[And That’s the Truth is a feature by our guest blogger, Sojourner Truth– PE] Somebody put out a report sayin that 93% of Black Lives Matter protests in the US were peaceful. Now if’n you got a brain in yo head, you realize that statement don’t mean a goddamn thing. Fust off, what counts as a protest? One guy on a street corner with a sign. Is that a protest? Next thing, what is “peaceful”? I mean, I seen clowns on the TV telling me they at a “peaceful” protest and there’s a big fire goin on behind em. So I dont know what a protest is and I dont know what “peaceful” is but even if I take the numbers they give me, 7 percent is 617 riots in 220 cities. Man, I bet Hitler is in Hell right now going “Why didn’t I think of this? Hey, I… Read more →
EppsNet Archive: Race
Traffic Stops and Swimming Pools
We know that people can maintain an unshakable faith in any proposition, however absurd, when they are sustained by a community of like-minded believers. —Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow When I was younger (we’re all very well-behaved now 🙂 ), I had several friends and family members who had unpleasant run-ins with police, where they were cuffed or arrested or beaten, the common thread being not that they were black (they were all white), but they were all wise-asses who didn’t respect authority and couldn’t find it within themselves to be compliant to a police officer. One day my 9th-grade gym teacher told us (again, all white boys) to be excessively polite to police officers — yes sir, no sir — have your day in court if it came to that, but better to be judged by 12 than carried by 6. In my experience, the narrative that only… Read more →
And That’s the Truth: Jacob Blake
[And That’s the Truth is a feature by our guest blogger, Sojourner Truth– PE] I seen the Jacob Blake video from two or three different angles. From what I can tell, a neighbor called police, told them Blake shouldn’t be there, he took someone’s keys and wouldn’t give em back. One officer showed up, called for another officer, they called for more officers. They tried to arrest Blake, he wasn’t gonna have it. [Editor’s Note: Mr. Blake had an active arrest warrant related to charges of third-degree sexual assault, trespassing, and disorderly conduct, in connection with domestic abuse.] They tasered him, tried to physically subdue him, he gets up, walks around his car, opens the driver-side door and leans inside. What’s he got inside the car? I don’t know but I don’t aim to find out by having him pick it up and kill me with it. I got another… Read more →
Down in the Pleasure Center
What percentage of Americans get more pleasure from calling someone a racist than from having an orgasm? I’ll estimate 35 but I feel like that may be low . . . Read more →
Milwaukee Police Chief Accused of Being Inattentive. His Response May Surprise You!
Protests Considered Harmful?
I saw multiple people on TV this weekend looting stores, running out with a “Black Lives Matter” sign in one hand and stolen merchandise in the other. Maybe we should stop having these Black Lives Matter protests. The majority of the TV coverage is black citizens stealing things and setting things on fire, which doesn’t improve anyone’s lives and probably, in terms of prejudice and race relations, makes things worse. In this case, the George Floyd case, I haven’t heard one person say that kneeling on someone’s neck and killing them is good police work. So it’s really a protest against no one, except the one guy who did it and he’s already been fired, arrested, charged with murder and condemned by everyone from the president of the United States on down. There’s no opposing viewpoint to protest against. The mayor of Atlanta, who is a black woman and therefore… Read more →
Why is Michael Bloomberg a “Racist”?
Ninety-five percent of your murders — murderers and murder victims — fit one M.O. You can just take the description, Xerox it and pass it out to all the cops. They are male, minorities, 16 to 25. That’s true in New York. That’s true in virtually every city. That’s an old quote from Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg, cited in “The Notorious Michael R. Bloomberg: His racist stop-and-frisk policy as New York mayor can’t be forgotten.” in the New York Times. My first thought is, instead of jumping right to calling the man a “racist” (translation: “anyone who disagrees with me”), run the numbers and tell us if the statement is true. My sense is that he might be a little off on the numbers but not a lot. And my second thought is that the statement is both sexist and ageist but to my knowledge no one has objected… Read more →
Lowering the Trauma Bar
More than a hundred faculty members at Ball State University signed a letter to the student newspaper saying, in part, “We support our students of color as they deal with the trauma of these events and navigate its fallout.” The traumatic events, as it turns out, are that a marketing professor asked a black student to move to a different seat in the classroom and the student declined to move. First, why make a racial thing out of it? If my son, who is not black, were asked by a college professor to move seats, my hope is that he would would move seats, and if he didn’t want to move, he’d move anyway. Certainly there’s room for personal interpretation, but to me a traumatic event would be, say, losing a limb, or witnessing a murder. Being asked to move seats in a classroom is not a traumatic event. I… Read more →
When Is a Mass Shooting Not a Mass Shooting?
Chicago shooting: 13 people were shot at a house party honoring a man killed earlier this year — CNN.com This is a wild story . . . First of all, the shootings took place at a gathering honoring a man slain earlier this year. According to police, shots were fired within the residence, which caused everyone to start to leave. As partygoers fled the home, police believe one of them opened fire outside. Then a vehicle was driving down the street and one of the people who left the residence, not the same person who was randomly firing at people leaving the house, fired on the vehicle. So we had one person firing inside the house, one person firing at people leaving the house, and a third person firing at a vehicle driving down the street, for a grand total of 13 victims. Because no one involved can be labelled… Read more →
Mass Shootings, Thwarted and Unthwarted
Arresting some knucklehead on a weapons charge and saying you “thwarted a mass shooting” is a speculative fantasy. Meanwhile, since El Paso there have been 25 actual unthwarted mass shootings (per Mass Shooting Tracker), which don’t make the news because they don’t fit the preferred narrative. For example, four of the shootings occurred in Chicago, where in each case the shooters fired into a crowd of people. By my count, about half the victims were women. I can’t find any reporting on this in Mother Jones, which is pretty shocking given their obvious interest in mass shootings. They’d rather report on imaginary mass shootings by white males than on the actual mass shootings of Chicago residents . Read more →
What is a “Mass Shooting” and Who Commits Them?
The Mass Shooting Tracker defines a mass shooting as “an incident where four or more people are shot in a single shooting spree.” The FBI definition of “mass murder” is three or more people murdered in one event. The FBI doesn’t have a definition for “mass shooting.” You have to actually die for the FBI to take notice of you. As of this writing, of 75 mass shootings in 2019, where the race of the perpetrator is known, 22 were white, 39 were black, 8 were Latino, 3 were Asian, 2 were American Indian and 1 was Arab. Many of the 2019 mass shootings are currently unsolved, thus the race of the shooters is not known, but they often took place in black areas and claimed black victims. Mass shootings of black citizens is not generally considered newsworthy, possibly because media have written inner cities off as unsalvageable, so what happens… Read more →
The New York Times vs. Trump
Slate has published a transcript of what it calls the New York Times “crisis town-hall meeting.” The transcript shows that Times executive editor Dean Baquet seems to fault readers for their failure to understand the Times and its duties in the era of Trump. “They sometimes want us to pretend that he was not elected president, but he was elected president,” Baquet said. “And our job is to figure out why, and how, and to hold the administration to account. If you’re independent, that’s what you do.” This was followed by 75 minutes of Q&A with staffers in which, by my count, every question except one could be summarized as “Why can’t we call Donald Trump a racist more often?” In terms of figuring out why and how Trump was elected, I feel sure that “Can you believe what stupid racists Republican voters are?” moves us further from rather than… Read more →
Betsy Ross: American Badass
Unfortunately I won’t be rocking my Betsy Ross sneakers today as Nike is making product decisions based on the hurt feelings of the most sensitive man in America. Hatred of a political party is erasing an iconic (female) figure in the founding of the United States of America. Below is a photo of the Betsy Ross flag prominently displayed at the 2013 inaugural of Barack Obama, of whom I was not a great admirer, but who at least did not hold completely insane views like displaying the original Stars and Bars is an endorsement of slavery. Read more →
5 Questions on the Covington Story
A group of black men taunted a group of white kids as faggots, incest babies and niggers (one kid was black). Would the story have been reported differently if the men were white and the kids were black? Would the story have been reported differently (or at all) if a white guy was banging a drum in an Indian kid’s face? Would the story have been reported differently if no one was wearing a MAGA hat? Would the story have been reported differently if the kids were girls instead of boys? (Again, assume no MAGA hats.) Should morality of action be calculated based on race, sex and hats? (I’m going to say no to this one.) Read more →
White Privilege Not Limited to White People?
Here’s a radio exchange between CNN legal analyst Areva Martin, a black woman, and Sirius XM radio and Fox Nation host David Webb: WEBB: I’ve chosen to cross different parts of the media world, done the work so that I’m qualified to be in each one. I never considered my color the issue, I considered my qualifications the issue. MARTIN: That’s a whole, another long conversation about white privilege, the things that you have the privilege of doing, that people of color don’t have the privilege of. WEBB (dumbfounded): How do I have the privilege of white privilege? MARTIN: David, by virtue of being a white male you have white privilege. WEBB: Areva, I hate to break it to you, but you should’ve been better prepped. I’m black. Wait, so you mean “white privilege” is just a generic insult to throw at people you know nothing about?! Martin’s response: “I… Read more →
To Make the Accusation is to Prove It. To Hear the Allegation is to Believe It.
Simply to make the accusation is to prove it. To hear the allegation is to believe it. No motive for the perpetrator is necessary, no logic or rationale is required. Only a label is required. The label is the motive. The label is the evidence. The label is the logic. Why did Coleman Silk do this? Because he is an x, because he is a y, because he is both. First a racist and now a misogynist. It is too late in the century to call him a Communist, though that is the way it used to be done. . . . That explains everything. — Philip Roth, The Human Stain Read more →
They Submitted Fake Papers to Peer-Reviewed Journals — Here’s What Happened Next
Three writers produced 20 intentionally outlandish academic papers and submitted them to the best peer-reviewed journals associated with fields of scholarship loosely known as “cultural studies” or “identity studies” (for example, gender studies) or “critical theory.” Seven of the papers were accepted for publication and seven more were still under review when the authors elected to end the experiment. Their point would seem to be that scholarship in these fields is based less upon finding truth and more upon attending to social grievances. Just about anything can be published, so long as it falls within the moral orthodoxy and demonstrates an understanding of the existing literature. The authors summarize their methodology as follows. (I’ve inserted the material in brackets from elsewhere in the article, which you should look at in its entirety because there’s too much good stuff to summarize.) What if we write a paper saying we should train… Read more →
“Why Do I Believe What I Believe?”
My fellow Americans – About 20 people showed up for Unite the Right last weekend. That would be a disappointing turnout for a pancake breakfast sponsored by the local softball league, let alone a national rally in Washington, DC. White supremacy is like the Flat Earth Society, not non-existent, but extremely marginal. It’s a boogeyman to scare people about things that are not real. A good question to ask is “Why do I believe what I believe?” For example, “Why do I believe in a resurgence of white supremacy when only 20 people in a nation of 300 million can be persuaded to show up at a rally?” Possible answers include “I saw it on the internet” or “I heard it on TV.” These are perhaps not good answers, in that they open us up to manipulation for political gain, financial gain, and increased readership and viewership. Read more →
See You in Hell
[See You in Hell is a feature by our guest blogger, Satan — PE] Greetings from the infernal regions! Man arrested at New Mexico compound was allegedly training child to commit school shootings — NBC News Here’s a photo of the gentleman in question, Siraj Ibn Wahhaj: One of the few black men in America actively involved in his children’s lives. Kudos, sir! See you in Hell . . . Read more →
See You in Hell: Sarah Jeong Edition
[See You in Hell is a feature by our guest blogger, Satan — PE] Greetings from the underworld! Someone named Sarah Jeong was hired by a newspaper to work on their editorial board. It turns out Sarah has some pretty woke tweets. Here’s a sample: Dumbass fucking white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants. Ha ha, that’s pretty good. Who hired her to write editorials? The Sweet Briar College student paper? No, it’s the New York Times! Earlier this year, the Times hired someone named Quinn Norton, then fired her on the same day because of what it called racial and anti-gay slurs. I don’t know exactly what Quinn Norton said but I’ll bet it wasn’t as provocative as dumbass fucking white people pissing on the internet like dogs! Look, I hate white men and white people in general as much as… Read more →