That sure is a funny way to celebrate Canada Day

I shouldn’t talk. Here in the US we have our own funny way of celebrating a patriotic holiday: “Hey, let’s set off a lot of explosions and set fires and terrify our pets!” In Canada, though, it’s “Hey, let’s go poke around the church school and find the dead bodies of Indian children!”

You guessed it: another 182 mysterious shallow graves have been discovered on the grounds of a residential school.

A First Nation in B.C.’s South Interior says 182 unmarked grave sites have been discovered near the location of a former residential school.

The community of ʔaq̓am, one of four bands in the Ktunaxa Nation and located near the city of Cranbrook, B.C., used ground-penetrating radar to search a site close to the former St. Eugene’s Mission School, the Lower Kootenay Band announced Wednesday.

In a statement, the ʔaq̓am band said it began searching the area for burial sites after finding an unknown, unmarked grave during remedial work around the ʔaq̓am cemetery last year. The cemetery is adjacent to the former school.

Preliminary results from that investigation found 182 burial sites. The statement said the graves were shallow — about a metre deep — and within the cemetery grounds.

Come on, Canada. You have to learn from your sister nation to the south. We keep our atrocities on the down low, and our legislators work night and day to bury our history. When you murder masses of small children, you have to dig the graves much deeper, and cover them over with a heavy layer of excuses.

Why was Chauvin sentenced to 22 years?

I found an informative thread on Twitter that explains how the judge arrived at that number. It was a reasonable sentence at the high end of the allowed sentencing guidelines. The judge was not generous.

To summarize, there is a precedent of prior court decisions with establish an allowed range of sentencing, and if a judge were to step way outside the bounds of that range, they’d be providing grounds for overturning their decision. So the judge’s hands are tied to a certain degree.

That doesn’t mean the guidelines are free of bias, however. For example, one factor they’re supposed to take into account is your prior convictions — you’re guilty of lots of crimes in the past, so therefore you’re justified in increasing the allowed range of punishments. If you’re a first offender, the judge has to bump the range down.

Derek Chauvin had zero prior convictions.

Where that is unfair and biased is that we’ve had this idiotic “war” on drugs going on for decades which is unfairly applied by the police, which means that if you’re a black person, you’re much more likely to stack up a record of offenses which will then automatically be used to increase the severity of sentencing against you. Being a white cop means you get to start with a clean slate, making it easier to skate when you do commit a serious crime. “Repeat offender” laws seem superficially just, but are also ways to selectively target oppressed minorities.

I’m calling it the Chris Rufo Theory from now on

Chris Rufo is a sad little man, and I almost feel sorry for him. He is the primary person responsible for triggering the nationwide moral panic over Critical Race Theory; he’s the one who handed the far right an egregious misinterpretation of the idea, shaping it into a meaningless punching bag for conservative resentment. Now he’s getting his moment in the sun, and we all get to see how feeble his idea is. He got eviscerated by Joy Reid. From the very first question she asks he is found wanting.

“Are you an expert in race or racial theory, are you a lawyer, a legal scholar, is that part of your background?”

Yeah, I’m a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, I’m running their initiative on Critical Race Theory.

Uh, what? The Manhattan Institute is a conservative think-tank dedicated to promoting capitalism and free market economics. Former members include George Gilder (who also co-founded the Discovery Institute) and Charles Murray. One of its big policy successes was pushing broken-windows policing, that terrible flop of an idea that only succeeded in increasing police power.

Rufo is, or was, a documentary film maker, and a research fellow at the Discovery Institute. There is absolutely nothing in his background that qualifies him in the slightest way to be an expert in race or the law. He should have said “No” in answer to that question.

But that’s OK, because Reid then exposes his ignorance repeatedly. She is amusingly vicious with a smile as she points out that nothing he claims is part of Critical Race Theory actually is, and wickedly uses his own words against him. His version of CRT is just a propaganda tool, a grab bag of lies and nonsense that he claims are all part of the theory; as he himself says, The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’ I like that she also does not let him use this interview to vomit up nonstop lies without pushback, something I’ve missed from too many journalists in the last few decades. A good interviewer is not a stenographer who is providing a platform for the interviewee.

Watch the whole thing.

One lasting contribution is that I’ll never again think of the right-wing spin on CRT as Critical Race Theory. It’s all really Chris Rufo Theory.

I’m not on the side of Boghossian and Lindsay, OK?

Critical Race Theory is simultaneously a profound readjustment of how we see American history, and a trivial, obvious fact. Yes, the United States was founded by genocidal European colonizers who built their country on the backs of African slaves. Yes, the Founding Fathers were philosophical hypocrites who wrote elegantly and beautifully about liberty and freedom and human rights and then went home to rape black women. Yes, that lovely classical architecture and those white pillars were erected on an Indian burial ground by black slaves. Get used to reality and accept it and do something about it.

The only people who reflexively object to Critical Race Theory are the worst and whitest buffoons in the country. So who do we see eagerly marching up to the microphones and cameras to express their dissent from reality? Two representative white atheists with arrogance to spare and a history of whining about “grievance studies,” Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay.

Jesus fuck, it’s embarrassing to be an atheist anymore.

Their ignorance got exposed and ridiculed on air, and now Michael Harriot completes the disembowelment. This is a truly ugly execution. Jimmy and Petey really need to stay at home, hiding under their bed, from now on.

Lindsay and Boghossian are college professors who have turned whitesplaining into an academic field called Grievance Studies. Basically, they propose that social justice is just a bunch of whining from people who don’t want to be held accountable for their lack of agency, unlike our white brethren who are coasting off a quarter of a millennium of privilege and convulse into conniptions at the very mention of this country’s racist past.

That’s just the prelude. Marc Lamont Hill, the man in the middle, let the two insipid fuckwits dig their own graves for 10 minutes. I about died when Lindsay, thinking he was so clever, tried to go on the counterattack and tell Hill that he was made uncomfortable by the word “folk” because Germans used the word “Volk” in Nazi propaganda. What a maroon…but here, enjoy the idiocy for yourself:

Or just savor Harriot’s summary:

So when Lindsay and Boghossian began whitemanning using polysyllabic words to explain why all the negroes are wrong, they had no idea that Hill was a practitioner of the ancient African tradition of knowing what the fuck he’s talking about. The pair filibustered through two segments while Hill patiently allowed them to say the things they made up. When they were done, Hill surprised Pinky and No-Brain with why they would not be able to take over the world with their pseudo-intellectual tripe.

“Of course, we’re running out of time but I’m going to respond just so people don’t think I don’t have a response,” Hill said, before launching into an explanation that Critical Race Theory is only related to Critical Theory in the way that bullshitting is related to having someone slap the shit out of you; it’s not the same shit. They may have known that Hill was the author of six books and holds a Ph.D. in the subject on which they speculated, but they were unaware that Hill also holds the position that can only be described by the things he is not.

He is not one of their lil’ friends. He is not Boo Boo the fool. And, most importantly, if they thought they were going to overwhelm someone with their white-centric Critical Racist Theory, they should have known:

Marc Lamont Hill is not the one.

Bewildered, Lindsay could only respond by saying: “You actually know a lot about this.”

And then, with a smile, Hill invites them to come back on sometime to continue the discussion. He sure knows when he’s got some tasty fish on the line.

This is not a fundraiser — it’s Juneteenth!

You may notice a Juneteenth logo on the left side of the window, where we usually put a link to a fundraising page. This is a bit awkward, because we want to honor and celebrate Juneteenth, but not appropriate it, so we’re taking a low key approach. Various bloggers around Freethought blogs have written or will be writing about civil rights, liberation, justice, all those sorts of things associated with Juneteenth, and I’ll be linking to them on our fundraising page, which is not about fundraising, this time. Look for that to appear tomorrow.

It’s also awkward for us because, well, Freethoughtblogs has no African American bloggers. We used to, but you may have noticed that we have a fair amount of turnover here, with new blogs joining and old blogs departing, possibly because we’re a good place to get started with public engagement, but since we don’t pay our bloggers and we had the recent episode with a jerk trying to silence us with a lawsuit, there’s always the appeal of greener pastures. Also, we’re maybe a little too low key in advertising blogging opportunities — we do have an application process, but it’s subtly buried in the “About FtB” link in the top bar. I should probably do something about that.

Freethoughtblogs is committed to supporting a diverse network of bloggers here. If you’d like to join a socially conscious, diversity affirmative network, let us know!

Gone almost a week, and nothing has changed

It was a good 5 days. I’m an internet junkie, but my laptop died a few days before my flight, and while I considered bringing along an old clunker of a netbook, I eventually decided to be strong and go mostly cold turkey and hang out with the family. I had my phone as one slender lifeline to keep in touch with Mary, and that was it. So I visited my mother, my two sisters, my two brothers, my son and his wife, my grandson, and went to the beach and went fishing. I went for walks and looked at spiders. I went to a church, once. I didn’t do much of anything, actually.

I got home early evening last night, and was finally able to shuffle some money around on the internet and make the big announcement, but then I just hit the sack and slept in until 7am. I got up this morning and finally, after that respite, plunged back into the internet and…

AAAAAAAAIAIIIEEEE.

Nothing has changed. The right wing is still ginning up a culture war, and they look even more stupid when you haven’t been desensitized by the continual barrage. I mean, look at these two idiots:

The Left’s War on Hydroxychloroquine Continues? What? Hydroxychloroquine is a dangerous drug that shows no effectiveness against the coronavirus — it was tossed out to the media by chickenshit politicians (like Ron Johnson there) as cheap snake oil to shut gullible people up. The “Left” didn’t buy it. Now we’ve got safe, effective vaccines, we lefties are happily lining up to get those while the righties are inventing conspiracy theories to avoid them. There never was a “war on hydroxychloroquine.” Johnson and every loudmouthed liar on Fox News can go gargle bleach if they want.

It only takes a little distance to see that the way these quacks operate is to tell an outrageous lie, and the first time you hear it, you think “That is the dumbest thing I ever heard.” The second, third, and fiftieth time they say it, you roll your eyes and tune it out. The hundredth time you think, “Am I gonna have to go dig into the scientific literature and read a bunch of papers?” The thousandth time you begin to have doubts and wonder, “Maybe I missed something? Should we fund another clinical trial?”, and then they’ve got you. Trust me, your first impressions were probably correct. Bullshit isn’t turned into science by a thousand Fox News morons churning it over.

Sometimes they even admit what they’re doing. Here’s Chris Rufo outlining their strategy against Critical Race Theory: they just lie about it, misrepresent it, and if they hammer it hard enough at the public, they’ll start to associate the lies with the real thing.

You just have to turn up the volume on your bullhorn and be really, really repetitive and you too can get any nonsense you want drilled into the discourse. If you can’t get on Fox News right away, there’s always Sam Harris and Joe Rogan to act as pre-amps and get you started on your program to purée everyone’s brains via mass media.

I strongly recommend the clarifying effects of watching ocean waves roll in for a while. Unfortunately, I have to warn you of the spectacular downer you will experience when you get back from the shore.

I still don’t know her name

The US Army is making a token acknowledgment of crimes against American Indians by digging up and shipping back to their homelands the bodies of 10 children who died in their care. A lot of the Indian schools in the US and Canada were run by Catholic missionaries (including the one at the site of my university), but there were also some, like the Carlisle Industrial School for Indians in Pennsylvania, that were administered by the US government. They were all equally heartless and fundamentally racist. At Carlisle, the goal was to “Kill the Indian: Save the Man”, which tells you all you need to know about their appreciation for the culture the children they forcibly stole from their parents.

180 children died at Carlisle, and were buried on a local plot; many more died, but their bodies immediately shipped back to their homes. Apparently, the children who died of infectious disease, especially tuberculosis, were buried locally to prevent the spread of disease. Lots died because conditions were minimal and care rudimentary.

Now, finally, some of these kids who died over a hundred years ago are being sent back to families who have almost no memory of them.

The remains of 10 children who died at Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Cumberland County between 1880 and 1910 are slated to be exhumed this summer.

Aleut family members will return the remains of one child to Saint Paul Island in Alaska, and Rosebud Sioux descendants will take nine children back to a tribal veteran’s cemetery in South Dakota or to private family plots.

Impressive. So we just rounded up kids from completely different nations, with different languages and customs, and threw them together in a dormitory far, far away from their homes. We took everything away from them, including their names.

Historian Barbara Landis wrote an essay debunking ghost stories surrounding a Rosebud Sioux child whose name translated to Take the Tail and who died within months of her arrival in Carlisle. Her name was changed at the school to Lucy Pretty Eagle and later used in a children’s historical fiction book as part of the Scholastic series, Dear America.

Landis and a group of non-native and native women wrote a review pointing out stereotypes and inaccuracies in the book, including its depiction of Lucy Pretty Eagle.

“She was not this ghost story,” she said. “She was a little girl who passed away far away from home under horrible circumstances and her remains were never returned to her home community.”

Take the Tail’s remains are among those of eight children being returned to Rosebud Sioux family members this year.

Picture this young girl ripped from her family in the fall of 1883, taken to this barracks 1500 miles away, and told that she was not allowed to speak any language but English. They take away her name and translate it literally into English as “Take the Tail”, and even that isn’t good enough, so they tell her her new name is Lucy Pretty Eagle, which has nothing to do with her culture, her history, or her family.

Then she dies in the spring of 1884. Her family gets a letter, nothing more. Her death is logged on a couple of 3×5 cards and mentioned in the school newsletter.

Finally, to complete her erasure, she’s turned into a character in a ghost story and historical propaganda.

To make up for all that, well, at least we’re sending her bones back to South Dakota now. What a feel-good story! Although her history won’t be complete until Disney makes an animated movie about her.

I do wonder what her name actually was — I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a string of English words, or a traditional European first name.