Interesting to note:
Vladimir Putin once reportedly praised the sexual prowess of Israeli president Moshe Katsav, while Katsav was under investigation for rape and sexual assault.
Today, Katsav is serving a 7-year term in an Israeli prison. He is due out in 2018.
This reminds me of Trump.
I’ll be honest. The trailer for Nate Parker’s vehicle “The Birth of a Nation” feels too much like Mel Gibson’s vehicle “Braveheart”, which is considered one of the most cringe-inducing films to win an Oscar for Best Picture.
I mean, yes, both films have received almost the same generally-positive Rotten Tomatoes (78%), but Braveheart is mocked to this day for that one-liner from William Wallace.
I disagree a bit with the Republican “line” being drawn at white women (see Hillary Clinton and Wendy Davis). His base is not abandoning him over this insult to White female autonomy, only the other party members with clout outside of his campaign.
No, this has to go deeper for a nuclear apocalypse to happen within his base. He has to be shown smearing some unforgivable crap over the wrong Anglo-American, able-bodied male, the avatar in which most of his base perceive and vaunt themselves. Whatever will destroy him will have to show him, “the Donald”, to be the Emmanuel Goldstein-like “cuck” which they train themselves to most grievously despise.
According to Trump insiders like Hugh Hewett, another shoe is to drop momentarily. It’s supposed to be worse than the “grab them by the pussy” tape.
So this is huge: in the UK, Diane Abbott MP has been selected by Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn as Shadow Home Secretary.
She’s only the fourth woman and the first black British person to hold this position in a shadow cabinet. If Corbyn were to win the next parliamentary election and bring in this shadow cabinet as his frontbench, Abbott as Home Secretary would have powers over immigration, citizenship, national security, intelligence (including MI-5), and criminal justice. It is one of the four most powerful cabinet positions in the UK, including the Prime Minister, Foreign Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Abbott would also be the fourth woman and first black British person to be Home Secretary. Former Home Secretary Theresa May is the current Prime Minister.
EDIT: So I got a *lot* of Facebook comments from pissed-off British commenters in my earlier post about #DianeAbbott. Apparently, she’s had a lot of gaffes since taking office as MP in 1987.
Folks, I wasn’t praising her. I was only *stating* that she’s *the first* black British (or, in British terms, BAME) person and *fourth* woman to serve as Shadow Home Secretary, and that this position is of critical importance to British politics.
And yes, I’m a USian. Hi!
Well let’s analyze what is meant by “white voice” vs. “talking black”.
A lot of it has to do with formative regions and the prevailing cultures of a certain period. African-Americans got our accent of English from the White British settlers in the Lowcountry region. We’ve kept that accent and spread it to multiple urban areas outside the South starting with our migrations to the Midwest and the Great Migration. This is why a lot of our linguistic roots in American English are shared with the descendants of British settlers in the Carolinas and Georgia. This spread out further following the invention of the cotton gin, resulting in the forced migration of slaves to as far as Texas by the same descendants of the aforementioned British settlers.
But this spread of population, this region, has always been poor and both socio-economically and racially stratified, and we carried both the accent and the perception of Southern poverty with us to multiple cities. Hence, this Southern American English is more associated with us in more cities than it is with the White Southerners who mostly carry the same and similar linguistic tendencies to this day.
If you’re from the South, you can tell the difference between African-American and White Southern English; in fact, Southern English is the most widespread accent of English in the United States. But if you’re from outside the South, that difference is minimal compared to the difference between African-American and White Western/Minnesotan/New England English.
The Midwestern English that is most associated with Nebraska is the most state- and economically-privileged form of English in the United States. This Nebraska accent, known as “General American”, is what we think of when we speak of “White Voice”. It is also the accent in which television journalists are regularly trained.
I should know, since I can’t speak African-American English to save my life. This accent helps for phone calls.
#NoAccent #MilitaryBrat #NebraskaAccent
Does this make any sense?
“I’m going to vote for Trump! I think he’s a destabilizing force. I’m skeptical of him, too, and who exactly is behind Trump. But given that there’s eternal dissent in the Republican Party, that leads me to believe that whatever he represents might be a destabilizing force. And he’s made a lot of overtures to Russia and China, which in some ways could be thought of as an encouraging thing. I don’t support or endorse any of Trump’s policies. I just think it’ll escalate the problem, which is the best we can hope for. I hope at the very least he’d turn the White House into a reality show. America would tune in, right? And then he could do something nice, like give the money to the National Park Service, because they’re trying to defund it.”
Source: American History XXX – Office Magazine
This is heightening the contradictions. Does he want to heighten the contradictions?
Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs and Steel” is a challenging read which does a cursory look at the role that environment and location both have upon human technological development.
But based on the severe critique of the book by other anthropologists, I’m learning to take it with a grain of salt.
The same perceived “environmental determinism” which drives much the book’s narrative can also be tied to the genetic determinism which has been used to justify scientific racism and its many related tragedies.
Instead, it would be better to consider both environmental and social factors.
A people may have been lucky enough to be in a certain place where a certain food crop was plentiful, but they also had to be lucky enough for someone else from somewhere else to show them how to preserve their bodies and food over the winter.
If you’re at the right place at the right time, have the right geography, and encounter the right people under the best terms, your people can go pretty far in the long run.
Those best terms do not include colonialism. Colonialism is one of the worst terms, actually.
#GunsGermsAndSteel #Anthropology
I’m already over the whole idea of black-owned banks, which duplicate the stratified structure of for-profit banks at the level of ethnic nationalism. Barely interested.
Let’s talk about black-owned credit unions. At least try to make banking more democratic if you want to improve the flow of money within predominantly-black communities.
Here are some examples:
The blog HBCUMoney.com also tracks the state of HBCU credit unions, which are used mostly by employees of HBCUs. https://hbcumoney.com/tag/african-american-credit-unions/
