The stories about George Floyd’s death have changed and morphed, as more video emerges, more witnesses talk to journalists, and the cops lies start to wear thin. What I recommend doing is keeping an eye on the story until the cover-up begins, because you can tell where the interesting facts are, by looking for the holes in the finished tapestry.
This, from Malcolm X:
The FBI announced that they arrested a white supremacist who was planning to blow up a synagogue. [slate]
Most Americans don’t know that reparations for slavery has already been attempted. It didn’t work. But that’s because the US did it wrong.
All of the western nations have been caught in a lie; a lie of their pretended humanism.
James Baldwin and Bob Dylan
I recommend Nell Irvin Painter’s The History of White People. [wc] It’s a valuable anodyne to all of the racist propaganda I have been ingesting and studying over the last few years. My approach to American racism has been to deconstruct its sources; Painter’s (in this book) is to demonstrate how it was constructed, and its sources. She puts the pieces together so you can see how they were assembled, and its an ugly picture.
Americans don’t seem to realize how completely inauthentic campaign rallies and caucuses are. Consequently, we have a huge discussion about what Trump said or didn’t say, supported or didn’t support. I hate it when people who know something is bullshit pretend that it’s not, because they’re committing bullshit too.
Oh, Georgia, you’re just full of racist assholes, aren’t you? They’re up to their same old tricks.
Trumpish rhetoric:
Many of those people were there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee. So this week it’s Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after?
Doing this as a “let’s all listen together and discuss” thread was tempting but I think the way they explain things is so solid that there’s not much left to say except “Wow, I didn’t know that.” Which is something I said a lot; perhaps a tribute to my ignorance.