SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
http://heavy.com/news/2017/10/michael-christopher-estes-asheville-airport-bomber-suspect/
A 46-year-old man is facing federal charges accusing him of leaving a jar filled with explosives at a North Carolina airport as part of a war he pledged to fight on U.S. soil.
Michael Christopher Estes was arrested October 7 and charged with attempted malicious use of explosive materials and unlawful possession of explosive materials in an airport, according to a criminal complaint unsealed Tuesday.
The improvised explosive device, or IED, was found inside a jar at the Asheville Regional Airport about 7 a.m. on October 6, the FBI said in the complaint. Bomb technicians from the Asheville Police Department rendered the device safe. The baggage claim and lobby area of the airport were evacuated and shut down for about 2 hours. No one was injured.
also at USA Today and The Independent
(Score: 1) by Arik on Sunday October 15 2017, @07:16PM (13 children)
It seems they believe that "race" determines politics, and if it does, if they're in lock-step that way, you can determine race by politics. And that's how they determine that only white people vote Republican, it's self-evidently the party of whiteness. So, if this guy voted Republican, it doesn't matter what his ethnic background is, that's a different thing, he's obviously full of "whiteness." Just like David Duke, or Alan Keyes.
I just don't understand why they all turned on Rachel Dolezal though. What did she do wrong?
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Sunday October 15 2017, @07:30PM (7 children)
Not tough to figure out, really.
Some history, from today.com [today.com]...
Okay, nothing earth-shaking so far. Now, why did she do that? She says it is because she does....
Okay, here we go. She thinks that supporting someone or something means you inextricably are that someone or something.
If I support relieving hunger among African children, do I become an African child? Dolezal believes she would.
If I support the poor in Russia, do I become a poor Russian person? Dolezal suddenly does.
If I support the right to humane treatment among zoo animals, do I become a zoo animal? That's right, Dolezal suddenly lives in a cage and eats Purina Gazelle Chow(tm) in that case.
There's the problem. Her sanity/insanity level is about that of someone who levelly claims that they are, personally, a poached egg.
Thus, "Please put down the NAACP and back slowly away" is a pretty reasonable, rational thing to ask of her.
She might try running for president instead.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Sunday October 15 2017, @07:45PM (6 children)
"I don't identify as African-American, I identify as black,'' she told Savannah Guthrie on TODAY Monday. "I am part of the pan-African diaspora."
"I definitely feel like, in America, even though race is a social construct … there’s still a line drawn in the sand, there still are sides, politically there’s a black side and a white side, and I stand unapologetically on the black side."
“I do think a more complex label would be helpful, but we don’t really have that vocabulary,” Dolezal told The Guardian. “I feel like the idea of being trans-black would be much more accurate than ‘I’m white.’ Because, you know, I’m not white . . . Calling myself black feels more accurate than saying I’m white.”
Given that race is a social construct, why is her blackness any less real than anyone elses?
Perhaps it's because her social group has now rejected her, fair enough, but before that happened, when she was the respected head of the NAACP, wasn't it just as real then?
If she's never identified as white and feels no affiliation for the label, who are we to stick it on her anyway?
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Sunday October 15 2017, @08:21PM (2 children)
From the today.com article, quote, "she told Savannah that she did not make a distinction between supporting black causes and identifying as a black woman. " I don't think she has to speak longer or more eloquently to provide additional context; her statement stands on its own, and means that she is delusional. This is not a judgement; rather, I am simply recognizing something that is true whether I agree with it or not.
The word "race" is pretty charged; the number of human "races" as determined by the ability to interbreed is "one". I am not sure how else you would define that word, except culturally.
And culturally, a "purple" person, skin purplish in color, who never really hung out with purple people and usually hung out with the "mauves" with skin in the "mauve" color range, does not stop being the color of the one-eyed one-horned flying-purple people eater. Neither would such a person stop being born in the purple culture, to purple-culture parents, raised in a purple-culture environment. It's just not retroactive that way.
No, her "social group" is something that she, as a free and intelligent adult, gets to choose.
But anyway, before, when she was a respected leader, she was still a born-of-purple-in-the-land-of-flying-purple-people-eater and raised-in-culture-of-purples who chose to adopt as her social group a different one of her choosing, and not one chosen by her culture.
That is perfectly okay.
Saying instead that it is one dictated by her culture, by her "race," and that it is not simply one of her choosing, is still a lie.
Why do we have to lie to support her? I think it's okay that she choose socially whatever group she like, that she choose to adopt any culture that appeals to her, that is a good and healthy thing.
To then lie about it, again, is not a good thing. The two don't go together, as she believes that they do. That's the problem.
She was born in a white* culture to white parents in a white culture and raised in a white culture, and choose freely and intelligently to align herself with a different, distinct cultural group that suits her better. That we recognize this fact does not mean we are "sticking on" a label, but rather means that we are cognizant of reality.
I could buy a spacesuit and spaceship, move to mars, "identify as" a native martian, and deny that I am from earth. That would not make me a leader; rather, it would make me a liar. Not rocket science.
-----
*use any better, more-descriptive term than the deceptive "white" that you want; but "black" "native american" "asian" "eastern european" are not going to be descriptive terms that fit there.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Sunday October 15 2017, @09:04PM
Whether it's delusional or not is not the point. The point of the context is to show that what she is saying is actually pretty consistent and based on what is commonly held to be true in the circles she moved in. They all agree that race is a social construct. You can disagree with that if you want but that probably isn't going to tell us anything about why her peers, who do NOT disagree with it, still rejected her.
"The word "race" is pretty charged; the number of human "races" as determined by the ability to interbreed is "one". I am not sure how else you would define that word, except culturally."
Again my point was not to expound my own understanding of the subject, but rather to ask why these people who profess to share HER understanding of the subject, nonetheless reject her person.
Was she born with Original Sin?
"...lie...lie...lie"
It's not a lie if this is what they honestly believe.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday October 16 2017, @02:43AM
Genetically, less delusional than the trans-sexuals, which we accept as non-delusional (many of us, at least).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday October 16 2017, @12:34AM (2 children)
Do you know that the genetic distance between a man and a woman is higher that the genetical distance between a black and a white of the same sex?
And still... we allow people to identify with whatever gender they want, right?
So why not allow them identify with whatever race they think they belong?
After all, "race reassignment therapy" should be much easier and less prone to medical risks (oops, there goes a business idea)
(grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Arik on Monday October 16 2017, @01:20AM (1 child)
There is no 'white' gene. There IS a males gene.
If those with the male gene can 'identify' as female, and we take that seriously and treat them as female, then why on earth can't she simply 'identify' as black?
So why not?
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 16 2017, @02:16AM
To pick a nit, its a chromosome, [google.com] made up of a whole bunch of genes.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 16 2017, @12:01AM (4 children)
Well, immediately after the Constitution was ratified (y'know, the thing which said that a black slave was only 3/5 of a person), the very first thing done by the very first Congress was to draw a racial line for citizenship. [google.com]
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 16 2017, @12:19AM (2 children)
I have trouble learning from these links to Google, because Google has blocked me ("Our systems have detected unusual traffic from your computer network.") Unless I already know what you meant, I have to first work out what you searched for, then search for it with another search engine, then try to guess which, if any, of those pages you wanted us to see. I wish you would instead pick a pertinent, credible page from the search results.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 16 2017, @01:15AM (1 child)
Are you using a proxy such that other people's sins are getting you in dutch?
Being routed through a company server?
"Our systems have detected unusual traffic from your computer network."
If you're not using a proxy (which will tar you with the same brush they use to tar other, miscreant, users of that proxy) then I suggest that you straighten up, fly right, and quit doing whatever got you on their shit list.
N.B. Whenever I've seen that message, it was because I had tried to narrow down a search, lost track of what I had already tried, and repeated the -same- search multiple times.
(Taking my browser offline and doing a drag & drop to a new tab now alerts me to repeats that are already in cache; if it's actually new, just go back online and hit Reload.)
Back a while, they used to bitch if I included site: in too many searches; they got over that nonsense.
...and, worst case for me, the message has gone away in a few hours.
...and, if you do JavaScript and don't block images, there has been a CAPTCHA associated with that when that message came up for me.
(It's been a long while since I encountered this stuff.)
.
...and when a page won't work for me (I typically block scripts and CSS), a proxy that almost always works just fine is archive.li [archive.li]
...also available as archive.is|archive.eu|archive.fo.
They run all that stuff on their machines and deliver the result.
Very nice.
Here's your first one, on the house.
http://archive.li/yQhBD#selection-745.0-745.10 [archive.li]
I wish you would instead pick a pertinent, credible page from the search results
When it suits my purpose, I do that.
In this case, it doesn't.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 13 2017, @12:50AM
Thanks for the response. I do use a proxy; when Google offers me a captcha and I solve it, sometimes all I get for my trouble is a 403 error page. With Google Translate, that happens consistently. For a long time (around a year), archive.{li | fo | is} was on CloudFlare and it also had a captcha.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Monday October 16 2017, @06:10AM
And the 'racial' (more accurately 'pseudo-racial') line was more accurately ratified by the first Congress, it entered our legal tradition a bit earlier, in 1655 with Johnson v Parker, or more broadly we might say that from about 1640-1660 what became the modern US black-white racial paradigm rose quite suddenly (and, in large part, for plainly economic reasons,) and by the time of the first Congress it was no innovation but old and well established precedent in common law.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?