Look at the wonderful example the chief of police of Austin has set, in the case of a jaywalker manhandled by the police.
She was lucky. So, so lucky. If they hadn’t been such good police officers, they would have raped her. For jaywalking.
I am so filled with confidence in the Austin police. They won’t rape jaywalkers! Does anyone have any cookies we can send to them?
I tell you, there are wretched hateful people everywhere, even in the Empire of Nice that we call Minnesota. A woman of apparently, from her name, German extraction (“Burchard-Risch” — how totally un-American) got so irate at a woman speaking Swahili (“Asma Jama”. Is that less American than “Burchard-Risch”? Shouldn’t only people with good Lakota names like “Winona” or “Wasechun Tashunka” have the right to complain?*) in an Applebee’s that she got up and smashed a glass beer mug across her face, lacerating her horribly.
Asma Jama was there with her children having an ordinary conversation, when Burchard-Risch irrationally lost her temper at hearing a conversation that she had no part in, in a language she didn’t understand, and thought that was sufficient to cuss out the Jama family, throw a drink at them, and then violently strike her. Unbelievable. How can people have that degree of xenophobia? I wonder if Burchard-Risch is a Trump supporter.
There is now a fundraiser to cover Jama’s medical expenses. Be warned: front and center at that link is a photo of Jama’s seriously cut up face.
*Except, of course, that the Lakota culture of courtesy would mean they wouldn’t get up to smack around someone for the crime of speaking that foreign tongue, English. Or excuse me, American.
This is a thread dedicated to discussion of race issues in the US. Tony and rq are the curators, and they will be posting news and links here. Please feel free to add to the conversation, but this is not the place for argument; increase the information, not the conflict.
What are you doing reading me about that incident? Go read Sikivu Hutchinson.
Whenever there’s a black girl on a school campus wielding a dangerous weapon like a cell phone, white macho can always be counted on to come to civilization’s rescue with the full force of fascist violence. These days, unarmed black children rank higher than mass murderers with semi-automatic weapons as public enemy number one on American school campuses.
Now there’s an interesting contrast. We can ban cell phones, but we are somehow incapable of regulating those semi-automatic weapons even a teensy-tiny bit. A black girl takes out a cell phone and a policeman slams her to the floor and beats her up, a white boy murders nine people and the police take him to Burger King. It’s almost as if we aren’t seeing appropriate responses to the danger or severity of the crime, but instead the police are reacting to the color of their skin.
This retracted article is proof that there is a diversity crisis in Silicon Valley.
Forbes has removed a contributor piece titled “There Is No Diversity Crisis in Silicon Valley” after being hit with a barrage of criticism from readers, including many leading the tech industry’s movement to hire more women, Hispanics and African-Americans. The article, authored by journalist Brian S. Hall, argued that the healthy revenue streams and stock prices of companies like Apple, Google and Facebook were proof that the tech industry is doing well and has no reason to go out of its way to include more women or underrepresented minorities.
There is no crisis at all in Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley is doing absolutely gangbusters!Hall wrote, according to a cached version of the post.This is not a crisis. Silicon Valley is swimming in money and in success.
Join me in a journey to the gibbering throat of conspiratorial madness: a Breitbart article on Ahmed Mohamed and Irving, Texas.
This story isn’t just the usual whine that the “clock” (it’s now always in quotes — because although it was actually a clock in a pencil box cannibalized from an old Radio Shack clock, that is only its outward seeming, and in truth, it was a portent heralding the rising of an ancient evil) was not really an “invention”, therefore Mohamed was a liar. No, that was a circuit board of destruction!!!
It appears, the “clock” Mohamed brought to school this week was not the first of his circuit boards to look ominously like an improvised explosive device trigger. In fact, a photograph of one circulated by the Dallas Morning News was virtually indistinguishable from a circuit board used in a commercially available device used to train law enforcement and military personnel regarding how to identify IEDs.
Look at that face and name: there’s someone who clearly needs careful scrutiny. He’s a 14 year old in Irving, Texas, who likes to build electronic gadgets. He must be very dangerous, because when he showed up at school with a digital device he’d built, the police were called and he was handcuffed and led out of the school and taken to jail.
Sam Harris is still going on and on about how we ought to racially profile airline passengers. We’re looking for suicidal jihadists
, he says, so it’s ridiculous that we’d give the same attention to someone who looks like Jerry Seinfeld that we would to someone who looks like Osama Bin Laden. Never mind that extremely few people who look vaguely Semitic are suicidal jihadists
; it’s an injustice to white people to subject them to the same indignities as brown people, but it’s not an injustice to falsely target brown people as terrorists because, well, they’ve committed the sin of looking like Osama Bin Laden.
We’ve been around and around on this subject. Bruce Schneier, the security expert, schooled him on the flaws in his idea, and really exposed the shallowness of his thinking. It’s bad security. It alienates people who are just as interested as we are in flying safely. It’s statistically naive, ignoring the problems with false positives.
I think it’s also a premise built on unquestioning bigotry. There is an assumption that people who look a certain way based on race will be less humane, more prone to violence, and a greater danger to law abiding citizens of White America, who would never ever harm anyone. The facts, of course, expose that for a sham.
Here’s an example from the streets of Ferguson.
Of those three men, who would Sam Harris thinks poses the greater threat to peace and stability in Ferguson? Clearly, it’s got to be the potential suicidal jihadist on the right, not the righteous Christian Oathkeepers who are patrolling the streets with deadly firepower in their hands.
The dismaying thing about this interview with Harris is that he hasn’t budged a bit — the facts explained to him by a security expert didn’t sway him at all from his bias that brown skin and Semitic features equates to fanatical jihadism. Science, how does it work?
So chrome! So shiny! Soap dispensers work for him 100% of the time!
It’s invisibility! Various technological gadgets, like soap dispensers and facial recognition software, don’t detect them, because they were never properly tested with diverse users.
On the one hand, this is disgraceful — it tells us that biases in the tech sector lead to blind spots. On the other hand, when SkyNet takes over and decides to exterminate the population, it’s only going to shoot the white people.
