COLLECTIVE MADNESS


“Soft despotism is a term coined by Alexis de Tocqueville describing the state into which a country overrun by "a network of small complicated rules" might degrade. Soft despotism is different from despotism (also called 'hard despotism') in the sense that it is not obvious to the people."

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Racial Foolishness and Incindiary Comments

This is a Change we do not need.

Fatimah Ali: 'Race war' in America


By Fatimah Ali
Philadelphia Daily News

AT LEAST 2 million readers visit DrudgeReport.com daily, and, for the last two weeks, it seemed like most of them were steamed at me.

Thousands of hostile messages flooded my e-mail after my Sept. 2 column that the Daily News called "We Need Obama, Not 4 More Years of George Bush."

Drudge cleverly headlined it: "Philadelphia columnist warns if McCain wins, look for a full-fledged race war."

I stand by the column - but after all of that backlash, I realize I was dead wrong. We don't have to wait until after the election for a race war. We're in one now.

I know that putting the words "race" and "war" together is like hurling an incendiary device. But I wasn't issuing a call to arms, it was a metaphorical prediction.

I hate violence, but I do see a growing wave of intolerance sweeping the nation. And most of the responses were hostile, like one from someone who identified himself as Dennis Van Pelt: "Obama runs like a porch monkey in Alabama during a KKK concert." But, not all white Southerners feel like Dennis. Russ Nelson wrote: "I am a white male who was proud to cast my vote for Barack Obama in the Alabama state primary. He inspires me!"

Nelson sounds more like the liberal whites I grew up with in West Mount Airy, a community that pioneered integration in Philadelphia and kept me wearing rose-colored glasses. I didn't personally experience racism until I was 40, and then it hit me like a ton of bricks.

The recent onslaught of hate mail I received is a cruel reminder that racism is a like a simmering pot ready to boil over. But it's diametrically opposed to what democracy should represent.

I move in diverse circles and was raised in an upper-middle-class family with parents who exposed us to a wide range of experiences. My family includes several races and religions and a range of political views.

But from what I've been seeing lately, including the reaction to my column, the racial, economic, cultural and religious divides are getting wider. Most of the 2,000 negative responses used language so foul my ears curled.

These excerpts are some of the milder ones: Jerry Caruso threatened: "Pleeeeease bring it, we'll extinguish you." Michael Babich from Wichita, Kan., accused me of "calling for rampant crime and a plague of locusts."

From John Hassler: "I'd rather have an all out war than have [Obama] for president." John Hermanek: "There will be race wars either way. Why? Because he's black." Roland hated my column: "I don't like threats, so I will for sure, vote for John McCain." Jim McDowell was less polite: "I just realized after I saw your last name you're a damn rag head. You stupid S.O.B.'s want to take us back to the seventh century."

Do these quotes shock you? Is the vitriol not far from the kind of hatred that led to lynching?

Unfortunately, sentiments like this are not uncommon. Flip through right-wing talk radio, and you can hear this type of intolerance daily. Syndicated talker Jim Quinn wondered if I'm some "liberal black Muslim" and (according to MediaWatch.org) fumed, "Get an American name if you want to be an American."

You have to have a European name to be an American? Barack Obama's candidacy has simply been the latest stage on which some of this antagonism plays out. I wonder about people like Larry Coltslinger, who said: "Our unemployment rate is as good, or better than it was after all eight years of Bill Clinton."

Yet, like so many others, my family has to tough it out daily to get by. But we're hardly alone. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that 592,000 Americans lost their jobs last month. Many share a similar plight - middle-class families who've lost financial footing because of corporate greed.


DECADES after Brown v. Board, after a long civil-rights struggle and the fact that we live in an increasingly multicultural society, our nation's sagging economic state is also causing great racial strife among those who are financially at the bottom.

In some neighborhoods in L.A., violence is rampant between blacks and Mexicans. Gang wars are frequent, and, the LAPD says, are based on race and competition for jobs. In Philadelphia, police believe several recent robberies and murders of shop owners were directly related to race.

No, we're not anywhere near "post-racial" times. If we were, the possibility that a black man may well become our next president wouldn't matter. And two words out of 775 in my original column would not have unleashed the kind of hatred that makes me want to retreat to a bunker. *


Fatimah Ali is a regular contributor. E-mail her at fameworksmedia@yahoo.com.


34 comments:

  1. If Obama wins, look for a full-fledged generational war. If Biden wins, look for a full-fledged gender war.

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  2. An excerpt from David Brooks today:

    " Palin is the ultimate small-town renegade rising from the frontier to do battle with the corrupt establishment. Her followers take pride in the way she has aroused fear, hatred and panic in the minds of the liberal elite. The feminists declare that she’s not a real woman because she doesn’t hew to their rigid categories. People who’ve never been in a Wal-Mart think she is parochial because she has never summered in Tuscany.

    Look at the condescension and snobbery oozing from elite quarters, her backers say. Look at the endless string of vicious, one-sided attacks in the news media. This is what elites produce. This is why regular people need to take control.

    And there’s a serious argument here. In the current Weekly Standard, Steven Hayward argues that the nation’s founders wanted uncertified citizens to hold the highest offices in the land. They did not believe in a separate class of professional executives. They wanted rough and rooted people like Palin.

    I would have more sympathy for this view if I hadn’t just lived through the last eight years. For if the Bush administration was anything, it was the anti-establishment attitude put into executive practice.

    And the problem with this attitude is that, especially in his first term, it made Bush inept at governance. It turns out that governance, the creation and execution of policy, is hard. It requires acquired skills. Most of all, it requires prudence.

    What is prudence? It is the ability to grasp the unique pattern of a specific situation. It is the ability to absorb the vast flow of information and still discern the essential current of events — the things that go together and the things that will never go together. It is the ability to engage in complex deliberations and feel which arguments have the most weight.

    How is prudence acquired? Through experience. The prudent leader possesses a repertoire of events, through personal involvement or the study of history, and can apply those models to current circumstances to judge what is important and what is not, who can be persuaded and who can’t, what has worked and what hasn’t.

    Experienced leaders can certainly blunder if their minds have rigidified (see: Rumsfeld, Donald), but the records of leaders without long experience and prudence is not good. As George Will pointed out, the founders used the word “experience” 91 times in the Federalist Papers. Democracy is not average people selecting average leaders. It is average people with the wisdom to select the best prepared.

    Sarah Palin has many virtues. If you wanted someone to destroy a corrupt establishment, she’d be your woman. But the constructive act of governance is another matter. She has not been engaged in national issues, does not have a repertoire of historic patterns and, like President Bush, she seems to compensate for her lack of experience with brashness and excessive decisiveness. "

    http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/16/opinion/16brooks.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

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  3. Anyone get the sense that we're daily asked to spend our emotions to honor mass movements with dubious relationships to our own interests?

    "Most of the 2,000 negative responses used language so foul my ears curled."

    MSM can't do outrage. Curling ears, eh? How many Chinese ears curled after those earthquakes killed their children? You ever been chased by your neighbors with machetes? Then asked to go live peaceably with them? Ever goto war while your country was at a mall or a rally?

    Ms. Ali simply discovered the Internet. Goto Digg.com or Reddit.com and you'll see "worse." They're blips, not waves, and more often not they're policed by reasonable people, if the software allows them to intervene. That Ms. Ali communicates with her audience via boring email and not socially rich software should disqualify her from impugning society.

    America should not favor or comfort any morons in its midst. But we shouldn't forget that we are ill served by our media firms. And that the best response to both is to use our God-given Reason.

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  4. "In some neighborhoods in L.A., violence is rampant between blacks and Mexicans. Gang wars are frequent, and, the LAPD says, are based on race and competition for jobs. In Philadelphia, police believe several recent robberies and murders of shop owners were directly related to race."

    They're thugs. Pursue them and arrest them. Let the sociologists converse about their skin tones, ethnic features and shared histories. Thugs will ruin our prosperity, that much is certain.

    Security, Water, Energy, Liberty - those are themes for 21st century political movements. Not complaining about the assholes you met on the internet.

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  5. Russia authorities halted trading on the country’s stock exchange on Tuesday after it plunged 17 per cent in a broad-based sell-off.

    “The fundamental issue is oil. Russian oil companies are not producing more so their earnings are dependent on a rising oil price,” said Daniel Salter, analyst at ING. If the oil price falls, then earnings downgrades are in the pipeline for these stocks, he added.

    That took an analyst to figure out.

    Compare to the Dow's 4.4% sell of yesterday, the worst since 2001.

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  6. For if the Bush administration was anything, it was the anti-establishment attitude put into executive practice.

    What's this writer been smoking?

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  7. McCain ahead a little in Ohio today, Virginia and Pennslyvania dead even, McCain a little ahead in Colorado for the first time, according to daily Rasmussen. Ahead nationally too, though Obama picked up a point.

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  8. "What's this writer been smoking?"

    Hopefully whatever it is, it falls from the sky upon you-know-who's inauguration.

    I'll order a Pizza if you want to join.

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  9. Questors, is it a bird, a plane, a UFO, maybe Barack Obama?---

    a scientist at the LHC declared that the object is similar to the flash that an Imperial Star Destroyer does when reaching Warp 10.

    Here One Moment, Gone The Next

    Weird celestial object stumps scientists at Hubble. Nothing like it ever seen, then not seen before.

    Passing strange.

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  10. Maybe it was a cosmic neon advertisement for $12k Pickups at Parr Motors, as they haven't answered my e-mail inquiring about same. Maybe sold out, sales over.

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  11. Wow bobal, they want 44K for new ones, maybe I got my wires crossed somewhere.

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  12. Totalitarian tendencies seep out at the edges of the Obama campaign, as Obamagoons try to stifle Free Speech

    If Fatima Ali is correct about an Obama defeat, and we know what an Obama victory will mean, the conclusion is Obama's a disaster for the country, whether he wins or loses.
    ------

    That flash in a far undiscovered part of the cosmos may have been the end result of some homonid like beings turning on a CERN type machine for the first time.

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  13. Yeah, they didn't get right back to me on that, Teresita. You can find the basic package, without 4 wheel drive, and what's a pickup without 4 wheel drive, in the low 20's maybe.

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  14. Secret Service code names--

    John McCain - Code name: Phoenix

    Cindy McCain - Code name: Parasol

    Barack Obama - Code name: Renegade

    Michelle Obama - Code name: Renaissance

    Joe Biden - Code name: Celtic

    Jill Biden - Code name: Capri

    Sarah Palin - Code name: Denali

    Todd Palin - Code name: Driller


    Have fun, make up your own.

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  15. Ash and DR attempting to lay responsibility for the subprime credit mess at Bush's feet is bullshit (but thats all you can expect from those two).

    From
    Investors Business Daily
    - But it was the Clinton administration, obsessed with multiculturalism, that dictated where mortgage lenders could lend, and originally helped create the market for the high-risk subprime loans now infecting like a retrovirus the balance sheets of many of Wall Street's most revered institutions.

    Tough new regulations forced lenders into high-risk areas where they had no choice but to lower lending standards to make the loans that sound business practices had previously guarded against making. It was either that or face stiff government penalties.

    The untold story in this whole national crisis is that President Clinton put on steroids the Community Redevelopment Act, a well-intended Carter-era law designed to encourage minority homeownership. And in so doing, he helped create the market for the risky subprime loans that he and Democrats now decry as not only greedy but "predatory."



    I link to this article only to note that fingers of blame for the subprime credit crisis can be pointed in every direction, but ultimately can only be laid at the feet of greed - on everyone's part - borrowers, lenders, investment banks, MBS/CDO investors, rating agencies, Democrats and Republicans.

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  16. Steven Hayward argues that the nation’s founders wanted uncertified citizens to hold the highest offices in the land.

    They wanted citizens, whether 'certified' or not, I don't know. But if 'uncertified' is your flavor, Obama just might be your man.

    Sarah Palin has many virtues. If you wanted someone to destroy a corrupt establishment, she’d be your woman.

    Ash, you seem to be making at least a little progress this morning, quoting stuff like that.

    Congratutlations, keep up the good work.

    A * star for you this day.

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  17. I agree with jwillie that it can't be laid at the feet of President Bush. If I could find where I read it, I believe I could show he was trying to get a handle on Freddie and Fannie early on.

    The pressure was on to make loans. I'll bet many of those loan officers would watch the borrower walk out the door after the loan signing, thinking, those folks don't have a chance, but, not my problem, it'll get bundled and passed on to someone else.

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  18. 'Todd Palin - Code name: Driller'

    First Dude sure isn't shooting blanks, they've got 5 kids.

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  19. I think it was Deuce who pointed out seveal weeks ago that the mortgage crisis was all about Affirmative Action. I agree.

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  20. Do not know where I laid all the blame on Team43. I do think that Rubin did a bang up job, in conjunction with Newt running the House.

    I do not think that Team43 matched their overall performance.

    Mr Bush thinks we're gettin' the cured. He supplied a little
    "hair of the dog", but woouldn't bail out his brothers' employeer.

    Maybe a good thing, maybe not.

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  21. It wasn't "about" affirmitive action, even habu warned of the hazards coming to term in derivative trading. It was financiers improperly booking the risk, not the clients themselves.

    They just filled out the apps.

    The boys at Silver State, their losses were not from affirmative action housing, but from booking raw land at values that made no economic sense.

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  22. The homes that lead in foreclosures, at least here, are in the $350,000 range.

    Not a lot of affirmative action clients in those houses.
    Pretty much none.

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  23. My bank here, if yov've got the income stream to handle it, will loan 80% of the assessed value shown at the court house, and that's it. The assessed value is always lower than the market reality, so they have a good cushion.

    Vegas/Henderson is running out of vacant land around there I read, running up against unca Sam's land. Vegas has taken a big hit lately, too expensive to get there, housing crisis, people tightening their belts. Some mega-projects going belly up. They ought to all get real jobs.

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  24. The nucleus of the housing disaster isnt the bubble areas of AZ and the coasts. Most of the issues are in big city America, not La La land.

    MSM wants to report on the middle aged white guy, married with 3 kids standing all teary eyed in front of his 3000 sq. ft house.

    If you go to the East side of Highlands Ranch in Denver, Oak Cliff in Dallas, Whitehaven in Memphis, etc., you will see who it really is, and it really is all about Affirmative Action.

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  25. How many Russians own stock? Probably not many, but Pootie the Poisoner and his pals have a big chunk. Hehe, serves
    'em right. 17% drop. Hehe.

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  26. "They ought to all get real jobs."

    How many people will seek real jobs after the billion dollar election is over?

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  27. 72% of city voters are wrong. Saggy Pants Law Unconstitutional

    Some of the gals around the U of Idaho thought to stand up for what they considered their equal rights one summer, going about topless like some boys, getting arrested for indecent exposure. Provided some entertainment for the community for a day or two.

    Can a local community mandate dress codes?

    You decide.

    Alaska 'skirts' the problem, you dress warm, lest your skin get quick frozen.

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  28. Working the welfare racket will be a full time real job if Obama gets in. Got to elbow in for all one's worth.

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  29. Thomas Sowell kicks in with an article in line with today's topic.

    The High Cost Of Racial Hype

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  30. Anyone see that article about America being more communist than China?

    Isn't one telltale sign of a communist their ruining of wealth and squandering of opportunity?

    What do Americans think of (our?) chief officers of industry?

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  31. Pelosi says she didn't have nothing to do with it---

    Pelosi: Dems bear no responsibility for economic crisis

    By Klaus Marre


    House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, when asked Tuesday whether Democrats bear some of the responsibility regarding the current crisis on Wall Street, had a one-word answer: “No.”

    Pelosi (D-Calif.) ripped President Bush’s “mismanagement” of the economy and a lack of regulation that led to the current situation.

    “I think the American people have had it with this situation where the middle-income people in our country are not protected from the ramifications of the risk-taking and the greed of these financial institutions,” Pelosi told MSNBC.

    When asked whether the Democrats “deserve some responsibility” regarding the economic crisis, Pelosi responded: “No.”

    “John McCain said that this is a result of overregulation by the Democrats in Congress,” she added. “Either he doesn’t know what he's talking about or he’s misrepresenting the facts as he knows them. But it’s simply not true.”

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  32. DR - The homes that lead in foreclosures, at least here, are in the $350,000 range.

    Not a lot of affirmative action clients in those houses.
    Pretty much none.


    Then why were "no doc" loans one of the primary marketing gimmicks of the subprime mortgage segment? If those loans weren't targeted primarily to minorities (blacks and illegal aliens), what was the market?

    bobal The pressure was on to make loans. I'll bet many of those loan officers would watch the borrower walk out the door after the loan signing, thinking, those folks don't have a chance, but, not my problem, it'll get bundled and passed on to someone else.

    That is exactly correct, except that the title of loan officer was falacious - they were simply salespeople. I watched it in the fall of 2003 in utter amazement. Visited a private banking friend in his office (at a bank with a highly conservative credit culture). As we talked, he processed paperwork for several "no doc" mortgages for houses in Atlanta priced in the $300,000- $500,000 range. These loans were for 90 to 100% of the purchase price, and I was told that some loans exceeded the purchase price to include all closing/origination costs. "No Docs" meant no proof of income, no financial statements, no tax returns - NADA! I went on record then that a train wreck was a comin'.

    While all races partook of the fun, the "no doc" loans were clearly targeted to the credit-challenged, which have long been overwhelmingly minorities (and do you think it coincidental that "press 2 for Spanish" began appearing in voice response systems about the same time?

    One culprit in the credit debacle that I left out above who may share a large proportion of the blame - Alan Greenspan.

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