Metal Reviews

Hey, he just might end up making the Darwin Awards!

My support for the Palestinians dropped about 60% after watching this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Chw32qG-M7E

WHAT

THE

FUCK

You could make the argument that the ones that ultimately benefitted the most from africans being brought over here were blacks; think about it.
Are they better off in America, or would they be better off in Africa?
And really, how are the rest of us benefitting?
Let's all be perfectly honest here; blacks (in general, obviously I am not saying every last man jack of them, but let's strive for honsety; their are major problems in the black community, don't deny it: that's why they seem to need so much external help vis-a-vis AA, programs, scholarships, blah blahblah, after all is it not?) are a burden in more ways than one. Can you honestly say they are pulling their weight, or even trying to? They get a chance that many from there native land would kill for at a better life, while the rest of us have to deal with their, sorry, but it's true, primitive behavior and lack of any personal responsibility whatsoever, while being constantly beat over the head with the hammer of how evil and racist we are. And at the same time, pay for their so-called playing field leveling programs; I don't know about anybody else, but I could sure use a tax break. I pay (including federal, local, state, property and sales tax) damn near half of my paycheck to the "government".
Do you really not get how many are starting to resent this whole steaming pile of bullshit? I mean enough's enough. Sink or fucking swim.

And, please explain why any society would not be favorable towards it's majority citizenry.
Again, Asians, middle-easterners etc. seem to manage, just fine, thank you, so whats the problem with blacks?
Asians, etc. are taken seriously because they come in with a strong work ethic, personal responsibilty, self discipline and a desire for education. They don't demand respect without earning it first.
At any rate, those myriad AA / entitlement / leg-up programs have proven to be failures... so now what?

My sentiments, exactly.

You should follow Canada's example and segregate your troublesome minorities and then pay for their food, beer and TV so that they leave you alone.

Whatever works.

as for forking over the money wrought from the sweat of my brow, to hell with that noise; fuck 'em, they can starve and go thirsty and watch the paint peel off the walls for all of me.

Man, my typing is atrociously error addled... fuck it, in my defense, if I may, I am generally typing in a stream of consciousness-on the fly manner.

hmm.. nearly the opposite happened for me ..

That whole place is just fucked up, my man.
Best not to concern ourselves with it overmuch.

Hah!

How quick YOU are to reel off a list of things you THINK that I think. I suggest you look beyond your own narrowly-conceived realm of political discourse. You really think a "Marxist" who has volumes of Eldridge Cleaver, Franz Fanon or leRoi Jones on the bookshelf really has a fetish for the "benign" black man? Oh wait, they are books, aren't they- I'll get out of my Ivory Tower.

It is true I've never taught in an urban American elementary school, but much as I'm sure you would love to think I have no experience of living and working in multiracial/multicultural environments, it ain't so.

The simple fact is, the writer has a transparent agenda. I mean, for starters he obviously has a huge problem with the syllabus itself. The entire thing drips with his urge to stereotype in as contemptuous a tone as possible the music black kids listen to, the clothes they wear, etc.

And hey, how about the fact that he implicitly identifies "conservative" political views with intelligence? Sure, you can tell us all how true what he is saying is til you are blue in the face, but how are we supposed to trust the testimony of someone like that?

When did this 50 years of "throwing money at it" happen? Seems to me like the last thirty years at least have been a process of GROWING economic inequality, DEindustrialisation, INCREASING work hours and STAGNATING wage rates. Social programmes/benefits/handouts/whatever have only ever been pissing into the wind. This is precisely the sort of thing that Marxists would predict would cause exactly the situation we are now seeing. If you're going to (in part) attribute a problem to something, at least make sure that that something's actually been happening.

You brought Marxism into it, so let me say this: Marx said that the way people see the world and the way they behave, are products of the economic environment in which they exist. If you have a situation whereby people are relentlessly told that with a bit of "personal responsibility" they can get rich- which turns out to be a total lie, in which communities (e.g. Detroit) are laid waste by businessmen deciding it is no longer profitable there, then deteriorating communities with no sense of aspiration or service will emerge. Not as the result of some moralistic notion of "oppression", but simply as an inevitable consequence of the environment. And yeah, if class lines are as closely tied to race lines as they are in the US, then that is going to be the prism through which everything is seen. Of course, this leads both to white racism and, no doubt, a sense of entitlement or victimhood from black kids. Two sides of the same coin.

Sure, blame the kids who are misbehaving for their misbehaviour. But WHY do these patterns of behaviour increase and decrease at different times? These things have a deeper explanation than the typical "blacks are bad, ok?" which seems to be the message of our schoolteacher here.

IMO a completely one-dimensional and asinine way of looking at it.

The assumption that employers think "this dude is black so I won't hire him" is also equally asinine and one dimensional. The whole white shit about "tut tut, look at all the victimhood mentality! You can't move for all the victimhood mentality!" is just the reactionary reverse of the same line of argument.

All societies are built on the exploitation of a lower stratum of labour power. This is no secret or surprise. In some societies, the way this lower stratum has been carefully delineated along the lines of race by the ruling beneficiaries. Again, no secret or surprise.

So why the surprise that a couple of decades after some government-imposed "equal rights legislation" the same divisions continue to fester?

Doesn't matter how much people get "land of the free" mythology shoved down their throats; if you are born poor, you are likely to remain poor no matter how hard you work in free market societies. And yeah, if the society has depended in the past on a bottom rank that has been segregated out and branded on the basis of race, then you really have no right to get indignant when race becomes as divisive as it has become.

I'm not going address all of that, because I'd just be repeating myself, but YES, throwing money at the problem. When did it occur? Ever since LBJ's Great Society programs were kicked off. I read somewhere that it has totalled into the trillions by this time.
Are you calling him a liar? Or is it just because he is a conservative that you don't trust him... what was that about an agenda? You want to talk about agendas? the liberals want to keep the black community dependent on the government, by constatntly feeding them the line that they are incacapable of bettering themselves without them (the liberal government); works out pretty well: the libs (who no doubt live in gated communities, have chauffeurs cart them around and send their kids to the best private schools money can buy) get to feel all warm and fuzzy, they keep their gravy train rolling, and they are assured the black vote.
Take about racist? Conservatives are of the opinion that every man is capable of making something of themselves, if they put out the effort. Liberals, with their coddling welfare politics, simply enable a state of a perpetual underclass.

But, what I really wanted to address is this:



I don't give a damn what Marx said.
I came from the gutter, never finished High School, forget about college, (so much for that "white privilige", eh?) but by the time I was 24, I decided that a life of construction was not what I wanted, as it is very hard on the body and seasonal, to boot, so I APPLIED MYSELF, took out a student loan, went to school at night after working all day at a shit job, got an AS in electronics, started at the bottom and over 17 years worked my way up to an engineer. About a year ago, seeing
that I had gone about as far as I was going to go in that industry, I further APPLIED MYSELF, took a CCNA course (again, while working full time, and taking care of my two children) so that I could get into the IT industry, which is much more lucrative.
I'll never be "rich", but I can provide for my family.
In this day and age of scholarships, there is no excuse for being a fuck up.
Poverty? that never stopped blacks from excelling at things like football and basketball, did it?

Sounds another pathetic excuse to me.

No offense, rio, but that is about the biggest pile of horseshit I've ever seen.
We are in the 21st century. blacks have more than their fair share of representation and advocacy here.
There is no segregation, other than self imposed... the excuses are running out and wearing thin. At some point the open hand will close into a fist.

This will doubtless turn into a shouting match, but



sounds like a great description of the typical senator to me, Republican or Democrat. True representation for the poor in America seems impossible; I have no idea about American union links to political parties, but our Labour party has been and still is funded by unions, and (in the early years, at least) was responsive to the needs of the poor. Our country is only just beginning to try and get beyond class divides; America never seems to have admitted them.

Sure, there will always be tales of the poor guy who clawed his way up from the gutter, but by the very nature of capitalism there will always be those on the top (whatever definition you put on that) and those on the bottom, through no faults of their own. Social Darwinism rules; obviously each and every citizen is never going to get to the top, there will always be masters and slaves, yet the right deliberately sells this as fact and tries to keep all in conflict where the left admits that some succeed and some fail through no fault of their own, and tries to rebalance this so that people can at least live their lives capably. Fairness should be the key, rather than anything else, and even if we stop short of socialism, the state shouldn't take equally from the richest and the poorest. Forget Marx; it's common sense.

There are plenty of examples of people coming from poor and disadvantaged backgrounds and building wealth through hard work. It's not impossible by any means. I don't know what the rebuttal for this might be ("just a small percentage!" maybe), but even if it's a small percentage, it can still happen. Even if you don't get rich through all your hard work, it's still possible to at least live comfortably.

You say my viewpoint is "completely one-dimensional and asinine," but I think it's pretty asinine to perpetuate the segregation and victimhood by essentially saying "if you're born poor, you'll stay poor; this country was built off your backs and now we've branded you and exploited you as the lower stratum of labor power." It's cynical and it assumes the worst in everybody to think that if you work hard, you won't be able to attain some measure of success just because of some external circumstances that you can't control (i.e., you're black). There's no point to thinking that way, because it's, plainly and simply, not true.

The power of positive thought?

Of course it is possible, but it seems we agree it is disproportionally difficult and unlikely.

The fact is, therefore, that it's useless as a remedy for any of societies ills that go beyond an individual scale.

I'm not cynical at all, actually- quite the reverse. My philosophy is that the thing that is needed but not present, is not some sense of individual "go getter" attitude, but community/social cohesion and community/social pride, and most importantly community/social responsibility. I have a lot of faith in these things, but I feel they have been disrupted by the way societies have developed over the last few decades.

Yes- not just this, but those of us who occupy a higher position depend on the labour of those lower down for the priveleges we enjoy.

If everybody "clawed their way up", then there would be nothing to claw our way up to.

Please explain to me why the worthlessness of representative democracy and the sham of the political system is something you are almost always railing against... until it comes to this issue, when suddenly it becomes this wondrous redress because of which black people have no cause for complaint whatsoever...

No offense taken, by the way