Category: SJW

Social Justice Warriors nuttiness

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I don’t think that means what you think that means…

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I’ve been reading the various articles about the “ Social Justice” push to have confederate monuments “removed from public view.”

My views on Social Justice have changed over the years. In the words of Inego Montoya from The Princess Bride; 

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“I don’t think that means what you think that means…”

When I was first on the Social Justice bandwagon I had a simplistic view. I thought it was about justice for everyone and that we all were supposed to have equal access in all things. Additionally, we were supposed to respect each other’s rights and beliefs. Someone’s beliefs were to be protected just as surely as their right to speak because the two were inexorably intertwined.

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It was incumbent on the observer to listen OR NOT, however, we were all supposed to defend each other’s right to speak, be heard, or believe whatever we wanted to believe, no matter how wrong headed or outlandish what was being said might have been.

Naively I believed that the end goal of Social Justice was a completely egalitarian society were all of us rose or fell in accordance with the level of our abilities and work.

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Very lazy or stupid people fell, very clever or lucky people rose, and those of us in the middle ground could look forward to having nice lives, families, and retirements. In my world view the wealthy weren’t evil, they were incentive. Inherent in my view was that even the wealthy could and sometimes did fall, just as clever people (Bill Gates, Steve Jobs) rose.

My belief was that no-one in this great nation should have a child go hungry, and everyone should be contributing. I thought that even the lower bounds of society could and should contribute and be compensated for their contributions. I’d happily feed the homeless guy who’s picking up trash on a city street. (In fact I still do that today. Someone in need who has pride enough to be concerned about where we all live will get a meal, or two, and / or a ride from me.)

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This was a simple concept, and for me, very easy to incorporate into my world view.

Then it started to get mean. My fellow Justice warriors weren’t all that interested in balance. They seemed only interested in retribution.  After all, what you may consider “Just” the people on the receiving end of your “Just Cause” may view as a loss of their rights and freedoms. Many of the Social Justice warriors, then and now, were more than willing to impose their will on others without mercy, because after all, Social Justice was “RIGHT”.

I began to have serious problems with Social Justice when I saw that the same “Sins” the Social Justice crowd railed against, being perpetuated by the SJ crowd. The only difference was that the “SJ Warriors” had picked new targets, and that made it all okay.

Today, in the name of Social Justice we’ll shame people, we’ll fire them, we’ll destroy their careers at the drop of a hat, and even if the reasons for “Punishing” someone turn out to be unfounded, our society never looks back and never even tries to repair the damage.

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Some Social Justice pundits seem to have the opinion, “They (The target du jour) deserved what they got. If not this time, then for all the times they got away with it.”

Remember the La Cross team in North Carolina? How about the Fraternity that was closed due to false gang rape allegations?

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Which leads to the current madness of removing confederate monuments. There are two contenders for the “Most insane / inane” award.  The leader in this category is the push in Memphis to dig up Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest’s grave. A close second is Al Sharpton and the NAACP demanding that Stone Mountain monument in Georgia be sandblasted from the side of the mountain. I ask myself how the hell is any of this behavior different from ISIS blowing up Palmyra, or The Taliban blowing up the reclining Buddha’s? The short answer is there’s not one whit of difference.

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The Bible says something like;  “If thine eye offends thee, Pluck it out.”

That passage says nothing about gouging something YOU find offensive, out of the side of a mountain. It says nothing about gouging everyone else’s eyes out, and in truth isn’t saying pluck out your own eye either.  It’s saying take responsibility for yourself and don’t look at something if it offends you.

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True social justice would be making these monuments about teaching. Teaching that these monuments are built to honor people deserving of respect because they stood up for what they believed in. Then explain why they were wrong, and the horrible losses on both sides of a conflict that should have been avoided. Let these monuments serve their intended function, to remind us that deep divisions within our nation lead to very sad, dark places.

I’d take up the social justice banner again if the movement was about doing things better but these days, Social Justice is about cracking an offensive egg with the 20LB sledgehammer of punishment.

Go ahead, argue with me! I’ve got DIRT on all of you; what I don’t have I’ll make up!

That’s how we do things these days isn’t it?

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Black Lives Matter Protest or Publicity Stunt?

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Martin O’Malley was interrupted over the weekend, by some kind of black lives matter thing, during an interview with Jose Antonio Vargas.

Vargas is a Pulitzer prize winning, self admitted illegal alien, who is also the guy behind MTV’s “White People”.

O’Malley responded to the chant “Black Lives Matter” by saying, “All lives matter” at which point he was booed by the crowd.

He’s since apologized for saying all lives matter referring to his statement as “insensitive”. At this point the old record player in my head went SCRRRRAAAAAATTTTTCCCCHHHHH!

What the hell?

He needn’t have apologized for anything. He was the wronged party here. If anything the Black Lives Matter crowd owed him AND the people who filled the auditorium to hear what he had to say an apology. Unfortunately, this is no longer the polite country I used to live in.

Given Vargas’s involvement in “White People” I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that this was a publicity stunt on his part. This could all have been “theater” to boost ratings for a show that has been criticized for being a vehicle to simply “Shame” white people for the grievous sin of being born white.

There’s something familiar about that. Humm, Oh Yes! A while ago didn’t we all agree that skin color wasn’t a reason for shame?

Moving on…

There are too many questions for me about this bit of theater. First and foremost where was security? Second, why does the lady on stage look like she was expecting to BE on stage?

You’ve got a presidential hopeful on stage, a room full of people who are being subjected to a situation that in other cities has degenerated into riots and nobody thought to call the cops? Nobody thought to escort O’Malley and Bernie Sanders to a safe place?

As I’ve said before, if I’m somewhere these BULLSHIT Black Lives Matter protesters show up, I’m leaving. It may be their right to shout and scream their beliefs… But it’s MY right not to listen!

Does anyone else notice another implication here, or is it just me?  One could infer, people yelling, “Black Lives Matter” then booing “All Lives Matter” are implying no one else does.

This whole thing doesn’t pass the smell test. It feels like manipulation.

UPDATE 07/23/2015

Caught this piece from

http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/tia-oso-protester-who-interrupted-martin-omalley-is-convicted-embezzler-7505469

All I could think was, “Only in America, or some Third World Countries.”

Apparently, I’m not the ONLY one who wondered if this whole thing was staged.

Tia Oso, Protester Who Interrupted Martin O’Malley, Is Convicted Embezzler

By Ray Stern
Tuesday, July 21, 2015 | 2 days ago

Jose Vargas, Tia Oso, and Martin O'Malley at Saturday's event.

Jose Vargas, Tia Oso, and Martin O’Malley at Saturday’s event.
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Anshantia “Tia” Oso, one of the protesters who interrupted a Town Hall event with presidential candidates Martin O’Malley and Bernie Sanders on Saturday, writes in a high-profile column today that she was the “right person” to lead the halting of the program.

Oso touts her many activist qualifications in the column, but she left one thing off her bio: her 2009 conviction for embezzling thousands of dollars from a nonprofit Valley arts organization.

Oso was among the demonstrators with the #BlackLivesMatter movement who approached the stage at the annual Netroots Nation conference in Phoenix about 20 minutes into the Q&A between event moderator Jose Antonio Vargas and former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley.

Vargas, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and immigration activist who’s in a business partnership with the Los Angeles Times, invited Oso onstage and asked stagehands to bring her a mic. Instead of asking O’Malley a question right away, though, Oso gave a speech and directed the other demonstrators for the next 15 minutes. O’Malley blundered with his politically incorrect response to the demonstrators, “black lives matter, white lives matter, all lives matter.” The demonstrators later interrupted Sanders briefly, until the Vermont senator threatened to leave if they didn’t let him speak.

Oso followed the stunt with a column that appeared today on mic.com titled, “I Am the Black Woman Who Interrupted the Netroots Presidential Town Hall, and This Is Why.” She writes that she has much in common with Sandra Bland, the activist who died in police custody last week after being arrested during a traffic stop:

“We were both black women, active in our communities and the Movement for Black Lives. We both pledged sororities: I’m a Delta, Bland was a member of Sigma Gamma Rho. I have also been harshly confronted by police during ‘routine’ traffic stops and feared for my safety and my life. Reading about Bland, about her life and brutal killing, the accusation of suicide, I felt devastated and enraged.”

Oso goes on to say in her piece:

“I felt I was the right person to open the action and shift the focus of the program, especially in the context of the conference theme of “Immigration.” I am a native to Arizona, the child of a Nigerian immigrant father and African-American mother, whose parents were migrant farm workers, aka “Okies.” I also served for three years as the Arizona organizer (and continue to work as the National Organizer) with the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, the premier racial justice and migrant rights organization in the U.S.  As I shared in my remarks on Saturday, racial justice intersects with all progressive issues, especially immigration. Black immigrants experience a double oppression, as they must contend with both the reality of racial discrimination in America as well as its complicated and punitive immigration system.”

 

While her social-justice creds can’t be criticized, her leadership skills are stained by the fact that she once severely betrayed the trust of an employer.

Jose Vargas

Jose Vargas
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While working as the business manager for the Arizona Citizens for the Arts/Arizona Action for the Arts in 2007 and 2008, a job she includes in her online résumé, Oso issued checks to herself, made unauthorized withdrawals and made personal charges on the organization’s credit card. The theft occurred over the course of a year and totaled about $11,000, court records show.

Oso had walked off the job in May 2008 without explanation “after being counseled about absences and performance-related issues,” records state. She was fired after she failed to show up for work for three days, and the embezzlement was apparently discovered soon afterward.

Twenty-seven at the time, Oso confessed to court officials that she used the money to pay rent, make car payments, and “stabilize her financial situation.”

She pleaded guilty to one count of felony theft.

Brenda Sperduti, the organization’s former executive director, told officials that the arts group, which depends on donations for its survival, “had to win back the trust of donors after this.” But Sperduti also asked for leniency for Oso.

Oso was sentenced to three days in jail and two years’ probation. She struggled in the past few years to pay off a $11,276 restitution order — to her credit, she finally paid it off entirely last year. After she completed her probation successfully, her felony conviction became a misdemeanor in court files.

The arts organization bills itself online as “the eyes, ears, and voice of the nonprofit arts and culture sector in Arizona.” It has a relatively small budget, notes Steve Carr, who works as its spokesman. Carr called New Times after we left a message for group’s current director. Sperduti, currently CEO of the Assistance League of Arizona, didn’t return a message we left seeking comment.

“This kind of situation impact on a lot of levels,” Carr says.

The “good news,” though, is that Oso paid back what she stole, he says. “We as an organization have moved ahead and put this thing behind us.”

Oso’s listed online as the national coordinator for the Black Immigration Network and Black Alliance for Just Immigration. She declined to talk to New Times about her past.

While we were interested to see if she’d comment about her theft conviction, we also wanted to ask about her scofflaw driving record — especially since she mentions her confrontations with police during traffic stops. Oso was listed as “failure to appear” in five separate traffic-court proceedings since 2006, including one from an alleged violation committed this past March.

Vargas, by the way, defended how he handled the interruption and denied any advance knowledge that the protest would occur.

“I would have loved to see how other reporters handled that,” he says, adding that he felt compelled to grant Oso’s request for a mic because her issue is important. “I did the best that I could given the circumstances.”

UPDATE: We clarified Vargas’ employment status with the LA Times. An undocumented immigrant, he’s in a business relationship with the Times, but doesn’t work “for” the paper.

Watch Oso and the demonstrators interrupt the Town Hall meeting in the video below. The interruption begins about 19:30 into the video.










 

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Confederate Flags – Symbols of Hate or Heritage?

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Stop the insanity!

Taking down a flag, or a monument, or stomping out a cultural identity is wrong. Isn’t it?

I’m sure that Native Americans could weigh in on that statement. Or for that matter African Americans?

Lets face it, Dylann Roof is NUTS! That’s pretty obvious, let’s call it what it is.  Roof claims that his attitude changed during the Travon Martin insanity.

Roof claims that he kept hearing about it, he got curious and after looking it all up on the internet he decided that a race war was necessary.

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Okay, so why aren’t we banning the internet, or the news media? Obviously roof is a special kind of nuts to boot. What kind of psychopath can sit in a room participating in prayer then kill the people he was worshiping with?

All that aside, would we be banning the American Flag or the Gadsden, or the flag of the Union if he’d been photographed holding one of them?

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I agree that the Confederate flag should be removed from various statehouses and government buildings.

In point of fact I thought the Confederate flag HAD been removed from those facilities decades ago. It’s well past time. I was surprised that any state buildings were still flying it. States like Mississippi will have a bit more trouble not flying the Confederate flag but only until they redesign their state flag

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I don’t however agree that the Confederate flag be stricken from all sales outlets, or erased from history. Yet that seems to be exactly what is happening. I really have a problem when monuments to southern leaders, are being defaced, and confederate flags are forbidden in games, or over confederate burial sites.

Being raised in the South I remember seeing the Confederate flag but it wasn’t all over the place. It was mostly a point of heritage, pride in the South, more like a celebration of southern culture. Which as many people who’ve visited the South discover, is pleasantly different from other areas of the country.

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I was at an event last night where I met a California Native who’d just returned from their first visit to the deep south. They were gushing about how polite people were. They were impressed that even the panhandlers were nice and didn’t curse at passersby who didn’t put money in their collection hat. Yeah, it’s become common in LA that panhandlers get nasty if you don’t give them money. Go Figure!

The point is, when someone visits the South they’re often amazed at how different the reality of the place is from their preconceived notions. Sure the South has problems, and stupid people, and even crazy people. But it also has charm, grace, and history.

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As a southerner I have zero patience for those who bash the South having never been there.  I may live in California, but my heart is still southern, when folks start painting the South with that broad brush saying things like; “Everyone in the South are bigots. Well, you know how ignorant they are down there.” I tend to get a bit spun up.

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I’ve visited confederate sites all over the South, does that make me a bigot, a hater, a racist, or a potential murderer of a bible study group?

NOPE! It makes me a person who visited those sites and who saw battlefields where hundreds, or thousands of men died. These are places of sorrow. Not because the South lost, but because of the waste, and the bitterness that precipitated the civil war.

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Contrary to popular belief it wasn’t ONLY about slavery. There were other components; like states rights, federal over-reach, business, and commerce. Slavery was a part of it but not the only part.

As a southerner visiting these sites it’s painfully obvious that secession was ultimately wrong because that action led inevitably to war. I’m really offended when someone says, “The South Lost, get over it.”

I’m offended mainly because you don’t need to tell a southerner the outcome of the civil war, anymore than you need to tell a black person they’re black or a jew what happened at Auschwitz.

Southerners know that confederate money isn’t going to come back in vogue, the South isn’t going to “Rise Again” and slavery was wrong. We know these things through the lens of history. In fact most of us aren’t looking behind and living in the past, we’re looking forward and trying to forge a future.

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The KKK is… or was, dying. I suspect that in less than a generation it wouldn’t have been able to sustain itself because it is considered even in the South to be just wrong and it hadn’t been gaining converts. That all may change now.

This change might not be due to renewed racism, but due to folks who believe they’re “our betters” once again telling southerners what they are, (racist, evil, stupid, bigots), and then trying to tell southerners how to live and think while continuing the “stupid southerners, racist southerners” chant.

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I can’t get over the Orwellian direction our country has apparently taken. Are we really wanting to “Memory Hole” anything and everything  that we don’t like? If we do and become a “Society of the NOW” won’t we be opening ourselves to repeating the mistakes of the past?

As a Southerner I can tell you, in my life and the lives of most of my peers the confederate flag exists in our psyche in its proper context.

It is not a rallying cry for racism. It’s a symbol of a place in common, a point of origin that is different from every other place in the country.

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A unique place where thunderstorms, red clay, water skiing, boats of all shapes & sizes, and fireflies dancing on a warm evening breeze, live forever in our memories. We come from a place where being polite is important and where we call Steel Magnolias, “Mom”.

Taking the flag out of our sight will not change those who are racists, nor will it change substantially the character of the South and is therefore an empty gesture.

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However, since so many people are all about erasing the Confederate battle flag I propose one of  these two flags as the new flag of Southern Heritage. These flags are clean, inoffensive, and exemplify the new realities of our “Brave Society”.

Just a thought…