Please, for the love of gods, someone confiscate Sarah Palin’s thesaurus. I just read her rambling mess of a post about black people and hyphens and it made me want to hork up my liver. If I had any students who wrote like this I’d have to buy red ink by the bucket. This woman simply cannot write or speak without jingo and cliches.
#BlackLivesMatter is a Farce and Hyphenating America Destroys Us
Our prayers are with the fallen on that Thin Blue Line in Dallas. America lost heroes last night as men in uniform did their unfathomably courageous job running into danger to protect others from it. Honorable first responders deserve our utmost respect and support.
Shame on our culture’s influencers who would stir contention and division that could lead to evil such as that in Dallas. Shame on politicians and pundits giving credence to thugs rioting against police officers and the rule of law in the name of “peaceful protests.” It is a farce. #BlackLivesMatter is a farce.
Media: quit claiming the rioters are “peaceful” as they stomp on our flag, shout “death to cops!” and celebrate violence. It is sick. You perpetuate a perverted message evil men thrive on to intimidate and warp malleable minds that would believe one race matters more than another. Blood is on your complicit hands when you naively or purposefully refuse to tell of this movement’s truth.
Black Lives Matter? Yes – more than BLM “protestors” can grasp, as evidenced by their self-destructive provocateurism. Doesn’t it go without saying that Native lives matter, too? And Asian; and Eskimo; and Hispanic; and Indian… and every other race comprised of people who see clearly the agenda at play to weaken America through disunity.
Get fed up and stand up if you’re sick of being called racist when proclaiming EVERY LIFE MATTERS, black as much as white and every skin tone in between. Every innocent life – at every stage of life – on the side of good over evil, matters. Why let the damaging false narrative prevail if you know it is a lie?! Speak up! Join me in refusing to go willingly with society trying to crown deceptive political correctness the victor.
Self-descriptions that put any race in front of being an American are now used to further divide our nation. It’s time to acknowledge you’re either an American under our system of equality, law and order – and traditional patriotic spirit – or you’re not. Knock off the hyphenation of who we are. And knock off the shoulder chip if you’ve let “leaders” burden you with it through their example that sadly capitalizes on division for untoward purposes. That chip is crushing the people’s hope. My youngest daughter recently confirmed the sensibility in this when she stated, “It would be sad to call myself an “Eskimo-American” instead of just a proud American like everyone else.”
Seeing partial footage of this week’s victims’ tragic deaths at the hands of police officers is mind-boggling. It’s nauseating. Granted, early reports rarely encapsulate all the facts of individual cases, but my heart is with victims’ families as I sympathize with anyone defenseless in these situations. More so, I empathize if we find out any cop involved was in the wrong, for I abhor bad cops. I abhor police union leadership that regularly protects bad cops and discredits citizens voicing concern over bad actors in authority. I’ve been there. Many of you know my own experience with well-publicized, constant, frightening encounters and threats to my family to “bring us down” via a badge and gun. We suffered an exhausting era knowing we were defenseless against a bad cop, his union, and a gleefully politicized media never reporting the truth. Threats that included the promise we’d be pulled over for whatever reason, destroyed, and “any judge will believe the badge over the citizen.” The decade-long situation nearly devastated us. Political opponents still get off on all the situation cost us. So believe me, my personal experience won’t let me throw a blanket of blind approval over all law enforcement and those in authority. Still, last night’s disgusting acts that snuffed out officers’ lives is exponentially worse than any one bad cop, his union bosses, and the media’s verbose attempts to intimidate and falsely accuse.
So if we’re to take sides, I side with the Thin Blue Line. To side with our public servants trying to keep law and order amidst political agendas that clearly oppose that virtue is how the good guys win again. It’s the only way to ensure our best days will be ahead of us. Join me. Do not let today’s agenda redefine what it means to be an American. Do not sit still for it to fundamentally transform America.
God created us equally, and not with a spirit of fear. We’re given the spirit of POWER, love and a sound mind. (2 Timothy 1:7) Use it.
My translation:
Love the police without question.
Black people are evil.
Hyphens crush hope. Her daughter thinks it would be sad to admit to being a Yupik-American.
Cops are wonderful except the ones who break up the wild parties at the Palin house. But black people are worse than even unions.
Bible quote.
4.6 million people like Palin’s words, including 35 of my facebook friends, which includes one relative. Please go away, you horrible creatures.
As for the rest of you…please fundamentally transform America. It needs it.
Thanks for the translation PZ, you’ve spared me my daily headache.
The bigots have a huge advantage in that it doesn’t take much time or effort to churn out drivel such as that. On top of that, they have millions and millions of like-minded bigots ready to eat it right up. And that results in bigots running the government which results in more Palins and the cycle goes on. It’s too much.
I don’t know how activists wake up every morning and find the drive to go out and do it all over again.
How fucking dare she.
This is what happens when you feed a Markov bot on Bircher pamphlets and transcripts of late-night televangelists.
I am not sure this was written by a human being. A Palin text generator can do the job, given a few instructions.
Wether Palin the physical person is human is a matter I will refer to Rick Deckard and his fellow blade runners.
Let’s see, where did this insidious rumor come from that this was a peaceful protest. It seems like it was someone that was wearing a blue shirt, might have been dealing with a tragedy of their own?
Oh, that’s right, it was the cops. The chief of police made a point of calling that out several times. The DPD even e had pictures of their interactions with the protestors before it happened, and made it clear that they were exercising their constitutional rights.
He probably wouldn’t know though, right!
“Eskimo-American”? Seriously? What century is Palin living in?
For the full effect, be sure to imagine it in her nails-on-a-chalkboard voice.
The word salad is artfully composed. Carefully throwing in true statements with all the racist gobbledy gook.
totally misunderstanding/misconstruing the purpose of hyphenization. It is to emphasize that the group most Americans may dismiss as “other”, are also American. It is not to divide us into separate groups but to combine groups into a singularity.
Also refuses to recognize that the horrific events she despises, of cops shooting a man for essentially racist reasons are not isolated events, but more prolific than she refuses to recognize.
aarrgghh, I would really like to throw these words at her but I refuse to visit anywhere she writes.
Seriously, fuck Sarah Palin and fuck the police.
I found that a lot more readable than she usually is. What she’s saying is sometimes nonsense, but she’s saying it more clearly than at times in the past. Most of the sentences are reasonably well formed and there aren’t many fragments.
God created us equally, but He created some more equally than others.
This is actually what BLM would like – the be recognized as Americans on an equal footing with white Americans. They have not experienced equality, and they would like to. It seems a reasonable enough request to me.
@quotetheunquote, Palin’s husband has Yup’ik heritage. Eskimo is not considered derogatory in Alaska, although endonyms are preferred.
Narrow-minded, fearful, and history-deficient people interpret “Black Lives Matter” to mean “Black People Think that Their Lives are More Important than Others.”
These willfully ignorant people can’t (or won’t) understand that “Black Lives Matter” is short for a much larger concept that includes all of us as responsible parties: “Because for the entire history of this nation, including a long, long time before we even became a nation, blacks have been systematically kidnaped, enslaved, dehumanized, oppressed, murdered, raped, marginalized, excluded from participation in the democratic process, denied education, employment, and housing, denied a fair chance, spat upon and beaten, discriminated against for the simple acts of walking and driving and living — because of all this and much, much more, and because a white society created this terrible system and codified it in our laws, religion, and customs and continues to perpetuate it — then we as a society — all of us, every one — we all need to acknowledge and agree right now that BLACK LIVES MATTER as much as any other lives, that we all have equal worth as human beings, and that we all need to do everything we can right now to ensure that all lives and all people are treated with dignity and respect and equality and especially, that the casual murdering of black people, especially black men, will be acknowledged for what it is, and stopped, and that to do so, we need to acknowledge the deeply-entrenched, systemic, often overt racism that still exists in our society and deeply informs our laws, religious practices, and customs, and we need to make the extra effort that will be required to make things right.”
That’s what BLM means to me. But this is a bigger, more self-critical concept than many people are willing to accept, because accepting the idea of BLM also means 1) accepting responsibility for the racism that still pervades our society, and 2) agreeing that it needs to change. Those who deride BLM and choose to interpret it wrongly do so from a position of several hundred years of white privilege that they like and that they wish to perpetuate. They see “BLM” as an attack on “white lives matter” or “blue lives matter” or whatever, and they react defensively in the form of extreme aggression.
I hear/read people bewailing the violence and discord as the “disintegration” or “unraveling” of our society. Well, perhaps if our society were better designed, better made, and more tightly woven, it wouldn’t be so vulnerable to stresses and strains.
I feel deeply, culturally ashamed.
Related: I’ve been paying attention to the changing demographics of this country, as people of color become the majority. Speaking as a white person, my reaction is “It’s time. We white people have had our day, we’ve had our chance, and we didn’t do very well. Time to step aside.” I welcome a better, more diverse future.
[Disclaimer: I am a middle-class, white, 57-yo suburban person who is watching all this from the sidelines and doesn’t have direct experience with any of this, except as an ally..]
iknklast @ 13 — “This is actually what BLM would like – the be recognized as Americans on an equal footing with white Americans. They have not experienced equality, and they would like to. It seems a reasonable enough request to me.”
Ha, you said in a few concise words what took me several paragraphs to convey. :-)
1) When I hear the statement that “All Lives Matter”, I think to myself, would this person walk up to someone wearing a pink ribbon for breast cancer awareness and chastise them for focusing on breast cancer and say that “All Cancers Matter”?
2) When I hear statements that “Blue Lives Matter”, I never see anyone say to them that “All Lives Matter”.
3) Growing up in an area were the oldest people still spoke their native language, it wasn’t unusual for someone to say they were Italian-American or Polish-American. A friend from Australia noted this when he lived in the NYC area that people would refer to themselves as Something-American. He found it strange because he said in Australia, people referred to themselves as Australian, regardless of their ancestry.
“Law and order.” Yeah, we read you loud & clear, Sarah. We knew what that phrase really meant when George Wallace used it, and we know what it means when you and Trump use it.
“Hyphenating America”? Is Palin borrowing racist rhetoric from the last century? <– That Wikipedia article features a quote that will make you think less of Teddy Roosevelt, although he's at least more eloquent than Palin up there.
I think of most Americans as hyphenated. It’s a large country with diverse cultures, values, slang and cuisine. I consider myself Norwegian-American or Scandinavian-American (NOT Norwegian or Scandinavian, since I’ve never been there, don’t speak the language, and don’t eat the same cuisine that modern Scandinavians do). There are kringler, lefse and lutefisk at family gatherings. There isn’t a house on my mom’s side lacking a Dala Horse.
Whereas my wife’s family is very German-American. Her grandmother was the 2nd generation to be born in the U.S. but still didn’t speak English until attending school. Hell, my step-grandmother is so thoroughly Finnish-American, she had a sauna added to their previous house.
@Saad
She has a strong feeling of entitlement as a white conservative darling is my guess. And she is uninhibited by any sense of shame, humility or consideration.
@Siggy’s link in 19
Yeah, I never understood why people would think that maintaining some sort of cultural identity based on heritage undermines commitment to America. I like my heritage, but many of those countries have parliamentary systems, which I find undemocratic. I also tend not to judge people based on shared heritage: there are plenty of jerks named things like Tingelstad and Ingebretsen among MN and IA politics.
Sarah Palin.
Because some elderly white male conservatives prefer brunettes.
Man, I hate how even rhethoric ostensibly about inclusivity gets twisted into nationalist bullshit in the US.
“We’re all Americans, after all!” Because what matters isn’t that we’re all fucking humans, it’s that we have the right nationality and the right amount of jingo. Reminds me of the “we’re all Muslims, after all” I hear a lot in interviews with the leaders of “moderate” militias in Syria or wherever.
Palin implies that BLM activists are “…thugs rioting against police officers.”
Hmm. Surely there would be less violence if municipal leaders chose to send unarmed, political leaders and policy experts to meet BLM leaders and activists and listen to what they have to say, instead of sending heavily-armed, militarized police forces who are trained for, and excessively prepared for, using extreme violence.
If a phalanx of heavily armed soldiers approached me, I sure as hell would either run (and risk getting shot in the back) or feel compelled to fight (and be shot in the front) or surrender altogether. What terrible choices.
But if people approached without guns, in plain clothes, and held out a hand, and said, “Let’s talk. Tell me what is on your mind and tell me how I can help” then surely that would be less violent and might actually lead to listening and conversation, which is the first step in effecting social change.
How can you talk to a tank? Or even to a LEO who has on a helmet, full face shield, etc.? How can you shake hands with someone who has a rifle in one hand and a riot shield in the other?
While I agree with 99.9% of everything here (as usual :S), do you think, PZ, in reference to the title of this post, that you could please maybe not compare someone who is ignorant, dangerous, bigoted, misguided (or any of a million other words you could use – be imaginative!) to people with mental-health issues?
Don’t want to be that complain-y person but one of the reasons I followed FTB after the “deep rifts” episodes was that you all seemed attuned to the need to rethink how / stop and think before we use certain words to reduce systemic marginalistion of certain groups, so hopefully this will be taken in the spirit it’s meant!
Thanks, and otherwise, keep up the good work :)
So much disingenuousness and bad faith in one little paragraph. It is nauseating to see Palin blame the victims of police violence for their supposed ‘provocateurism’. I wonder how it was that a man simply reaching for his driving licence ‘provoked’ a cop to gun him down? It seems that an awful lot of often unarmed and compliant Black people, or Black people reasonably running away from quite probably dangerous cops while harming no one, are somehow so darn ‘provocative’ that they incite their own fatal shootings. Why, it is almost as though racist cops find the mere fact that a person is Black and not in shackles to be ‘provocative’. Palin is engaging in outright apologia for murder performed from behind a badge, and I can’t yet decide if she is merely too stupid to see it (quite possible on her prior track record), or is so racist that she is happy to spout tripe in defence of racially motivated murderers. Of course, both stupid and bigoted is my current leading hypothesis.
And invoking other marginalized groups to try to delegitimize Black Lives Matter is nothing short of disgusting. I am fairly certain that pretending to care about any of the less privileged caused her to come out in hives.
Because acknowledging the reality of the diversity of identity within the broad descriptor ‘American’ is bad… why, exactly? It is not as though American are churned out to spec from mass production facilities or something – they are all individuals, all human as Zeppelin points out @ 23. Fetishizing a ‘my nation right or wrong’ cult of abstract ‘Americanism’ over the reality of the lived experience of actual people from all walks of American life and all of the many composite American identity groups is down right fascist, which is par for the course for the likes of Palin I suppose.
Also, what did hyphens ever do to her?
I fail to see the ‘virtue’ inherent in acts of cold blooded, racially motivated murder committed from behind the cover of a badge. Surely the self declared ‘land of the free and home of the brave’ should stand for something better than that?
@birgerjohansson #5:
What instructions? “Be an arse”?
Now I see why xtians are so eager to defend the concept afterlife.
Folks like Palin should burn in hell.
Die, Amer-ica! Take that!
Well… before reaching for his wallet, he told the cop that he had a license to carry concealed weapon [CCW] and he did have one. That probably triggered the cop into ultra-defensiveness, wary of any suspicious moves he might make. Disregarding the contradictory command the cop gave, “show me your driver’s license”, causing the driver to reach behind his back. Causing the cop to instantly respond by fatally disabling the suspicious person. (even though his wife kept saying he’s reaching for his wallet). Never mind their was a child in the car also.
ugh
however one tries to construe the motive for the shot, my rationality rebels.
only wrote the 1st paragraph out of surprise at having never seen it construed that way.
The easiest way to express what BLM means to me is to think of it as “Black Lives Matter Too!”.
CatieCat, #31
If you phrase it as “Black Lives Also Matter!” then you get the darkly ironic acronym “BLAM!” as an added bonus…
re 31:
Yes, exactly the point of the TLA. Every Liberal pundit (EG: Trevor Noah, Seth Meyers, etc) point out that saying Something Matters, is not intended to mean Only Something Matters.
Seth gave a good example of a store with a sign saying “We Sell Lottery Tickets”, and how absurd it would be to interpret it as “We Only Sell Lottery Tickets”.
Saying “Black Lives Matters” is emphasizing that “All Lives Matter” includes Black Lives; which are often overlooked. Which is what is meant by objecting to BLM instead of All Lives Matter.
Demanding use of All Lives… is deliberately dismissing Black Lives as significant.
re 32:
*chuckle*
yet throwing the “also” in there diminishes the emphasis which is the whole point of the TLA.
@CatieCat: I wondered about adding the “too” myself.
From my (ignorant) POV it looks like it would save a lot of misunderstanding, but then again my impression is that said “misunderstanding” comes only from bad faith.
Native lives…and Eskimos? What the whaaargrbling fuck?