reparations? Not such a crazy question when you think of what is happening in the world of gender, women's sports and beer.
This happened with the Native communities. Sherman Alexie was in the comments a few months ago talking about “Pretendians”(pretend Indians if you haven’t had coffee yet).
If you’re ‘Slavic’ - from the Baltic countries of Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, etc -your ancestors were some of the first slaves trafficked by Vikings to the Middle East - hence the derivation of the word ‘slave’.
They are long seperated, like Britain and America; but, again like the British and Americans, were once the same people. The 'Poles' tended to be the ruling class and the 'Ukrainians' the ruled. You've inherited a fascinating and diverse cultural and historical legacy.
That's true, My Ukrainian Jewish grandmother used to tell me stories about her life in the village in the 1880's up to 1906, when she and my grandfather emigrated to the US. They were terrible stories to tell a 6 yr. old and were terrifying enough so that I remember them till this day. Here's one. The Cossacks used to ride through the villages at harvest time and any female caught outside was raped, any man or boy run through with a sword. If it was in the morning or early afternoon and they could hear the hoofbeats of the horses, they'd run inside and those in the fields would hide in the haystacks. If the Cossacks didn't find anyone outside, they'd ride on to the next village. Today the the Cossacks have tanks and guns. Other than that, nothing has changed.
Here in Canada we have a Black Haitian who is a Status Indian. He gets all the perks. He Identifies as an Indian so even tho he does not have a single drop of Indian blood in him, he's an Indian. Identity, Identity, Identity.
The biggest affliction of black Americans is learned helplessness. When immigrants from black nations come here and thrive, it disproves the narrative that this is a racist nation.
It’s also about choices and values. My good friend down the street grew up in Brooklyn, studied hard, worked hard, became an engineer who has traveled the world for work, owns investment properties as additional revenue streams, and is doing a stellar job of raising two daughters as a single father. The oldest is a straight-A student who is just entering high school but already has a couple of years studying Mandarin under her belt. In what way has the field not been leveled here?
Ridiculous. Reparations are just the latest shake down. Spare me the fake moralizing and interminable guilting. The reparations were paid in the blood of the white Americans who died and were wounded in the Civil War, and the generation of white women who were unmarried because so many men were killed.
Jim Crow and 20th century racial discrimination has been paid for by trillions of dollars poured into the pockets of black Americans--not to mention so-called Affirmative Action.
Can you imagine what the average ethnic community would have done with that mind-boggling financial bonanza and the systematic national college and hiring preferences provided black Americans over the past two generations?
Are reparations a good idea? Well, sure - if you want to ignite a race war. Go ahead and make people who never owned a slave open their wallets for people who were never enslaved. Only a leftist could come up with such stupidity. This is a patent scam. A scheme to impose a punishment on people for the alleged "sins of their fathers" - even if their great-grandfather was laboring in some field or factory in Europe or Asia when slavery existed in America. As such is is no different from an "attainder" - a taint of blood, which our Constitution prohibits. Along with the confiscation of property without due process and compensation. This crackpot idea should have been DOA. Let's bury it once and for all.
Well yes and no. Again, why should anyone not responsible have to pay? We're already $31 trillion in debt and spend more than we take in. How would this even be financed, even if it made sense. Which it doesn't.
I was thinking more on a municipal or state level. I don’t have any practical ideas about how to pay for it, but having grown up in Alabama shortly after the civil rights movement, and knowing what I know about how terrible it was for black people, I do have a great deal of sympathy for the ones who suffered actual harm under that system.
I get it. But healing doesn't involve making innocent people pay, either. It just keeps the pot boiling. And adds to the destructive grievance culture that's making things far worse.
If you agree with the concept of injustice towards black people who lived through Jim Crow, what would you suggest as an alternative to “financial” reparations? I’m referring to those still alive, with no “descendant” benefits ie. restricted to those literally directly affected.
Financing it is the elephant in the room. Perhaps we could create an additional tax surcharge on anyone descended from a known slaveowner? But that probably still wouldn't cover it.
But it does seem fair that those who were personally harmed by Jim Crow (now an aging population) should get some kind of consideration.
Placing guilt on descendants of slaveowner is even worse. Like a bill of attainder. Punishing innocent descendants for the sins of the fathers. Jim Crow laws didn't exist in every state, either. Plus since the 1960s we've put in place very generous (and misguided) welfare programs. None of this is easy or simple or fair. You have good intentions but as my mom would say to us "the road to hell is paved with good intentions." If the Black family and middle class hadn't been destroyed by liberal policies we'd be much farther along in our nation today.
I agree that trying to place blame on people for the "sins" of their ancestors is a bad idea. I was just suggesting that if someone MUST be made to pay, it ought to be the people who theoretically* got some kind of leg up in the world as a result of their ancestors' ownership of slaves. *I say theoretically because it's likely that you would find the descendants of slave owners among the very poor, considering what was done to the overall economy of the South by Northerners after the Civil War.
What would be more logical is to force companies that had policies that excluded black people (like the hospital that would not admit the man's mother) to pay reparations to those who are still living who were, during their lifetime, affected by those policies. That is a far more legitimate pairing of the harmers with the harmed.
I'll agree to reparations in exchange for one way tickets to the African nation of their choice for those accepting the payments. Simple - slavery reversed completely.
Those who were harmed by Jim Crow are an aging population. As are many of the boomer liberals who think reparations are a good idea and should be paid. So who will pay for them? The boomers (like me)? Of course not. Boomers are just great idea people. We will leave it to our children and grandchildren to pay the bill.
A race war we will surely have. That's why this nonsense won't happen. The pushback and resentment would be too severe. Any Dem supporting this would be a total idiot (they're not far from that already), and soon to be voted out. Reparations would be to them what a total abortion ban is presently to Republicans, a (very) dead albatross around their necks.
Which is, of course, the way every dopey white liberal racist views the black community. As children who can't get by without their tender ministrations. And what happened? Their "great" society destroyed the black family. Their education systems and demented teachers unions destroyed generations of black kids. Their paternalism and stupidity has created a depraved culture of drugs, fatherless kids and chaos. Nice handiwork. And now their reparations argument demands that the rest of us pay for their stupidity.
Black Poverty 1990 32%; 2022 17%. Black representation in the middle 60% of income = 13% (= to their representation in the population) up from 9% in 1990. Just two of the metrics demonstrating the trajectory of black Americans over the last generation. When will we quit pretending all Blacks are poor and uneducated?
Other issue is that biracial marriages have gone from 4% to 20% since 1980; meaning if the trajectory holds we will see biracial kids become ubiquitous shortly. Race as a category gets more amorphous.
One of my Little Nanna's neighbours children managed to both spend it all very quickly AND set herself up for life: she bought the whole damned street off the council!
“the plan favored by many Democrats in Washington, which would allocate $800,000 to every black household”
———————————————————-
Hunter Biden, who has suffered past trauma’s, received $800,000 *every year* for doing nothing.
How’d that go?
Combine that with the fact that even UPS drivers can make $170,000 per year now and ‘reparations’ is nothing more than an expensive marketing campaign to advertise that this is a shitty and racist country.
But I would support (R)eparations, a conservative version of reparations, where Black Americans just don’t have to pay federal taxes.
It’s just as racist and unjust as all the other plans but I think it would be worth it to have one group in the country who knows what it’s like to not be partial slaves to the Permanent State in Washington. Maybe they would spread the word to other people and this would create a movement to disempower the ‘elite’ scumbag parasites running the country.
Hunter Biden and the Biden crime family have nothing to do with this. Hunter Biden wasn’t discriminated against because of racism. Louis Weathers was. I think awarding $100,000 to those who can prove they were personally discriminated against is reasonable. Of course any such plan should be means tested. Nothing can be done about less than 5% of potentially eligible even applying.
Black Americans who reap the rewards of American capitalism should of course pay income taxes on the same scale as whites and there is nothing conservative about any proposal that they should not.
It’s as close to a conservative plan as you can get if you’re going to do something totally perverse and immoral using government force.
Obviously, I would prefer if we weren’t subjected to unremitting psychological warfare by the communists who run our State Media because that’s the only reason we have to talk about this.
Also, paying taxes to the federal government, the primary barrier to capitalism occurring, because you are “reaping rewards of American capitalism”, does not make any sense.
Come ON, Kevin! Anyone living below a certain yearly income ALREADY pay no Federal taxes> Has it helped them?
In my highest earning year, I believe that I paid around $5,00 in Federal taxes. Would it have changed my life if I didn't have to involuntarily shell that over? No, not one bit!
Plenty of capitalism happens despite taxes, which are a payment by everyone so that we can have a military, a police force, social services, education, and other things that protect and benefit us all. It's the price we ALL play of avoiding the social catastrophe, including Revolution, thay would happen otherwise, because the market can't take care of all needs.
The federal income tax is not a price we all pay. That is just a straight-up lie. No matter how much of a communist you are, there is still no justification for the idea that centralizing all of it is a good plan. It obviously is not.
The military is the only part that can be fully justified at the federal level and the military has a $900 billion annual budget and they are running out of ammunition 18 months into a relatively small proxy war that got $120 billion in supplemental funding. The amount of theft required for that to happen is almost unimaginable.
“The market can’t take care of all needs” is a utopian framing.
That the market can't cater for all needs (needs it creates) is proven by a mountain of socio-historical evidence. "Theft" was Marx's equally dubious definition of profit. Centralising is indeed not a good plan, but it's "so much better than all the others", to quote Winston Churchill on democracy, when privatising absolutely everything and forcing us all to build our own hospitals, teach and bury ourselves, etc., would be apocalyptically disastrous. We need education to feed the skills it needs into a capitalist economy. That's why capitalists started up education in the first place. They need publicly-funded education so that those skills can keep coming, especially as the capitalist economy expands, as it has to. They need taxes even as on the basis of pure individualism they complain about them.
Well you certainly have spelled out the choice we must make.
We must choose between Joe Hussein Biden and a room full of transvestites running healthcare centrally out of the most corrupt city on earth OR each person building their own hospital. Nailed it.
(I’m kidding. What you are doing is a manipulative tactic, common from Marxists, known as forcing reactance.)
No point in trying to be reasonable with a TFM (The Free Market) fundamentalist, they are not capable of understanding that public ownership of *anything* is preferable. They think that the fire department should be run for profit. "Your call is important to us, please stay on the line and an assistant will be with you shortly. Please have your credit card information ready. Did you know that if your neighbor burns now, Burnrite is offering a limited two for one sale? That's right, we'll put out both your fires for the same price as one fire! (Some restrictions apply.)"
There are too many groups out there in the world who might be deserving of reparations but who could never be properly identified and singled out in a just way. Taxpayers alive today should not have to foot that bill. Municipalities instead should work on infrastructure and improved housing and services so that all can live decently.
If you gave every poor family, no matter the color, a million dollars. I would say within 5 years we would be back to where we are today except with bigger problems. Money will not solve anything. The left believes that if everyone is on parity with wealth that would solve everyone’s problems. I have my doubts!
Reparations: it is ludicrous to believe that everyone with a certain pigment needs the government’s help and that once given a ton of money people will automatically start making good choices. Not sure that is true.
We've seen proof of this over and over with lottery winners. Most people who get a big lump-sum payout are worse off in 5 years than they were before the payout.
Not all poor people are poor due to bad decision-making. But bad decision-making definitely contributes to poverty. And giving someone who handles money badly a whole lot of money usually ends in grief.
My BIL is a good example of what happens when you give a lot of money to a person who always makes bad decisions. When my in laws died (really after the second one died), and my husband and his siblings inherited a fair amount of cash, the in-laws money manager told my H, the executor, that inheritance was a lot like winning the lottery. Most lottery winners are broke 3-5 years later. A lot of people who inherit a large sum of money are also broke a few years later. This from a financial advisor who has seen it happen over and over with different families. My BIL had already gone bankrupt once and been bailed out by his parents. He got that inheritance and paid cash for a house (couldn’t get a mortgage due to bad credit rating due to said bankruptcy). Subdivision of said house went belly up, had to sell at a loss, rented and bought second house that was destroyed in a hurricane due to lousy location, etc etc. One bad decision after another and absolutely NO retirement savings. Zilch. Will be working until he dies, probably in some rental unit. Money alone does not save people.
A slight cavil—the author inaccurately describes redlining as “[making] it nearly impossible for a black applicant to get a mortgage for a house outside black neighborhoods.”
My understanding is the practice of redlining was designating certain neighborhoods too high-risk for mortgage insurance—almost all African-American neighborhoods—thus making home ownership much more difficult for African-Americans and pushing them into public housing. It applied within, not outside, majority-minority neighborhoods, so it would have had no direct effects on an African American’s ability to purchase housing OUTSIDE of redlined neighborhoods.
[edit: as a response to this comment pointed out, redlining did occur in lower-income neighborhoods that were predominantly white. Stated with more precision, the point I wanted to make above is: redlining applied in disproportionately Black neighborhoods (even if whites were still a majority in many or most of those neighborhoods—a neighborhood that is 15% Black is still disproportionately Black if the overall Black population in that area is 5%), which often made out proportionally more difficult for Black families to own homes. The author’s claim—that redlining kept Black families OUT of disproportionately white neighborhoods—could only be true if the neighborhoods that were white were to ones that were disproportionately redlined. I am not aware of any historian who would make that claim, while the opposite claim—that the neighborhoods redlined were disproportionately Black—is a common one and one that is pretty widely accepted. So the author’s understanding of the practice is backwards.)]
While other features of the residential real-estate market would have made it difficult for most Black families to get a house in a white neighborhood, redlining was not one of them.
Glad someone posted this to clear the record. The author’s view is an incredibly common myth about redlining (I find people across the political spectrum who have been taught it incorrectly).
I have a cavil with your cavil, good sir. Redlining actually applied to not just majority-minority neighborhoods. While the definite majority of black neighborhoods were red-lined, the majority of neighborhoods that were red-lined where non-black neighborhoods. Redlining affected a much higher percentage of potential black homeowners, but the decided majority of victims of redlining were good ol' white people. I ask rhetorically, are these white victims eligible for reparations? I can imagine not.
Black home ownership is a lagging indicator. Currently Black ownership is 44% compared to 73% for whites, 63% for Asians and 51% for Hispanics. Asians have the highest average income by a good bit, but lag Whites by 10% in home ownership. That will change going forward. Black incomes have been rising consistently and now they are proportionally representative in the middle 60% of income earners. But they are overrepresented in the bottom half of that middle 60% and underrepresented in the top half. Unfortunately, housing prices have skyrocketed in the last 20 years keeping many of the middle group of income owners from being able to buy a home most acutely in that bottom half. However, on the positive side, Blacks have moved steadily into the suburbs (with its better schools) over the last generation and now are proportionally represented in the suburbs. As Blacks move into the top half of the middle 60% going forward home ownership will increase. The housing market is really screwed up presently as corporations moved hard into ownership in many states and drove up prices beyond what the "average" income can buy. We are already seeing some decreasing prices in the West, especially the mountain west and would expect the east to follow soon. Don't know, with the cost of construction, how low it can go unless we fall into a recession which as of today doesn't look imminent. Most places have a housing shortage to add on to the problem.
It wasn't almost all African-American neighborhoods. Most red-lined neighborhoods were majority white. If you said disproportionately African-American neighborhoods, you would be correct.
You’re right. LiterateDog pointed this out in an earlier comment, and I added another paragraph to clarify that in response to his comment. Apologies for not stating it with sufficient precision the first time; there is a lot of nuance on this issue.
It sounds like you are a conservative. If so, you should appreciate the point I made, which is that redlining is not as far-reaching as the author suggests.
And yeah, agree that NPR sucks. Wikipedia doesn’t, though.
As the descendant of Scotsmen, I want reparations for WWII. Before that, Culloden. And before that, reparations for Boudica and her daughters. And reparations for Rome's conquest. After all, these bad things were done by people I didn't know TO people I didn't know, generations before I was born, and all those people are long dead. If those don't qualify me for money taken by force from people who earned it, I don't know what does.
Agree with the comments here. Slavery happened, not just in the US, but all over the world. Essentially, everyone in the world would be owed reparations. I think this is a ploy that loves to be pulled on when it's convenient.
Meanwhile, we forget to look at how the media and LEFTISTS policies continue to destroy black neighborhoods:
https://unorthodoxy.substack.com/p/the-culture-warfare-on-the-african
Love the mention about the Civil War. I've written a lot on the topic because I think ALL American's need to know the REAL reason behind it, because slavery is ONE aspect of it. I wrote about that here:
https://unorthodoxy.substack.com/p/why-esoteric-philosophy-is-vital-329
Slavery is still going on in the Middle East and parts of Africa.
Still going on in the Anglo and Euro - spheres wtf is Human Trafficking but a euphemism for slavery? Why the euphemism? One look at the any of the majority engaged in it will tell you.
Related but not synonymous. Slavers enslave, forcing kidnap victims to work for free. Human trafficking gets “product” from one owner to the next, and the victim generally gets paid to provide sex or other manual labor like restaurant work, picking crops, janitorial, maid work or servants to rich families.
Well not to nit pick but slaves had to be fed, clothed and housed. While you try to draw a distinction that trafficking victims are "paid" those funds usually go to guess what? Housing, food, and clothing. So if anything it is some form.of indentured servitude which is arguably worse because slaves were considered valuable property whereas indentured servants were disposable. It is my understanding that the mortality rates for indentured servants was higher in the America's, North and South, than for slaves.
In a way that’s like comparing the firebombing of Tokyo causing app 75000 dead in 1945 - and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima a few months later causing 90000 dead. When you compare two monstrosities - does it really matter?
it is indeed synonymous.
I think the distinction, for the United States, is that both indentured servitude and slavery were legal and protected by government but modern human trafficking is unlawful and government will prosecute the perpetrators.
It's going on here in the US as well. Here in San Diego, near the border, trafficking is big business. And, yes, it is slavery in all but name.
And I want reparations from the UK for taking my ancestor’s land and then letting them starve.
As Scott Adams said a couple years ago, Let’s look at how these descendants of slaves would have fared had they not been sold by their African relatives. Their standard of living in Africa would be far lower than what it is in America today.
You know me, off topic. Here is a story of great unsung heroism, of a time when we had heroes. Men and women of principle who would die for their principles. Where are they now?
I wish Bari would run an article on this story:
This a great story and a great leader
https://player.vimeo.com/video/198357872
Where are today’s heroes and do we have any?
Wow! That was heartbreaking and uplifting at the same time. What courageous and great men! I am sure men like that still do exist, but just like their predecessors, they don’t call attention to themselves. We may only learn of their heroic deeds after they are gone. Thanks for sharing!
I think I have seen that video before, but it brought tears to my eyes again. I wonder how many other stories of heroism went untold to family members of those WWII veterans.
beautiful video! It shows each person CAN make a difference if brave enough to stand up for what they believe! Thanks for the link.
Thanks for sharing that wonderfully heroic story!!!
How beautiful was that story, you should send it to the Yad Vashem the Israelis must put Roddie on the “Avenue of the Righteous” it’s a beautiful tree lined avenue on the grounds of the museum. Thank you for this it was a great watch.
I watched as the credits rolled and I believe he has been recognized by the Jews.
No we don’t LP
Skinny, welcome back. We have missed you.
Thank you I been reading all your posts LP, some as you can see are not worth reading let alone replying to.
(Not yours LP)
Thanks Skinny.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_March_(1945)
This, and other things, happened to my uncle. To this day I will tell Germans to their faces I'll only trust them if they are dead or my boot is on their neck.
The Ardennes Offensive of December, 1944, is one of those "Wait...WHAT?" moments of WWII. We had Ultra and Fritz had none of the advantages he'd had for Case Yellow in 1940, and yet we were caught asleep at the wheel when Fritz attacked across pretty much the same ground 4 1/2 years later.
It was sheer accident that he missed the huge gasoline and munitions depot at Stavelot, the fuel at which that would have carried the Panzers and the Landseers to their objectives; instead of having to get out of their tanks and half-tracks and walk back or be captured.
You should perhaps think about getting out of the habit of electing prize numpties President and we of putting idiots in No. 10!
You're a Limey?
It sounds like it LP. The give away is No 10, I presume our prize numptie is Brandon and No10 is Boris but I could be wrong.
Shhhh. Doesn't fit the narrative.
Hey Maureen, do you think that giving you reparations for the UK taking your ancestor’s land is different from providing reparations to an actual living African American person who say experienced humiliation and discrimination during their lifetime? I also don’t think it’s fair to talk about “standard of living” when referring to a class of people who were forcibly removed from their ancestral homelands and imprisoned as slaves.
Reparations won't fix what is ailing America's Black population. It would result in a bonanza of consumer spending without meaningful long term improvement. It would also create decades of anger and resentment among those forced to pay for harm they hadn't caused. Blacks must look within to improve their conditions, starting with good education, paternal involvement and personal responsibility. They need and deserve help, but handouts won't do the job.
The big question is would it satisfy the Black activists enough to have them stop harping about "structural racism" all the time?
If you want an answer to this, consider what happens whenever someone apologizes to a woke mob. Does the woke mob go away? Or do they redouble their efforts because they smell blood?
Rule 1 when dealing with militant Leftists... never apologize for anything.
I don't doubt what you say. It will never be enough.
The answer is "no". Nothing will stop activists from using structural racism allegations to extract benefits from the system.
I'm having trouble stopping laughing.
I highly doubt it. Maybe infinite reparations for a century or more MIGHT
Nope it won’t
I agree with some of this sentiment but education doesn't really fit on that list. Because most public school systems are funded by local property taxes, the poorest neighborhoods will continue to get the worst schools and teachers until some kind of reform is made in that area, regardless of the actions that individuals take now to improve their lot.
That is why we need school vouchers. This will break the cycle of unequal education. Here is something the left hates, competition. Vouchers would spur public schools to do better if they wanted to remain in business.
100% agree.
I'd be in favor of vouchers but only for use in other public schools, or schools that agree to have an elected school board. I don't want to pay school tax and then have no say in how the schools are run or what is taught in them, and that's exactly what happens when public monies are given to private religious schools.
I agree Matthew. Inner city public education is the civil rights issue of our era, but Democrats are so in bed with the unions that it’s a non-starter.
"Democrats are so in bed with the unions" That is an understatement.
If they are in bed with the unions it is no wonder they are... buggered.
California addressed that years ago. State funding is specifically allocated to school districts to make up for property tax inequities. Essentially all schools receive equal funding per pupil. They have some of the worst schools and lowest NEAP scores in the nation.
That is the Left definition of equality: that everyone be equally poor - Except for the Nomenklatura, any one with enough roubles/dirt or willing to suck cock of course.
Is it red meat Monday again so soon?
To empower and rebuild a Black middle class: Federally guaranteed home loans, w/no down payment, for those able to financially qualify. Private school tuition for high schoolers and university tuition for those able to pass the entrance exam, and a stipend based on need for the students attending. Add subsidized counseling services and job training for single parent homes and a UBI for grandparents raising their grandchildren.
To stop the "school to prison" pipeline and gun violence in Black communities end the war on drugs and set up a treatment focused model and, as we are attempting here, begin a new national dialogue aimed toward personal success, responsibility, family and community.
Of course, anyone here, despite the fact that the financing for many of these programs is already in place, can point to the impossibility of the idea because of the heavy investment in chaos and destruction of the Republic, being "perp'ed" by the poseur idiots of ideological utopianism and the narcissistic corporate fascists they serve. They are the antithesis of prosperous order and thriving human American culture. The Globalist DNC/EU/Davos overlay of CCP totalitarianism on free Western culture and society, unless stopped here, will continue until world economic collapse and the enslavement of free peoples every where.
The Ukraine was neck deep in money laundering and European oligarchic grift and graft long before it was exploited by the Bidens. It might be time to consider why our elected political D.C. leadership voted down oversight of the billions in tax payer dollars going into the Ukrainian proxy war with Russia. Baksheesh and the numbered account is the name of the game for the surveillance state bureaucracy and the cartel of international criminals that own it. The plight of Black America is the canary in the coal mine for the peoples of the world. You're not supposed to feel safe. Look up the number of murders on public transportation in major cities across America so far this year. Homelessness and sh!t in the streets, un-prosecuted encouraged open looting, vandalism, drug addiction, riots and murder. Welcome to your home town!!
Hey Mike - You left something important out of your 'Rebuild Black Middle Class' post: What are you going to do about the 67% of black households with no father (or father figure) in the home? Until that problem gets fixed - you're simply rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. NOTHING the government can do will fix that problem. That needs to come from Black leadership which by my observation is MIA.
"To stop the "school to prison" pipeline and gun violence in Black communities end the war on drugs and set up a treatment focused model and, as we are attempting here, begin a new national dialogue aimed toward personal success, responsibility, family and community. "
Check out the article today on Oregon's legalization of all drugs.
Not in Texas. There is an equalization method whereby funds from wealthier districts are transferred to poor districts. Also the top 10% of each graduating high school class are guaranteed admission into any Texas public university.
* Top 7% now as the state population increased. That diad there is still a instantly guaranteed spot at a university for you if you do well in class.
I love this for Texas. I love hearing stories like this that really upend silly stereotypes about how progressive or backwards any given locale or population is. Another such truth is that Texas is one of the most ethically diverse states in the union. I salute you, TX!
Having worked in a Title 1 school, what most people don’t realize is those schools typically have double the funds (coming from the federal budget) because of the demographics. Money doesn’t solve the problems for schools in communities that do not value education, administrations that deal with neighborhood issues that spill into the school daily, and a victim mindset that prevents families from seeing education as a tool for a better life. Money doesn’t change these things.
In Texas the state takes funds from weatlthy districts and "redistributes" it to lower income school districts. Regardless of wether those districts improve anything. No goals need be met I guess. People that don't care for having large percenteges of their raised funds taken call it Robin Hood.
This is why vouchers are a good idea. Parents can vote with their feet that way and schools are more likely to whip into shape with real competition. Re: funding levels though, vouchers or otherwise, I do think it only makes sense for funding to be equal on a per pupil basis barring possibly some rent/cost of living adjustments - there simply is a cost to educating a child, and that cost isn't lower because the kid lives in a poor neighborhood. If the state can mandate school attendance with truancy laws then the state has an obligation to provide consistent quality in the services they force us to consume.
Hey Big Noise - thanks for your reply. I agree with most of your sentiment; however, where I might disagree is in the case of someone like Mr Weathers. Per the article, he suffered discrimination in the housing market and in education - literal dollars were likely taken away from him or made harder to achieve. He is still alive today and no amount of educational reform or parental structure will help him recoup those loses. Would this be an example of a valid case of some form of monetary compensation?
As I posted elswehere, my white SFPD dad was passed over for promotions he earned because the dept promoted blacks with lower qualifying exam scores. He earned less and retired at a lower rank than he earned and his pension was impacted. Should he have gotten reparations? What about the other white cops similarly treated? Where should it stop?
Maureen, please don't baffle the left with facts. It just makes their heads' hurt.
That is an interesting way to put it...I’m with you most of the way I am just hung up on the fact that the injustices suffered by African Americans are rooted in enslavement and forced removal that occurred over a long time scale, which allowed for lost lasting, generational effects. Contrast this with the resulting “over correction” that occurred recently which may have resulted in reverse discrimination but hasn’t had the same impact timescale. How to account for the real injustices of the past while making sure that others aren’t discriminated upon? I didn’t think so in the past, but some form of monetary compensation could be a part of the solution.
Reminds me of the 'give the man a fish vs. teach him how to fish' adage.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Experienced humiliation. Called bad names. Walked to school three miles in knee-deep snow, uphill both ways.
Things are tough all over. Your "standard of living" today has more to do with your initiative and industry than do things that happened to long-dead people whose names you don't even know. Ask a poor white boy from the Head Of The Holler in rural Appalachia what it takes to get ahead when there are NO legs-up for you, but dozens of them for people with whom you had to compete who had the right skin tone or politically-correct genitalia.
Or ask Ray Croc, founder of McDonald's, who had over fifty - yes, FIFTY - business failures before McDonalds, what it took. Or ask Calvin Coolidge. His take? "Persistence alone is omnipotent."
Ted Roosevelt, - the man in the arena - “It is not the critic who counts, not the one who points out how the strong man stumbled or how the doer of deeds might have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred with sweat and dust and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who, if he wins, knows the triumph of high achievement; and who, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”
Here's one for you, one of my favorites:
Bullfight critics, ranked in rows, crowd the enormous plaza full.
But only one is there who knows,
And he's the man who fights the bull. ~ Domingo Ortega
Gold-Route, My great-grandparents, grandparents, still living parents , and even I, suffered plenty of humiliation and discrimination in the US (e.g., grandfather denied admission to Med school due to quotas to keep Jews out, parents/grandparents had swastikas painted on property & on their synagogues, I, as a little kid was told by my friend that her mama told her that if you pull my hair back you will find little horns growing; I, unfortunately felt ashamed and hid my Jewishness in my southern town....I could go on and on) but it was not our culture to wallow in victimhood. As long as we keep having this reparations discussion, no matter how we frame it, we, as a country, are not having the discussion we need to have.
There is no end to people who have been oppressed. The Jews, especially.
You know, everyone, absolutely everyone, has experienced humiliation and discrimination in their lifetime.
But life isn’t fair.
Hey G_R, Maureen is alive so that portion of your argument makes no sense. As for the rest of it, I can't speak for Maureen but if she is talking about the Irish, as I suspect she is, they were treated abominably. After their ancestral lands were taken they were essentially peasants who toiled for the gentry. They existed off potatoes. When the potatoe blight came along - in waves - the gentry kept taking the agricultural products and let them starve. People died with green, frothy mouthes and tongues.
from eating grass (which the human digestive system cannot break down - it takes a cow two stomaches to do so). They were not allowed to hunt or fish because the gentry owned all the land. At the time of the Potatoe Famine the population of Ireland, or Eire as we call it, was 8,000,000. Today it is 5,000,000. It was a diaspora. I read once that if you stacked all the bodies if the Irish who died coming to the States you could walk across the Atlantic. The ones who made it were subjected to "Irish Need Not Apply" signs. The Brits thereafter applied the same strategy in India and allowed a series of famines there as late as the mid- twentieth century. Less than a hundred years ago. So suffering is not limited to any particular race or ethnicity at the hands of any particular race. As for slavery, the Arabs were notorious proponents of African slavery up until very modern times, some say including the present. No reparation issues though because their slaves were not allowed to reproduce. Another thing Maureen is right about is that while Europeans absolutely engaged in and fostered the slave trade they did not venture into the African interior to do so. African slavery, all of it, began at the hands of other Africans. So while there is no doubt that some living African Americans have been treated abominably in their lifetime and I am in favor of redress it should come from the resources of those who profited and have never offered a mea culpa, much less one red cent. Like New York financiers, for example who financed the large cotton plantations. Or shipping companies who provided the transport. Or insurance companies who insured the property. Or banks who actively promoted redlining until very recently which was by no means limited to the South. But to ask taxpayers who may well be descendents of immigrants who arrived long after the end of slavery, or descendents of reconstructed southerners for that matter who already paid for their sins, to pony up is in the same vein as asking plumbers, electricians and sanitation workers to pay off student debt. IOW your position is just feel good rhetoric with very little analysis or supporting information supporting it. You know what the road to hell is paved with, right?
Edited to correct nineteenth to twentieth.
Amen, and thank you. My husband and I are both descendants of the Irish immigrants from the potato famine. We took our first trip to Ireland 10 years ago and discovered that it wasn’t overwhelmingly Catholic as we had thought, and that in the 1800’s, Catholics in Ireland weren’t allowed to vote, own property or go to public school. They were serfs basically. The pervasive idea of “Irish Catholic” seems to have grown in the US mind because that’s who the immigrants to the US were. The Irish independence movement portrayed in the movie “Michael Collins”, those guys were all Protestants. They were protesting British rule in general, not how badly they were being treated. One of the few people sympathizing with the Catholics in Ireland was Jonathan Swift, the author and Anglican cleric who was Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin. You’d think that was a Catholic church to hear its name, but you would be wrong. Anglican Protestant.
Hey Lynne, thank you for your well thought out, thorough response. There’s a lot to digest in all of these comments - a lot of good material to throw at my pre-conceptions to help me shape my view moving forward!
Thank you very much for your calm, measured tone. It is truly inspirational.
No problem, thank you. You raise some fair points that made me reconsider my position - that’s a good thing! Hope you have a good rest of your day.
Well posted
Slavery continues worldwide to this day, including in the U.S. where both labor and sex slaves are trafficked. Where’s the outrage? It’s so much easier to talk about yesterday’s injustices rather than confront today’s.
Excellent point!
Well what of so many immigrants who "spoke funny" and had hard to pronounce names, were picked on in schools, not-hired by those in power, stuck working in dirty manual labor or low-paying domestic jobs etc.? My Italian grandmother was born here, but still was called a "dirty guinea" and actually passed as French in order to get a job in Macy's! Not to mention "no Irish need apply"!!
Don't think it's fair?? Try telling that to people like Oprah Winfrey, Jay Z and the THOUSANDS of Blacks who are successful in business, entertainment, the arts, education, politics (mayor's, police Chiefs, legislators, etc etc. It comes down to CHOICES - prosper within our society or stand on the sidelines crying about the horrible injustices of 160 years ago.
You obviously don't know the history of British rule in Scotland and Ireland. Brutal doesn't quite cover it.
> an actual living African American person who say experienced humiliation and discrimination during their lifetime
From what time periods would you say that happened? For example, most black people (and a good percentage of white people - especially young ones) believe that there is still widespread "humiliation and discrimination" (TBF, there's definitely still some -- but there's also now quite a bit of legal and social discrimination against whites via DEI policies and the like, so it's not gone away).
Is it just every black person ever should receive a stipend because of perceived systematic/structural racism? Or do you create some cutoff point -- in this story, it was 1969. What's to prevent that cutoff point being moved?
have you ever been to Australia?
Great retort.
I gave a hearty guffaw reading that! Nice one.
If the goal was and is to achieve equity by breaking the cycle of generational dependency on government handouts, how is another cash handout called reparation will help break the cycle? If the idea is to help the younger generation of Black people in developing a sense of personal responsibility, obtaining better education, and an ability to stand on their own feet, cash reparation payments will do just the opposite.
Call me a white suprematism or whatever, but I have a story to share. Many years ago during recession, when I had no job, I briefly worked for a local government office. I was hired at the time when families with children diagnosed with ADHD won a class action suite and received tens of thousands of $$ in retroactive payments for their children’s disability. My job was to call mothers in and to ask how they spent the money because it was awarded strictly to purchase medical or educations supplies. 99,99% of mothers answered that they took all their kids (sometimes 5+) to Disney, bought video games and expensive snickers. True story. And I think the moral is clear. Now call me a racist.
Find me a living slave in the United States and I’ll write him or her a check myself. Last slave in America died in the 1900s, last I checked.
I think NCMaureen is highlighting the stupid here; has anyone worked out what the "benefit" to the succeeding generations has been against if they were still enslaved as their ancestors were? Looking at the thing whole without emotion and with the cold eye of Surak would probably bear a perspective no one; not even the most determined loony lefty; could not but back away from.
Using that logic, NC, generations of poor whites living in Appalachia should have been enslaved two hundred years ago - they would be better off today..
NCMaureen...I always enjoy your comments. Nobody ever mentions the tribal leaders that sold them...No blame is ever placed there. I’m so glad that he included a quote from Shelby Steele. His book, “White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era,” is an excellent read. I would much rather have his perspective because he speaks truth and common sense. He and his son, Eli, have a substack called Man of Steele’s Substack and I highly recommend it.
The Compost 2.0 guy owes all of us reparations from having to read his comments.
Someone reads his comments?
Only for occasional comic relief
And as a reminder of the insanity the U.S. is up against.
You guys are ON today!! 😎
Give them some slack; they've made two reasonably intelligent comments that I've Liked after getting up off the floor! /s :-)
When I first got a subscription to FP, I read a few of his comments. Now I scroll right past them.
He is funny NC
Compost is a useful idiot on this site. His inane posts tell the rest of us we are on the right track, i.e, "is that all you got?"
Every time he puts his broom and toilet brush down to post on this BBS, I roll my eyes.
He absolutely has never done honest work. A janitor would possess a certain level of ethics and be capable of telling the truth at least occasionally.
I have huge respect for janitors. They do honest work, usually cleaning up the messes left by a class of people who can't be bothered to clean up after themselves, and who may even believe their shit doesn't stink.
I agree, Compost has almost certainly never been a janitor.
Yeah, no kidding. Compost wishes he was as useful as is a janitor.
I apologize to janitors everywhere. I hope the woke accepts my apology.
I have since learned that compost has never worked a day in his life and has lived off welfare since he was a kid.
Don't you not walk into things a lot then? :-)
All the time and I'm sober. What part of Jolly Old do you live?
That really did make me laugh out loud.
🤣🤣🤣🤣God that was classic Kevin
Not you perhaps: if there was no Compost 2.0 and the like, you'd have to invent them or about a quarter of your material would go missing!
Yes this is why I support Compost 2.0. His presence is needed. It’s like how the US supported the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Compost is a perfect description. Made me laugh out loud 😁😆
I have Scottish too. And Irish, abused for centuries by the English and suffered egregiously from the Great Famine. I want my money!!!
Having witnessed the destructiveness of dividing a people into warring classes, the Founding Fathers, men well educated on the history of the world, wanted to avoid this kind of tribalism beyond anything else and were careful to set up our government so that everyone was equal in the eyes of the law. And of course the Democrats, progressives, and communists - but I repeat myself - understand that dividing a happy people according to race, sex, class resentments, and jealousies is the most effective way to foment the unrest and turmoil needed to destabilize a culture and provides the perfect entrê for their evil plans.
You got it, Jim. These divisive tactics re: race, class, and gender are all a means to an end for the Left. Despicable.
I think you ascribe a more nebulous motive to the Democrats than what their actual goal here seems to be.
The most immediate benefit they see to divisions like this are votes. They want to keep a voting bloc intact - my impression from dissident social media is there's some crack of red in the blue -- whether it be the "law and order" opposition to crime, the opposition to gender ideology among the black community, some opposition to vaccine/lockdown mandates, or the recent anti-immigration sentiment you see coming out of inner cities. There was some pretty solid Democratic support among black voters in 2020 after the "summer of love," and reparations are the new carrot they want to dangle for 2024.
The other immediate benefit they see is money. Inflation/wealth redistribution (which is exactly what reparations are) serves corporate entities, especially in certain industries like retail, entertainment, and technology. The idea of someone working hard and saving money instead of spending it is very much the opposite of modern capitalism, which wants us to continue spending money. They think that giving people a lot of money will have them spending it right away - which it will.
A less tangible benefit is that it agrees with their belief systems about systematic/structural inequities. They want to redistribute wealth because many of them simply were taught that's a Good Thing.
You can probably ascribe some additional motives that align with some WEF great resets, Marxism, cultural destabilization, etc, etc. But to the Dem lawmakers at a local level, that's not really on their radar.
LOL...................you mean the slave owning founding fathers??????????
The ones that set up a system of democracy that allowed for representation from white, land owning males????????? You can do better.............
In the study of history, the unfailing mark of a wet-behind-the-ears amateur is his judgment of historical figures by contemporary standards.
I think Dave is comprof. They both use LOL a lot.
Nope. Not me. Although Dave is exactly right re: Founding Fathers.
Objectively accurate history....except in PragerU Florida.
LOL.............no just reacting to your statement. Might want to reread yours again.
"were careful to set up our government so that everyone was equal in the eyes of the law."
The eyes of people are not always the same as the eyes or the law.
A clean kill.
How many nations had outlawed slavery at the time our Declaration was signed? Exactly one.
Dolt.
Yes, white England. It is still practiced in black Africa today.
And in states run by the Religion of Peace. The same liberals who whine the US is a brutal racists country love the Religion of Peace that practice slavery today. The all black Sudan is run by the Religion of Peace. Just a few years back they raided Christian villages slaughtering everybody except women and children whom they took as slaves.
The snowflakes/woke/PC are vile assholes trying to destroy this country and drive it into the ground.
England didn't abolish slavery until nearly 50 years after the Declaration of Independence. If it was outlawed anywhere in 1776, I'm not aware of it.
Sorry, slavery was abolished in Britain in 1833.
Had they? I thought that wasn’t until 1834.
England did not abolish the trade in slaves until 1807. They didn't abolish slavery until 1833.
But that nation did so only in Britain and continued to profit from it from it, arguably to this day.
Settled English law since at least Elizabeth I; you couldn't be a slave on English soil, famously restated in 1772. Something happened almost immediately afterwards but I can't quite bring it to mind. /s
Minor correction England; Ireland; Scotland; and Wales make four. ;-)
Funny. A nation that enslaved several continents as well as running brutal slave colonies in the West Indies. Nope.
Which one?
But I like how it was repurposed into Segregation/Jim Crow and the national support of regional apartheid states thereby preventing the U.S. from becoming a legitimate democracy until 1965.
Could you do better? Stop acting like an ignoramus and learn to appreciate what the Founding Fathers accomplished. It isn’t easy to create a new nation. A nation that is just. Lots of blood, tears and sweat went into it. Now progressive barbarians like you want to destroy it. Cover up or change history, judge it by today’s standards without learning it first. Sound bites and clever trolling are for losers.
"Cover up or change history, judge it by today’s standards without learning it first."
As a non-ingnoramus you should be able to understand that whereas the FF accomplished a great deal indeed, that does not mean that what they failed to accomplish cannot be discussed. Let's be honest. "All men are created equal" is a noble sentiment but it was no where near what they achieved. And they knew it too and didn't pretend otherwise.
"All men are created equal" is simply lies. We are neither "created" or "equal" when we come into being.
Slaves were only owned in the South, weren't they? John Adams didn't own any slaves. Neither did John Hancock.
And if you possess the historical knowledge to look around the world in 1776, what are you comparing the United States to? For example, were blacks treating other blacks from different tribes magnanimously in Africa? Was there harmony and peace, representative government, statutary rights, and effective means to petition for redress of grievances?
Only a system better than you deserve could enable you to be so publicly idiotic and flamboyantly ignorant.
Actually I believe there were also slaves up north, and for sure there were blacks who owned slaves.
It’s not cut and dried.
Yes, slavery was legal in the northern states, except for Vermont which as a colony banned slavery in 1777 (it became a state in 1791).
The other northern states began banning slavery in 1780. By 1805, all of the northern states had either completely ended slavery or had initiated a process by which it would end.
My point was that the "Founding Fathers" were the polar opposite of a uniform, homogeneous group, other than being white males. Jefferson, Franklin and Washington were not even really Christians.
And slave owning was never common up North, which is why it was the South that was screaming about counting slaves in the 3/5ths Compromise.
To my mind, if you want to speak about history, you should understand a bit about it.
You're right.
George Washington owned 124 slaves: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington_and_slavery
He was also the first President in the first major nation in human history not founded on the arbitrary rule of unelected tyrants. You are free today because he did his job well and honorably.
And we both know, don't we, that as an abject conformist you would have made no public objections to slavery when it was difficult?
They STILL use slaves in much of Africa, so quite obviously there is no link between whiteness and slavery. In point of fact, the word slave is derived from Slav, and references a time when most slaves were white.
Nor is the Left REALLY concerned with slavery per se, are they? They are not fighting it in any way where it still exists. If principle were involved, they obviously would be. This is all just mind breaking gobbledy-gook peddled by simpletons for other simpletons, and overseen by crooks and deviants.
It would seem to me you are quoting out of a propagandistic coloring book, and operating at a grade school level. By all means, though, if you have an intelligent and relevant point to make, then please make it. Prove me wrong. Put me in my place through the dedicated operation of wisdom, knowledge and superior rationality.
What about the land controlled by blacks in Africa who sold black's to the rest of the world and are still doing that today?
Okay good point we should try communism.
Haha
I make a point of putting my mug down when I spy your comments! :-)
Evidently you don't realize that in Britain, only landowners were allowed to vote at the time the Constitution was written.
Stop with the straw men arguments. Again, look at the statement made that I was responding too. What was posted was clearly not factual. As to the history, I taught it to undergraduates, so I am well aware.
I think I see one of the reasons our students in this country aren't doing very well.
You were mocking the idea (put forward by Jim Wills) that our Founders--all of whom were white men and some of whom owned slaves--did not want a country where people had rights only according to hereditary class. That they were sufficiently educated in the history of government to know how badly democracy can go wrong. That they were well aware that only a hundred and some years previously, England had experienced a civil war due to divisions among the English people. That they set up a government based on the rule of law, in which all men were, in theory, equal.
That was a genuinely revolutionary concept. The fact that they did not immediately extend all the benefits of those rights to women and slaves (something that had not yet been done anywhere) does not lessen that vision or weaken that accomplishment.
It is not a straw man to point out that their ideas of who should have the privilege of voting came directly from Britain (the nation of which they had very recently been a colony).
Actually it was factual. Their understanding of "men" was different than the modern use. It did not include women either but the modern use does. To their mind they were greatly expanding freedom and they set up a system to pave the way for ever-expanding freedom. That is admirable. Your problem is that you fault them for not setting up an ideal or perfect world.
No. The ones who set up a system that provided a way out of slavery.
So there was no Civil War?
There was but the system the founding father's created via the Constitution is what ultimately granted the slaves freedom. It wasn't Sherman or his orders.
They doing every thing to destabilizing our country but Americans are strong we not going to let them the fight back as begun!
My Latvian grandmother fled her native land in 1916 fearing a Russian invasion which subsequently happened. Her father lost their farm and potato mill operation and arrived in the USA penny-less after an arduous trip to England to finally get on a boat across the Atlantic. It never occurred to me that the injustice of her young life would or could be compensated. All the strife our immigrant families suffered was just accepted as ‘bad fortune’, but arriving in America was ‘a second chance’.
The early LDS were driven from the state of Missouri in the 1830s by an "Extermination Order" issued by the governor himself. The governor of Illinois promised protection, but did not give it, with the result that the Mormons were forced to flee to the far West, outside the boundaries of the United States.
After the U.S. gained that territory in the Mexican-American War (in which a battalion of Mormons fought, ironically, on the side of the U.S.), an army was sent to Utah for the purpose of wiping out the Mormons if it was deemed necessary. Fortunately, it was apparently not deemed necessary.
But the Edmonds Act of 1882 was enacted specifically to allow the persecution of the LDS people on the basis that they believed in polygamy (which was not illegal at the point when they began believing in it). One need not actually participate in polygamy (only a fraction of Mormon men actually had plural wives); merely being a member of the church was enough be denied the right to vote, hold public office, or serve on juries in federal territories. As late as 1905, a Senator from Utah was denied his seat, despite not being a polygamist.
In spite of all that clearly unConstitutional mistreatment by the government, the LDS people made the desert of Utah blossom with a functional and largely self-sufficient economy.
And a family-centric culture as well..
I go to Utah often as my son now resides there. It's a wonderful place. I have done a lot of historical reading about Utah. While much of the history you provide is accurate, forgetting the Mountain Meadow Massacre is a common occurrence among LDS members. As is imagining that the US Army set out to slaughter the Mormons. The actual Utah War, never was fought in any conventional sense, except for a few small skirmished and few soldiers were killed. The Mormons cut off supplies to the US Army effectively and that combined with a late summer march from Kansas and with the winter arriving resulted in the army heading back. The majority of the killing happened at Mountain Meadow where 125 immigrants were lied to and then killed by the Mormons as they passed through the territory to California. The Mormons blamed the killings on Indians.
The Utah War was really a comedy of errors from both sides. The federal government sent troops to facilitate the new governor after Brigham Young was fired from the post. They had no intention of attacking the Mormons. While Brigham Young was told they were on their way to take over the territory and move the Mormons out.
The federal government was most concerned that the governor of the territory was head of the church and said he would put the church doctrine ahead of the federal government's laws and regulations. Polygamy was indeed a concern also, with about 1/3rd of Mormon women involved in the practice. Mormon's were understandably paranoid given how much hatred and violence they had been a victim of. This was the stew that led to the killing of innocents at Mountain Meadows.
And again you try to pretend that you know history!
I have not forgotten the Mountain Meadows Massacre. The wagon train that ended up being attacked had people in it who were openly boasting of having murdered Mormons in Missouri and Illinois. They were also boasting that Johnston's Army would, in fact, wipe out the Mormons.
Attacking the wagon train was a shameful occurrence, but in the circumstances, it is not surprising that people who had been driven violently out of place after place took an opportunity to engage in what must have seemed like vigilante justice--the only kind they were likely to ever get with the U.S. Army closing in.
BEFORE the Army was sent, mail service to Utah was cut off. It was not surprising that the Mormons feared the worst. And the Army WAS sent to put down the resistance Buchanan fully believed the Mormons would put up to having Brigham Young replaced as their governor. Indeed, well before the replacement governor reached Salt Lake City, he set up a grand jury and indicted Brigham Young and 60 other LDS leaders for treason--a capital offense.
Rather than meaningfully resisting militarily (although they did their best to slow down the Army with attacks on supplies), the Mormons intended to burn their towns and flee southward. The buried the newly laid foundations of the Salt Lake Temple to protect them from being destroyed by the invading Army, in case they should ever be able to return.
Even when a rough peace was cobbled together out of the "comedy of errors," Utah became a territory under military occupation. That did not change until the Civil War drew the occupying troops away to where they were actually needed.
So many of us are the progeny of ancestors who left difficult circumstances to get to the promised land or as my ancestors referred to it, the Medina. I am forever grateful for their determination to find a better life here.
Yes 🙏🏻 gratitude
Don’t even get the Polish started
Why does it take 4.5 hours to clean the windows of a one story building in Poland?
Because it takes half an hour to clean the windows and four hours to dig the hole for the ladder.
Back in my ‘youth’ Polish jokes were everywhere. Being Polish, I gave them nary a thought. I knew we were smarter than everyone else (had a proud Polish father). But we were American first.
Ah yes, "Polish" jokes (not the exact term that was used back then.} My brother-in-law, from a Polish-American family, laughed as heartily as anyone at them. For some reason, he did not take offense, perhaps because his family had come from nothing to create a very successful homebuilding company in post-World War II America.
I’m of Swedish Norwegian descent so my dad bombarded us with Sven and Ole jokes growing up.
One thing I will say for Poland is that the Polish girls I tend to see on Instagram are representing the nation well.
And pierogies
I’m gonna agree heartily agree with you on that Kev. :)
The Jewish standup comics of the last century would have had no material if they could not make fun of their immigrant parents and relatives.
True that.
Nice
When I woke up this morning I did not know I was going to need bagpipe jokes. I don’t have any.
😭😭🙏🙏
I'm part Scottish as is my wife. Her 5 brothers are all pipers, and I love the music,
Here's a few
Why do bagpipers march while playing?
To get away from the sound.
What is the difference between a bagpipe and an onion?
No one cries when you chop up a bagpipe.
What is the difference between a lawnmower and a bagpipe?
You can tune a lawn mower.
What is the definition of a gentleman?
Someone who knows how to play the bagpipes and doesn't.
Joe Biden was the best bagpiper at Oxford and he was first in his class.
Was that when he played with Corn McPop?
I am lol-ing!!!
I've got a great McGregor joke I can share. It kills.
and all of the irish limericks. there was a young lady from...
I didn’t know modesty was part of your character. I’m impressed.
Don't forget the 1920 Dublin massacre where the Bristish troops opened fire on a unarmed crowd. Fourteen people were killed including children.
I have Irish relatives. The woke left should be with me on this because it causes me anguish, discomfort and pain. Where is my money?
None of that makes up for the Stewarts; Gordon Brown; or Wee Crankie and her Weans, and Bairns.
Exactly. How far back does this logic extend?
The fact that any policy makers are giving g any real thought to the idea of reparations is the result of our terrible history education in America. Americans only ever learn American history, so it’s no surprise that they believe that racism, slavery, colonialism, and all things horrific started the day a white man stepped foot in North America. If we would teach kids world history, we’d all know that this has been going on from the beginning of time. And the logical extension of that knowledge is the realization that we can’t fix the past with cash handouts today.
It's a little like a nuclear bomb - all you need is to have to have the right ingredients arranged in the right way at the right time. Today young American citizens - with the worst educations in the history of the planet, ignorant of even the fundamentals of how this Experiment works, susceptible to the most transparently fallacious arguments - are at least in titular control of a political system that requires for operation not only intellect but knowledge - being led by the noses by well-educated individuals of evil intent. All the ingredients for the Bomb to end that Experiment.
And yet we have Substack, blogs like The Free Press, and readers like you - and we are gaining strength and influence every day. We Just May Make It.™
I like, but don't always share, your sense of optimism.
No but we can sure keep people dependent on the state and buy some votes, again.
White man bad.
Logic? You found logic? Where?
Hell with that. As a descendant of Europeans with Neandertal genes, I want reparations for the genocide of my ancestors. Which, because I carry mostly modern African genetics, would involve me paying reparations to myself. Where does the idiocy end?
Good point. Soooo.....how does this work for, let's say, Hussein Obama? Do his white half pay his black half? Since his white mother and grandmother did all the work and bore the expense of getting him educated, maybe his sperm-donor (biological-only) father, who just bedded the old girl and then bounced back to his wife in Kenya, providing zero resources thereafter, should pay.
Why would he be owed any reparations, since his ancestors were never American slaves?
Yep. Really a can of worms, isn't it? Surely we have other, more important, fish to fry.
"Do his white half pay his black half?"
No, no, NO! You don't understand Identity. If Obama Identifies as Black then he is 100% Victim. Stop bringing your White racism into it. Just as biology has nothing to do with Gender, so it has nothing to do with Race-Identity.
Heads I win, tails you loose.
Yup.
What about Octaroons, i.e., people of 1/8 African descent? Will they get a paid?
I too would like some raparations. As the descendant of a woman I never had votings rights, land rights, ownership rights until the 1900's...heck, I was a man's property and he could beat me if he chose to. There were juries I was excluded from well into the 1970's! And while we're at it, I'm also LDS and I have ancestors who were driven from their lands and Missouri passed a law saying they could kill us on sight. I'd also like some of that Scotsmen raparation money, as I have Scots ancestors. Give me a minute and I'll think of some more.
I don't mean to be flippant but let's continue to move forward and improve our culture and ourselves as we have been doing. I also want to point out that the article did mention, once, the disintegration of the family, which, to me, is a root cause of a lower socio-economic situation and I'll say what everyone is thinking...why does he have 4 kids and one on the way and a fiance and not a wife??! Statistics show that marriage, stability (both financial and otherwise) before kids create an environment of success for those children...not reparations. Put that money in better education for those kids and FIX THE SWIMMING POOL!
Yes. There's no end to the good you can do with other people's money.
Ha...good one!
I thought the same thing about his 4-5 kids. And then thought, he shouldn't have that many kids if he can't afford them. No one should.
I think all Scotsmen should pay reparations to the Irish for doing England’s dirty work in Ireland.
And there you have it. This is how dividing people works in the neverending quest to be king of the grievance hill. The great Thomas Sowell cuts right to the heart of it, viz: "No one can really understand the political left without understanding that they are about making themselves feel superior, however much they may talk piously about what they are going to do to help others."
They had no choice. They were slaves of imperialism themselves. The English military always made sure to maximise Scottish casualties, a species of genocide (incluing women left without spouses and children). Don't forget how Edward Bruce (Robert's brother) saved Ireland from annihilation by the English in 1319-20. Many Scots clansfolk helped the Irish resist the English in Elizabethan times. Don't generalise.
I'm sure he's being sarcastic, but also remember many of those original Highlanders were once Irish themselves, having come over from what is now Ulster.
True, though you have to add Pictish and to a lesser extent Norse admixture in Scotland itself. Eventually the whole country ended up being manipulated and abused by greater powers.
Aye, but they make great whisky.
“If you ask me theoretically, ‘Are reparations justified?’ The answer is yes. There’s not much question,” the former president [Obama] said.
Meaning: "But PRACTICALLY...."
America can never repay. It's an outstanding debt of indeterminate value and "currency."
Moreover, Africa owes more, for having sold its own children into slavery. (The Bible doesn't put much blame on the caravaners who took Joseph into Egypt as a slave, but rather on his brothers.)
And finally, we still have slavetraders, vying to broker the sale (reparations), and get rich in the process.
The fact that no one in Evanston who voted for reparations bothered to think about how the city would PAY for them illustrates very clearly and painfully the childish mentality of the Left. Only children (and Leftists) think that they should be able to have anything they want, regardless of the cost. To them, money comes out of thin air.
It's a Cargo Cult. It's politicians promising winning lottery tickets that never materialize.
Don’t worry Jim. Relax. It ain’t gonna happen. No ten trillion of anything on reparations will be spent. It’s what we call a trial balloon - as in let’s float this monstrous idea out there to see the response. After the laughter and indignation dies down, as in sites like this one, it quietly fades. Now I know that the ‘evil’ Dems are everywhere, including under your carpet and in your glove box, but don’t worry - this is such a nonstarter than even an avowed communist progressive like Newsom is walking away. Perhaps we can talk about Scotland’s independence movement. Now that has more traction.
Say what? Wha' 'choo talkin' 'bout, Willis? Can you somehow tie all that together?
Yeah, something like that. Do people talk like that in Scotland?
The real tragedy is that American blacks are still being treated like children.
We’re talking about reparations as a way to help blacks, but the only way to really help them would be to encourage the nuclear family in their community.
The black family survived slavery and Jim Crow, but it was the loving hand of government that killed it.
Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan warned about the risk of destroying the black family structure in the 1960's due to social policies that would encourage women on public assistance to raise families without fathers. His analysis turned out to be prophetic. Over 50% of black children don't live with a father in their household.
While I am in total agreement that it is best for children to live in two parent families, the amount of children living in single parent families is rising across all groups. Currently 75% of white children, 69% of Hispanic Children, 43% of Black children live in two parent families with all groups seeing a downward trend over the last generation. So, this is not the result of poverty or the cause of general poverty. However, it is a very concerning factor with regards to the health and well being of our children.
We're going to have to rely on our Asians to take care of the rest of us as everyone else shirks their responsibility for raising the next generation.
Considering the divorce rate among whites at around 38% and blacks at approx 42% - I think fatherless households are roughly equivalent no matter if one is white or black.
Divorce rates may be similar but you need to look at births in wedlock. Over 70% of black children are born to single moms. So there are proportionally way less black marriages to start with.
Fair point.
There’s something to be said for ‘personal agency’ no matter the odds and environment.
Coleman Hughes wrote a great piece for Quillette that analyzed the cultural and behavioral differences that play into the wealth discrepancies between races. https://quillette.com/2018/07/19/black-american-culture-and-the-racial-wealth-gap/
Nice Coleman Hughes essay. I like Coleman Hughes and his writing. That said, I'd quibble with some of his 'facts' but his thesis is right on the mark. He says that 25% of Southerners owned slaves; most historians believe that 5% did. He also says in the South substantial wealth was 'inherited'; that's just false. The Civil War decimated the Southern economy and it's destruction by the North was intentional. It took almost a hundred years for it to reemerge as a viable economy, some areas doing better than others. The majority of people living in the USA today are descendants of immigrants who arrived post-1890, many arriving with nothing to their name. (My own ancestors left behind everything they owned no matter where they were from - Latvia, Ireland, Scotland - that is, if they owned anything in their home country). In the USA, people who inherit money do so because they have relatively stable families over decades, with one generation giving to the next. But stuff can also happen and when dysfunction is introduced - alcohol, drugs, immorality, divorce etc - it can destroy generational wealth. (Even religion can upset the apple cart. In my own family, the largest fortune was made in 19th century granite & monument works in the New England area. One relative gave her entire fortune to the Catholic Church is the 1950's!). Hard work and family cohesiveness looms large as one of the greatest factors in 'wealth formation'. You're a lucky person indeed if you're family has kept the thread going.
Coleman's discussion on spending and consumption disparities ring true. I have lived in NYC for 35 years after 20 years of a 'thrifty New England' upbringing. When I was young, I literally had kids in my class who wore rags. But any NY subway, on a daily basis one can observe ghetto kids with the latest phones, sneakers and backpacks, far better outfitted than what I observed as a kid. During Covid, one had to line up to shop in Soho where the tony shops like Prada, MARNI etc are located. It was jaw dropping to see dozens of primarily black kids dressed up in the latest gear worth thousands and thousands of dollars each. It was a stunning sight as least for me. I have not denied my kids anything, but I would not indulge them in such a gross display of consumption (and they know it and have incorporated my thriftiness in their own adult lives today).
Correct about the postwar South - povertyville USA for nearly a century (for whites and blacks).
It is ironic that the same liberals who wax on about reparations are pushing policies that overwhelmingly hurt the poor and blacks even today. Justice Kennedy's comment from the 90's is a perfect illustration: "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life." While maybe great for a Harvard Law grad who has the drive and ability to seize every opportunity, most people are neither qualified to not interested in doing this. Most of us want a stable (culturally, geographically, economically) location in which to raise a family. Yet the liberal consensus in Washington has been tearing that down for decades: the Right on economics; the Left on culture; and both in geography.
Meanwhile, while wealthy, white, liberal elites preach "defund the police" and "sleep around" and "history is racist" through every institution they control, they teach their own kids very differently.
Don't forget the war on drugs pushed by conservative elites which incarcerated a good portion of the black males in poor communities. That along with the crazy idea that you can house 1000s of impoverished people in large complexes isolated from the rest of the city and not get insular deviant behavior. Creating "The Projects" was part of the Roosevelt's New Deal and combined with the drug wars to create the environment for what we see today.
This woiñf certainly strengthen the black community, but these are also the hardest things to do. I am convinced, the only way to change culture is to shame it. Until that happens nothing will change, unfortunately.
Great point, Sophia! It is NOT the skin color, per se, that is the problem today. Nor is it "white supremacy" (a bogeyman that never dies). It is a culture borne out of prison culture and the pathology of drugs and gangs that has been glorified and spread by music culture and as a protest against past social sins. The "War on Poverty" and the expansion of the welfare state, with its family killing requirements, is the real villain.
Smart black kids who do well in school are taunted by their peers for "acting white."
There’s a great podcast - I think hosted by Kmele Foster - where Thomas Sowell (mentioned above in comments) talks about this very issue.
Yes, rap and the macho culture.
Shame is a potent remedy! Great point.
Shame has been a very powerful force throughout human history.
You are not entirely wrong.
I have been mystified for years at the destruction of the black family AFTER slavery and Jim Crow.
You look back and you cannot help but admire the grit and determination it took to survive those things and keep families and communities intact.
Then along comes the war on poverty and the great society and all of a sudden you see this incredible decline. Why?
There are times, in my most cynical moments, when I think that Lyndon Johnson and that whole crew of democrats from the 1960's and 1970's knew what they were doing, and the erosion of the black family and black communities was planned with buying black votes a bonus. Its almost like they knew they were going to poison them with sugar.
Didn't he say something like: "We'll have those niggers voting Democrat for the next 100 years." ?
He did. Sadly, I think he was right.
Also, "These Negroes, they're getting pretty uppity these days and that's a problem for us since they've got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we've got to do something about this, we've got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference."
That quote alone tells you everything you need to know about Johnson's intentions in "helping" black people.
Questionable. Tracks back to a single source; and what is actually on record belies it.
I don't doubt that LBJ knew exactly what he was doing.
See my reply above. The New Deal is what created the projects and that combined with the drug wars pushed mostly by conservatives created what we see today. By the time Johnson arrived on the scene the Black family had already been harmed.
The black family was split up across different plantations - husband and wife and children sent to different masters. Strengthening the family is key to success but we can’t pretend slavery didn’t contribute.
Thomas Sowell (90+ year old legendary black economist) does an excellent job of debunking the notion that the breakdown of the black family was a legacy of slavery. It’s an attractive and intuitive idea but not supported by facts.
Black columnist Jason Riley of the Wall Street Journal also disabuses the fact that the black community has always been in turmoil since slavery. He cites pre-1960’s statistics when blacks had higher employment rates, lower divorce rates than whites and far more stability than inner city black life today. Seems like LBJ’ ‘Great Society’ giveaway and new welfare laws which created dependency did quite a bit of harm.
I agree. And sadly, the programs that create government dependency are causing poor results in rural/rust belt white communities today as well. Bad policy and poor cultural choices (undervaluing education, having children early and out of wedlock) increasingly impact both American blacks and whites. We need to have a real conversation about what values and actions result in success or failure. I think economist Glenn Loury’s concept of Social Capital is spot on and needs to be a part of this conversation.
Aye. Charles Murray talks about this in his book Coming Apart.
The "Bell Curve" guy? You have to wonder. If there were a Stupidity Quotient, I wouldn't be surprised if Democratic Party voting, and the majority of Independent, White Americans scored 90 or less.
Jim Howes, sounds interesting- do you have a link? (And Thomas Sowell doesn’t need an intro)
Yes, black families were split up by slavery. And they were grieved by that. And they sought to get back together again when slavery ended.
It only took a few decades for Democrats to destroy even the *desire* to keep black families together. Welfare removed black men from the family picture just as effectively as slave-owners ever did.
Slavery was outlawed 165 years ago. Sorry.
Try harder.
Outlawed isn't the same as ended. It took several years after the emancipation proclamation for slavery to end.
I was responding to “The black family survived slavery and Jim Crow, but it was the loving hand of government that killed it.”
Try reading harder.
You said "Strengthening the family is key to success but we can’t pretend slavery didn’t contribute." Again, that was many generations in the past. And nobody alive today owned slaves in America.
Try writing coherently.
Before LBJ's Great Society 75% of black children were born to married parents and had a father to help raise the children. Because of the rules of welfare more than 72% of all black babies are born out of wedlock and there is no male presence to help raise the children.
Is that because of slavery or bad left wing policy designed to keep the black communities "in their place" and to keep voting for the Socialist Party?
Other than getting almost 60,000 American boys killed and destroying the futures of black kids in our nation, did LBJ do anything useful?
And many blacks are still on plantations created by their democrat masters - inner cities on government 'assistance' payed by all races. See how that is working out by visiting:
heyjackass.com
Black families were not always split up. A number of slaveholders endeavored to keep them together often forming their own enclaves. Thomas Jefferson had generations of families living together; those who left, Sally Hemings brother for instance, did it so on their own volition after being freed. It’s impossible to generalize the ‘slave experience’ as there was lots going on and situations differed.
Wow..it’s a jungle out there. Thanks for the link!
If reparations are ever granted, there also needs to be a credit totaling the social benefits already paid out, section 8 housing, welfare, food stamps, Medicaid etc.
When you stop and think even for just 10 seconds, you see how risible their arguments are.
This will certainly strengthen the black community, but these are also the hardest things to do. I am convinced, the only way to change culture is to shame it. Until that happens nothing will change, unfortunately.
Shaming will cause further rebellion. Convincing an entire population that education would be beneficial is more difficult but necessary. That education must include valuing family and excepting that work is the way to maintain your life. All crime must be punished until people realize that committing a crime will land them in jail.
Which means breaking the power of the teachers unions and serpents such as Randi Weingarten.
If teachers were paid and treated fairly, there would be no need for a teachers union. If the union would act on the teachers behalf when students cause problems in the classroom, a union would be useful. Otherwise the teachers union and most if not all unions only serve to perpetuate themselves. You can't reform employers, so until then, some sort of organization is needed to protect workers. I was in a union for many years and the only thing that they did was, if you paid your dues, they protected you from them. It's a difficult problem without an easy solution.
From the Newark NJ BOE website "For the 2022-23 school year, the starting salary for a teacher with a Bachelor’s in the Newark Board of Education is $62,000, starting salary for a teacher with a Master’s degree is $64,000, and starting salary for a teacher with a Doctorate is $66,000. Teachers with more experience can earn more than $100,000!"
Speaks volumes.
Starting salary in FL. $44,000. They are listed as the 14th highest in the US and it's all downhill from there. If you're going to talk about numbers you have to look at all the states. No one becomes a teacher in public education to build wealth.
And invest in infrastructure for poor neighborhoods across America
You mean like public housing? Because that worked out so well.
Not public housing because we know how much of a disappointment that has become, but real infrastructure to improve quality of life in impoverished neighborhoods. Public libraries, schools, venues, improved street lights, better roads, etc. In poor neighborhoods you’ll have no problem finding a 7-11 but where are the grocery stores? Coffee shop/Internet cafes? Poor neighborhoods often get seen as unattractive for business and as I see it the reason is a lack of care by city planners and public agencies. There’s never a problem with investing in a well lit park for an affluent neighborhood. But drive down the poor part of town and it’s so dark and unattractive you won’t want to stop anywhere even if there was somewhere to stop.
You do have to put a lot more thought into the matter; but Daniel is right in the bald statement.
The fact that this ridiculous idea of reparations is even entertained is complete insanity. There is no way on God's green earth that it could be implemented fairly. It would result in a downward spiral of greed, resentment and suffering and destroy the country.
Then again, I think that is the goal of those that are behind it.
It doesn’t stop there. An article today in the Epoch Times features a Princeton scientist and an MIT scientist demonstrating with data, not hyperbole, how global warming morphed into “climate change” primarily as an enrichment scheme for a group of hoaxers, I would provide the link, but it’s paywalled.
I’m a subscriber to ET so kindly post the link. (Consider subscribing; they’re one of the few newspapers bucking the trend).
https://www.theepochtimes.com/business/two-princeton-mit-scientists-say-epa-climate-regulations-based-on-a-hoax-5460699?utm_source=share-btn-copylink
You can read the article for free in exchange for supplying an e-mail address. I read it and learned something new: that beyond a certain point, increased CO2 in the atmosphere has little additional warming effect due to saturation. I also recommend the article!
Once more with feeling!
CO2 is plant food; by far and away the leading "Greenhouse Gas" is water vapour; and while this stupid has been floated, an area more than twice the Amazon Basin has greened.
You can also read the article for free by turning off Javascripts in your browser. Brave can do this, I know. I'm sure others can. It works for most paywalls.
Or you can just click on the audio which will read it to you.
I humbly bow to your technical knowledge. I know what a browser is, but I lost it beyond that 😂
https://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000891.htm
JavaScript can be a good thing, so you might not want to do this permanently. I, like many others, use more than one browser, with each set up for different use cases.
Which is why one shouldn’t pay attention to Barack Obama who was for both Affirmative Action and Reparations. That man couldn’t lead his people out of a manicured, well trod park path.
Disagree with your last sentence, Bill. Are the leftists proposing this lunatics? Probably. But its being thrown out there to test the reaction. Their goal is to find out what you think. Not to destroy the country, at least not deliberately. It’s as if you have a car worth five grand, but you ask for twenty five. You’re sneered at and you drop it to six.
Nothing is going to happen here.
“But then, he said, his caseworker got him on the straight and narrow, and he got a job driving a forklift.”
———————————————————
I like this story for two reasons. First, because ‘driving a forklift’ is my go-to job suggestion for what most of the people who go to college should actually be doing. I don’t think I’ve ever referenced Nicole Hannah Jones or Jake Sullivan without mentioning that they should really be driving a forklift.
I also like it because during COVID when there was rioting and looting going on with Democrats explaining how it’s happening because there’s no hope and the rioters just need food and have been stripped of opportunity, and there was literally a billboard not far from my house advertising warehouse positions (forklift driver) that paid $27/hr starting wage with no experience necessary.
The local McDonald’s also has a big sign offering starting pay at $25/hr. And when will there be reparations for the victims of unconstitutional affirmative action programs?
I think at McDonalds you basically just have to show up consistently for 18 months before you are made the manager.
i'll wager its less than that, probably closer to 3 months. so many businesses are short-staffed because no one wants to work other than their pipe dream of being the next tiktoc star/influencer. so many places have shortened hours because there is no one to work them, let alone manage the place. well, at least what i'm seeing and hearing in my neck of the desert.
In England I know of a ouple of instances where folk have had McDonalds jobs while homeless and sleeping in-store.
I’d take such a job. But probably in my part of the country it’s a union job and impossible to get into without knowing someone.
“But probably in my part of the country it’s a union job”
——————————————-
I just tried to picture the Randi Weingarten of forklifts and I am now vomiting.
You’d need a forklift or two to actually get her fat ass into a classroom and teach kids…
But that is the WHITE man's solution! Meaningful work?
When I was working my way through college on the G.I Bill in the 70s, I had a part time job driving a forklift (and a truck) for a ferrule manufacturing company. I made peanuts, but I still have fond memories of that job.
I think you should have gone for it. Is that billboard still up? I think I will. I even know what a forklift looks like.
I know that many of them operate on propane. That’s the extent of my forklift knowledge. $40/hr please thanks.
So I make $27/hr. And you charge me $40.
Sounds like socialism to me.
“Reparations, Clegg said at last, would “give my kids a different life.””
————————————————————-
No, it would not. Well, okay, ‘different’ but not better.
I guess the main argument against the reparations discussion is that it gives people a false hope and Powerball mentality. Not quite as poisonous as the ‘diffuse inescapable white supremacy is holding you down’ discussion; but still not great.
Unless we are going to argue that Black Americans are a superior and more moral class of human beings, giving people cash basically never fixes their problems. The more cash you give usually the worse it goes.
The Great Society welfare programs were reparations. Trillions so far.
My father was a cop in SF in the 1960s. One night he came home from work, and over dinner he described the “projects” he went into that day. Garbage in the hallways, graffiti, urine smelling elevators, he shook his head and said the taxpayers paid for those buildings, look how these people destroy them. He said people don’t appreciate something unless they earn it. I was ten, I never forgot that conversation.
PS--and I won’t forget the fact that black cops were promoted ahead of my father back in the 1970s, even when he scored higher on qualifying exams. Reverse discrimination was happening even back then.
“He said people don’t appreciate something unless they earn it.”
This statement-so true. I have seen people of all colors and walks of life demonstrate this over and over.
Check out first year night school class at a community college and a first year day class at a university and this theory is glaringly obvious. People appreciate what they have to work for and they work for things that are worth it.
When I taught English at the local community college, it was the "non-trad" students (people who had been working since high school) who were my best students, because they appreciated the opportunity they were getting. Kids fresh out of high school were often too involved in their social life and their feelings to make much of an effort; college was just "more school."
Considering that I had the same experience--didn't do well in college the first time, despite having been a straight-A student, but returned later to finish my B.A. and get my M.A.--I was not all surprised by any of this.
Yep. I got an A.A., B.S., and M.B.A. all as a non-traditional student and by far the best experience was the AA at my local community college. Night and weekend classes had students who were serious about school and the quality of professors and instruction was by far superior. The professors were actually invested in their students’ success and went above and beyond to ensure their classes were successful. Many of them actually worked at the bigger name state universities and liberal arts colleges in town by day and taught classes at the community college by night.
My daughter was not much of a student in HS. She couldn't get into a four-year college, so she went to a local community college where she learned how to study. After two years, she transferred to a good university and got her BA. If she had been black and had initially received an affirmative action admission to a four-year college, she probably would have not been able to do the work and would have flunked out.
Absolutely. A great example.
As I sit in my mortgage free home, and with a paid for 2 year-old vehicle, comfortably retired, I must truthfully admit that I wouldn't have been able to do it alone. Along the way there were people who gave me a "hand up", including thousands of dollars, and friends who assisted me and my family at crucial times.
I am no one special, not especially perceptive or brilliant, but even THIS guy KNOWS that any attempt at reparations MUST come with the accompanying hard work for it to succeed. I just cannot see that happening.
I remember watching a report on 60 Minutes back in the late 1970's that showed the horrible, filthy conditions that people were "enduring" while living in welfare motels. I also remember my mom stating that the people living there had plenty of available time to clean up those filthy conditions themselves.
Mom's comments were something along the lines of "If you have a rag and running water available, your floor should never be dirty. If you have hands and a garbage can available, your home // apartment building shouldn't be surrounded by litter".
I remember my Dad scratching his head over the long lineups at the Food Bank. Why aren't they helping? he wondered. My Dad was the sort who would help a waitress clear the table. What also comes to mind is the care people will take of homes they own versus homes they rent. And to add to the mix: where are all the absent fathers?
In gaol; smacked up to the eyeballs; or under a bridge.
Your mom’s comments were, of course, 100% correct. But only to people that already get the idea. Those that don’t wouldn’t understand or agree.
“Reparations, Clegg said at last, would “give my kids a different life.””
This from a guy who won't marry his children's mother?
If she’s his fiancée, it isn’t that he *won’t* marry her, it’s that he *has yet to* marry her.
5 kids later....
Possibly. Or possibly his older kids are with someone else, and the current fiancée doesn’t want to be pregnant in a wedding dress. Who knows?
Truthfully, bless your good heart.
> ‘diffuse inescapable white supremacy is holding you down’ discussion
That won't go away with reparations. In fact, it would only be fueled by them.
Oh yes 100%. Cash reparations absolutely will not work and will make things worse and then Dems will say
“Well this just shows how much hidden bias and racism is lurking in society because even with lots of money the white supremacy still wins!!”
It’s just another empty promise that undermines people’s actual power over their lives.
"the curse of the lotto" is a thing. Who knew?
They did that during CoVid. It contributed very noticeably to the subsequent inflation.
Hey everyone! Black guy here and here are my comments:
1) I think the reparation topic is one that the LEFT loves to pull on when it needs votes. To be honest, slavery happened all over the world. Yes, it's under 200 years old in America, but it happened and to give reparations to all that where effected is unrealistic. If anyone needs to give reparations it would be the UK and it's colonization of the world.
https://unorthodoxy.substack.com/p/the-man-behind-the-british-empire
2) Redlining is a think and that definitely should be eliminated because that is true "racism" at its core.
3) Love the mention about the Civil War. I've written a lot on the topic because I think ALL American's need to know the REAL reason behind it, because slavery is ONE aspect of it. I wrote about that here:
https://unorthodoxy.substack.com/p/why-esoteric-philosophy-is-vital-329
4) For a larger conversation on just black politics in general I think we have to look at HOW THE MEDIA HAS DESTROYED THE BLACK COMMUNITY. From media exploitation and more, once THAT conversation occurs, we can truly start to heal... and not the healing from reparations.
https://unorthodoxy.substack.com/p/the-white-redneck-origins-of-black
https://unorthodoxy.substack.com/p/the-culture-warfare-on-the-african
Redlining has largely been eliminated. Also, blaming the media is another scapegoat. Secrets to success: don't have kids out of wedlock; develop a trade or higher education, don't spend money on luxuries until you are financially secure.
Amy Wax gave that same advice and she was pilloried at Penn. Leftist Democrats are fools. Giving them control of anything is madness.
I agree with the path to success (although, oddly enough, it did not help me and my husband all that much; I guess things could have been worse?) But the media definitely bears a share of the blame. If only for the promotion of rap music, which celebrates black lawlessness, violence, and misogyny. Thereby warping the minds and expectations of young blacks.
Sofia, sounds like solutions millions of whites could use..
Not so sure redlining has been eliminated
It is illegal. Oprah can buy any house in any neighborhood, just like I (white guy) may.
That being said, try building a trader Joes in/near the hood. You'll see redlining, er, whatever they call it today.
I disagree. That’s a business decision that incorporates business issues - neighborhood risk, affluence of the community, etc. Money is green, and Trader Joe’s is trendy progressive. If they don’t locate in a given area, it’s, not because they’re redlining.
You miss the context, the black community doesn't want TJs to move there because then people with money (White people) will follow - that's what happened in Portland
Wow. Is that what you think? That’s fascinating. If true, someone should interview people and get their thinking around this. I’m skeptical because I think people want the best for themselves, their families and their community, and choice is always a good thing. Why, then, did you make a reference to redlining?
I didn’t say it is illegal. I said it still happens.
Redlining is illegal but not putting a Trader Joe's or Nordstrom on the south side of Chicago or in Podunk, Arkansas is just business sense.
Where does it happen, except when blacks don't want something (and those someones that follow) into their neighborhoods?
Thanks for that insight.
I can’t take anything you write seriously after looking at your credulous essay about the long-debunked Khazar nonsense.
Long debunked by whom? It still isn't settled amongst Ashkenazi intellectuals. There are bona fide arguments to be had on both sides and there is no consensus that I've seen, and I've followed the topic intermittently since Koestler first published. No one has made a case I'd view as slam-dunk and there is toxic ideology to be had on both sides.
I agree that the media is partially to blame. It is quick to show pictures of Black Ghettoes, and promote Rap music that promotes misogynist and violent ideas thru the lyrics. The average white person never sees photos of Black people living in beautiful houses in the suburbs of Atlanta.
I must agree with; why do I owe anything to anyone when my family fought for the Union in the Civil War. The forefather lost everything while fighting and ended up moving North and died in an Old Soldiers Home. The rest of our family came to America long after slavery ended. Almost all athletics, music, movies, commercials, and special treatment for thieves and crooks for one race. When is it enough?
We have always paid out taxes that support those who need assistance. Yet having graduated from a predominantly Black High School, everyone makes their own choices. I choose the military as a means to break my bonds to continuing the poor opportunities in Flint, MI. As did my brothers. Flint forever has been run my Democrats, who, we must remember were the ones in favor of slavery, but now conveniently forget their history. Where are opportunities and infrastructures crumbling or never progressed? Reality is the Democratic controlled areas. It seems those who are the enemy, conservatives, move to areas and vote for the things they want from their government. But now, that is seen as elitist, yet my taxes pay for it. Funny though, I live in a very diverse neighborhood.
Equal opportunity, favorable college selection, tax support for families, and other things provided by tax payers. Yet, what has changed? Somewhere people themselves need to say no more killing of our own in neighborhoods, vote for those who will provide better schools, laws, and infrastructures. The police are bad! Yeah, you want to be in a police car alone at 3AM in Chicago? If not, you know nothing of the true character of the job. Yet, elected officials who encourage crime, theft, and excuses for why everything is bad are the winners. It's those other folks who are doing it to you.
Reparations are just the next bait to hook the clueless voters. No one has that kind of money, well other than the elite world order rich who aren't giving up jack squat for anyone. Where are the rich actors, musicians, and athletes? Oh yeah, they are encouraging money be taken from middle class folks to give away, again and again. It never ends. This is just another form of wealth redistribution and the goal of all to be equal in having nothing, while the elite thrive and rule over the kingdoms. You want wealth, work your ass off, make the sacrifices, and try and integrate into the system that will allow you to do that. It is done everyday, well, not for those who think the money fairy will plant that special tree for you to just pick hundreds off of.
The US infrastructure is a joke and in desperate need of updating, safe guarding, and modernization. Yet a new car for all and shop till you drop is the new motto I guess. It's all free!
You just hit on it!!!! If our wealthy elites want reparations let's give it to them. Funded entirely by a 90% surcharge on their income and a 50% wealth tax. Watch how fast the "reparations" gig wilts. Like hail on a summer's day.
Elihu Yale was supposedly involved in the slave trade somehow (though looking a little further into it, I'm not sure if he actually owned a slave, or what his culpability was as a governor of the East India Company).
But to be both safe and to fulfill the spirit of self-mortification, Yale should dig into its $40 billion+ endowment as penance. I'd say a 50% cut would be a good start.
My favorite post of the morning!
Yeah. Go reparate, Ben affleck.
You make so many good points; allow me to add one more. People keep mentioning the importance of improving black-majority schools. It doesn’t matter how much money you put into the schools if the kids are the ones in charge of the classrooms. I’ve seen numerous videos where inner-city kids are screaming, fighting, and generally raising hell, while the teacher just sits there, too cowed to do anything. The teachers need to be able to discipline (with a hired security guard if that’s what it takes) and the parents need to be on their side. The respect for and value of education must be instilled in the home. Didn’t it used to be there? Remember those commercials where the poor old grandmother was scrubbing floors on her hands and knees to add her grandchildren to school “because a mind is a terrible thing to waste”?
I remember those old UNCF commercials. A mind IS a terrible thing to waste. And yet black minds are being wasted at a far higher rate now, twisted and ruined by a rap-based culture that glorifies crime and teaches young black males to treat women horribly.
England lead the fight against slavery, losing hundreds of sailors patrolling the seas for slave ships. But only the US lost over 400,000 men to end slavery. Liberals act like all 19th century whites were rich plantation owners when many were just poor northern soldiers fighting to preserve the union and abolish slavery.
Will Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who identifies as black, receive reparations? Not such a crazy question when you think of what is happening in the world of gender, women's sports and beer.
If racially based reparations ever were to be enacted, millions of people would come out of the woodwork who identify as descendants of slaves.
This happened with the Native communities. Sherman Alexie was in the comments a few months ago talking about “Pretendians”(pretend Indians if you haven’t had coffee yet).
If you're Jewish, you're a descendant of slaves, who, in turn, kept slaves.
If you’re ‘Slavic’ - from the Baltic countries of Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, etc -your ancestors were some of the first slaves trafficked by Vikings to the Middle East - hence the derivation of the word ‘slave’.
My Grandparents were Ukrainian & Polish. I don't know where their families originated.
They are long seperated, like Britain and America; but, again like the British and Americans, were once the same people. The 'Poles' tended to be the ruling class and the 'Ukrainians' the ruled. You've inherited a fascinating and diverse cultural and historical legacy.
That's true, My Ukrainian Jewish grandmother used to tell me stories about her life in the village in the 1880's up to 1906, when she and my grandfather emigrated to the US. They were terrible stories to tell a 6 yr. old and were terrifying enough so that I remember them till this day. Here's one. The Cossacks used to ride through the villages at harvest time and any female caught outside was raped, any man or boy run through with a sword. If it was in the morning or early afternoon and they could hear the hoofbeats of the horses, they'd run inside and those in the fields would hide in the haystacks. If the Cossacks didn't find anyone outside, they'd ride on to the next village. Today the the Cossacks have tanks and guns. Other than that, nothing has changed.
In legend of no historical value.
Here in Canada we have a Black Haitian who is a Status Indian. He gets all the perks. He Identifies as an Indian so even tho he does not have a single drop of Indian blood in him, he's an Indian. Identity, Identity, Identity.
As a Black Haitian he has a more than legitimate claim on the French; who shit on Haiti to this day.
The biggest affliction of black Americans is learned helplessness. When immigrants from black nations come here and thrive, it disproves the narrative that this is a racist nation.
It’s also about choices and values. My good friend down the street grew up in Brooklyn, studied hard, worked hard, became an engineer who has traveled the world for work, owns investment properties as additional revenue streams, and is doing a stellar job of raising two daughters as a single father. The oldest is a straight-A student who is just entering high school but already has a couple of years studying Mandarin under her belt. In what way has the field not been leveled here?
Ridiculous. Reparations are just the latest shake down. Spare me the fake moralizing and interminable guilting. The reparations were paid in the blood of the white Americans who died and were wounded in the Civil War, and the generation of white women who were unmarried because so many men were killed.
Jim Crow and 20th century racial discrimination has been paid for by trillions of dollars poured into the pockets of black Americans--not to mention so-called Affirmative Action.
Can you imagine what the average ethnic community would have done with that mind-boggling financial bonanza and the systematic national college and hiring preferences provided black Americans over the past two generations?
Are reparations a good idea? Well, sure - if you want to ignite a race war. Go ahead and make people who never owned a slave open their wallets for people who were never enslaved. Only a leftist could come up with such stupidity. This is a patent scam. A scheme to impose a punishment on people for the alleged "sins of their fathers" - even if their great-grandfather was laboring in some field or factory in Europe or Asia when slavery existed in America. As such is is no different from an "attainder" - a taint of blood, which our Constitution prohibits. Along with the confiscation of property without due process and compensation. This crackpot idea should have been DOA. Let's bury it once and for all.
I agree--but I’m not averse to the idea of paying reparations to those still living who were directly harmed by Jim Crow.
Be honest; the guilty party is the Democratic Party and their vote. Both for the evils du jour and the evils of yesteryear.
I agree.
Well yes and no. Again, why should anyone not responsible have to pay? We're already $31 trillion in debt and spend more than we take in. How would this even be financed, even if it made sense. Which it doesn't.
I was thinking more on a municipal or state level. I don’t have any practical ideas about how to pay for it, but having grown up in Alabama shortly after the civil rights movement, and knowing what I know about how terrible it was for black people, I do have a great deal of sympathy for the ones who suffered actual harm under that system.
I get it. But healing doesn't involve making innocent people pay, either. It just keeps the pot boiling. And adds to the destructive grievance culture that's making things far worse.
Yes, I agree with that as well. It's a difficult and complex situation.
If you agree with the concept of injustice towards black people who lived through Jim Crow, what would you suggest as an alternative to “financial” reparations? I’m referring to those still alive, with no “descendant” benefits ie. restricted to those literally directly affected.
Financing it is the elephant in the room. Perhaps we could create an additional tax surcharge on anyone descended from a known slaveowner? But that probably still wouldn't cover it.
But it does seem fair that those who were personally harmed by Jim Crow (now an aging population) should get some kind of consideration.
Placing guilt on descendants of slaveowner is even worse. Like a bill of attainder. Punishing innocent descendants for the sins of the fathers. Jim Crow laws didn't exist in every state, either. Plus since the 1960s we've put in place very generous (and misguided) welfare programs. None of this is easy or simple or fair. You have good intentions but as my mom would say to us "the road to hell is paved with good intentions." If the Black family and middle class hadn't been destroyed by liberal policies we'd be much farther along in our nation today.
I agree that trying to place blame on people for the "sins" of their ancestors is a bad idea. I was just suggesting that if someone MUST be made to pay, it ought to be the people who theoretically* got some kind of leg up in the world as a result of their ancestors' ownership of slaves. *I say theoretically because it's likely that you would find the descendants of slave owners among the very poor, considering what was done to the overall economy of the South by Northerners after the Civil War.
What would be more logical is to force companies that had policies that excluded black people (like the hospital that would not admit the man's mother) to pay reparations to those who are still living who were, during their lifetime, affected by those policies. That is a far more legitimate pairing of the harmers with the harmed.
OK you both convinced me.
I'll agree to reparations in exchange for one way tickets to the African nation of their choice for those accepting the payments. Simple - slavery reversed completely.
How many takers do you think you'll get?
Not many.
Those who were harmed by Jim Crow are an aging population. As are many of the boomer liberals who think reparations are a good idea and should be paid. So who will pay for them? The boomers (like me)? Of course not. Boomers are just great idea people. We will leave it to our children and grandchildren to pay the bill.
A race war we will surely have. That's why this nonsense won't happen. The pushback and resentment would be too severe. Any Dem supporting this would be a total idiot (they're not far from that already), and soon to be voted out. Reparations would be to them what a total abortion ban is presently to Republicans, a (very) dead albatross around their necks.
Look at the root problem now, not what was from 150 years ago.
Lousy education, broken families and crumbling infrastructure hurts these people the most.
Fixing those problems will do the most to lift them up permanently.
Writing a check is like a lottery win. And like most lottery winnings it will be gone in short order, and then what?
The root problem is a mentality that one is helpless, deeply aggrieved, and cannot get by without handouts.
Which is, of course, the way every dopey white liberal racist views the black community. As children who can't get by without their tender ministrations. And what happened? Their "great" society destroyed the black family. Their education systems and demented teachers unions destroyed generations of black kids. Their paternalism and stupidity has created a depraved culture of drugs, fatherless kids and chaos. Nice handiwork. And now their reparations argument demands that the rest of us pay for their stupidity.
Black Poverty 1990 32%; 2022 17%. Black representation in the middle 60% of income = 13% (= to their representation in the population) up from 9% in 1990. Just two of the metrics demonstrating the trajectory of black Americans over the last generation. When will we quit pretending all Blacks are poor and uneducated?
Other issue is that biracial marriages have gone from 4% to 20% since 1980; meaning if the trajectory holds we will see biracial kids become ubiquitous shortly. Race as a category gets more amorphous.
Race doesn’t exist. Race is a social construct. Didn’t you know that? 😉
Yes, makes me think of Vegas and CoVid checks
One of my Little Nanna's neighbours children managed to both spend it all very quickly AND set herself up for life: she bought the whole damned street off the council!
“the plan favored by many Democrats in Washington, which would allocate $800,000 to every black household”
———————————————————-
Hunter Biden, who has suffered past trauma’s, received $800,000 *every year* for doing nothing.
How’d that go?
Combine that with the fact that even UPS drivers can make $170,000 per year now and ‘reparations’ is nothing more than an expensive marketing campaign to advertise that this is a shitty and racist country.
But I would support (R)eparations, a conservative version of reparations, where Black Americans just don’t have to pay federal taxes.
It’s just as racist and unjust as all the other plans but I think it would be worth it to have one group in the country who knows what it’s like to not be partial slaves to the Permanent State in Washington. Maybe they would spread the word to other people and this would create a movement to disempower the ‘elite’ scumbag parasites running the country.
If blacks are earning in the lower brackets, most likely they don’t pay much in federal taxes anyway.
Yes but most of that is because of the perverse incentive of welfare and we aren’t allowed to delete welfare.
But if you make it so $90k is actually $90k then that puts a new incentive at the top that would disrupt the welfare calculation people are making.
Closing the border would also help tremendously.
Ten trillion $. Now that's real money. Almost as good as Powerball.
Hunter Biden and the Biden crime family have nothing to do with this. Hunter Biden wasn’t discriminated against because of racism. Louis Weathers was. I think awarding $100,000 to those who can prove they were personally discriminated against is reasonable. Of course any such plan should be means tested. Nothing can be done about less than 5% of potentially eligible even applying.
Black Americans who reap the rewards of American capitalism should of course pay income taxes on the same scale as whites and there is nothing conservative about any proposal that they should not.
It’s as close to a conservative plan as you can get if you’re going to do something totally perverse and immoral using government force.
Obviously, I would prefer if we weren’t subjected to unremitting psychological warfare by the communists who run our State Media because that’s the only reason we have to talk about this.
Also, paying taxes to the federal government, the primary barrier to capitalism occurring, because you are “reaping rewards of American capitalism”, does not make any sense.
Come ON, Kevin! Anyone living below a certain yearly income ALREADY pay no Federal taxes> Has it helped them?
In my highest earning year, I believe that I paid around $5,00 in Federal taxes. Would it have changed my life if I didn't have to involuntarily shell that over? No, not one bit!
Plenty of capitalism happens despite taxes, which are a payment by everyone so that we can have a military, a police force, social services, education, and other things that protect and benefit us all. It's the price we ALL play of avoiding the social catastrophe, including Revolution, thay would happen otherwise, because the market can't take care of all needs.
The federal income tax is not a price we all pay. That is just a straight-up lie. No matter how much of a communist you are, there is still no justification for the idea that centralizing all of it is a good plan. It obviously is not.
The military is the only part that can be fully justified at the federal level and the military has a $900 billion annual budget and they are running out of ammunition 18 months into a relatively small proxy war that got $120 billion in supplemental funding. The amount of theft required for that to happen is almost unimaginable.
“The market can’t take care of all needs” is a utopian framing.
That the market can't cater for all needs (needs it creates) is proven by a mountain of socio-historical evidence. "Theft" was Marx's equally dubious definition of profit. Centralising is indeed not a good plan, but it's "so much better than all the others", to quote Winston Churchill on democracy, when privatising absolutely everything and forcing us all to build our own hospitals, teach and bury ourselves, etc., would be apocalyptically disastrous. We need education to feed the skills it needs into a capitalist economy. That's why capitalists started up education in the first place. They need publicly-funded education so that those skills can keep coming, especially as the capitalist economy expands, as it has to. They need taxes even as on the basis of pure individualism they complain about them.
Well you certainly have spelled out the choice we must make.
We must choose between Joe Hussein Biden and a room full of transvestites running healthcare centrally out of the most corrupt city on earth OR each person building their own hospital. Nailed it.
(I’m kidding. What you are doing is a manipulative tactic, common from Marxists, known as forcing reactance.)
Churchil was as complete a fucktard as ever you could find, you only make your crappy argument worse bringing that "thing" into it.
No point in trying to be reasonable with a TFM (The Free Market) fundamentalist, they are not capable of understanding that public ownership of *anything* is preferable. They think that the fire department should be run for profit. "Your call is important to us, please stay on the line and an assistant will be with you shortly. Please have your credit card information ready. Did you know that if your neighbor burns now, Burnrite is offering a limited two for one sale? That's right, we'll put out both your fires for the same price as one fire! (Some restrictions apply.)"
And would it end any further demagoguing about reparations for succeeding generations? Of COURSE it wouldn't!!!
Wait. Aren't you Canadian? Why not try it there, first? Maybe your PM can make the speech in blackface?
There are too many groups out there in the world who might be deserving of reparations but who could never be properly identified and singled out in a just way. Taxpayers alive today should not have to foot that bill. Municipalities instead should work on infrastructure and improved housing and services so that all can live decently.
$10T is twice the annual tax base. Get real people.
If you gave every poor family, no matter the color, a million dollars. I would say within 5 years we would be back to where we are today except with bigger problems. Money will not solve anything. The left believes that if everyone is on parity with wealth that would solve everyone’s problems. I have my doubts!
Reparations: it is ludicrous to believe that everyone with a certain pigment needs the government’s help and that once given a ton of money people will automatically start making good choices. Not sure that is true.
We've seen proof of this over and over with lottery winners. Most people who get a big lump-sum payout are worse off in 5 years than they were before the payout.
Not all poor people are poor due to bad decision-making. But bad decision-making definitely contributes to poverty. And giving someone who handles money badly a whole lot of money usually ends in grief.
My BIL is a good example of what happens when you give a lot of money to a person who always makes bad decisions. When my in laws died (really after the second one died), and my husband and his siblings inherited a fair amount of cash, the in-laws money manager told my H, the executor, that inheritance was a lot like winning the lottery. Most lottery winners are broke 3-5 years later. A lot of people who inherit a large sum of money are also broke a few years later. This from a financial advisor who has seen it happen over and over with different families. My BIL had already gone bankrupt once and been bailed out by his parents. He got that inheritance and paid cash for a house (couldn’t get a mortgage due to bad credit rating due to said bankruptcy). Subdivision of said house went belly up, had to sell at a loss, rented and bought second house that was destroyed in a hurricane due to lousy location, etc etc. One bad decision after another and absolutely NO retirement savings. Zilch. Will be working until he dies, probably in some rental unit. Money alone does not save people.
A slight cavil—the author inaccurately describes redlining as “[making] it nearly impossible for a black applicant to get a mortgage for a house outside black neighborhoods.”
My understanding is the practice of redlining was designating certain neighborhoods too high-risk for mortgage insurance—almost all African-American neighborhoods—thus making home ownership much more difficult for African-Americans and pushing them into public housing. It applied within, not outside, majority-minority neighborhoods, so it would have had no direct effects on an African American’s ability to purchase housing OUTSIDE of redlined neighborhoods.
[edit: as a response to this comment pointed out, redlining did occur in lower-income neighborhoods that were predominantly white. Stated with more precision, the point I wanted to make above is: redlining applied in disproportionately Black neighborhoods (even if whites were still a majority in many or most of those neighborhoods—a neighborhood that is 15% Black is still disproportionately Black if the overall Black population in that area is 5%), which often made out proportionally more difficult for Black families to own homes. The author’s claim—that redlining kept Black families OUT of disproportionately white neighborhoods—could only be true if the neighborhoods that were white were to ones that were disproportionately redlined. I am not aware of any historian who would make that claim, while the opposite claim—that the neighborhoods redlined were disproportionately Black—is a common one and one that is pretty widely accepted. So the author’s understanding of the practice is backwards.)]
While other features of the residential real-estate market would have made it difficult for most Black families to get a house in a white neighborhood, redlining was not one of them.
Sources:
https://www.npr.org/2017/05/03/526655831/a-forgotten-history-of-how-the-u-s-government-segregated-america?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining
Glad someone posted this to clear the record. The author’s view is an incredibly common myth about redlining (I find people across the political spectrum who have been taught it incorrectly).
Yeah, hopefully they will maintain their high standards and issue a correction.
I have a cavil with your cavil, good sir. Redlining actually applied to not just majority-minority neighborhoods. While the definite majority of black neighborhoods were red-lined, the majority of neighborhoods that were red-lined where non-black neighborhoods. Redlining affected a much higher percentage of potential black homeowners, but the decided majority of victims of redlining were good ol' white people. I ask rhetorically, are these white victims eligible for reparations? I can imagine not.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/06/the-truth-about-redlinings-history/
Thanks. I edited my comment in a way that I believe addresses your point.
Thank you for posting this link. Very educational though, at the same time, very depressing.
Black home ownership is a lagging indicator. Currently Black ownership is 44% compared to 73% for whites, 63% for Asians and 51% for Hispanics. Asians have the highest average income by a good bit, but lag Whites by 10% in home ownership. That will change going forward. Black incomes have been rising consistently and now they are proportionally representative in the middle 60% of income earners. But they are overrepresented in the bottom half of that middle 60% and underrepresented in the top half. Unfortunately, housing prices have skyrocketed in the last 20 years keeping many of the middle group of income owners from being able to buy a home most acutely in that bottom half. However, on the positive side, Blacks have moved steadily into the suburbs (with its better schools) over the last generation and now are proportionally represented in the suburbs. As Blacks move into the top half of the middle 60% going forward home ownership will increase. The housing market is really screwed up presently as corporations moved hard into ownership in many states and drove up prices beyond what the "average" income can buy. We are already seeing some decreasing prices in the West, especially the mountain west and would expect the east to follow soon. Don't know, with the cost of construction, how low it can go unless we fall into a recession which as of today doesn't look imminent. Most places have a housing shortage to add on to the problem.
It wasn't almost all African-American neighborhoods. Most red-lined neighborhoods were majority white. If you said disproportionately African-American neighborhoods, you would be correct.
You’re right. LiterateDog pointed this out in an earlier comment, and I added another paragraph to clarify that in response to his comment. Apologies for not stating it with sufficient precision the first time; there is a lot of nuance on this issue.
You cite NPR and Wikipedia. Actual evidence of fuck-all.
It sounds like you are a conservative. If so, you should appreciate the point I made, which is that redlining is not as far-reaching as the author suggests.
And yeah, agree that NPR sucks. Wikipedia doesn’t, though.