The Brilliant, Transcendent Clarity of Chauncey DeVega Applying Cone, Baudrillard, Adorno, Gordon and Postman in his Nuanced Argument about the “Kanye West.”

[The eclipse of serious journalism by punchy soundbites and outraged tweets, and the polarized, standardized reflection of opinion into forms of humor and theatricalized outrage within narrow niche-markets makes the category of individual thought increasingly unreal. This is true on the left as well as the right, and it is especially noteworthy once we countenance what passes for political discourses today. … The new media forms have devolved into entertainment, and instead of critical discourse we see the spectacle of a commentariat, across the ideological spectrum, that prefers outrage over complexity and dismisses dialectical uncertainty for the narcissistic affirmation of self-consistent ideologies each of which is parceled out to its own private cable network.

I am reminded of a lecture I attended some years ago where the late James Cone, an intellectual titan and the father of black liberation theology, observed that some of the most difficult students to teach on questions of the color line were those who happened not to be white. Why? Because black and brown students often believe that because they were born into a certain body at a certain point in time, they have special knowledge and wisdom that makes it unnecessary for them to engage in serious study of the color line….

We see this in an America which in many ways has lost the ability to determine what is “true” and what is “fake,” and where lies are now labeled as mere “untruths” or “disagreements.” As with Trump, Kanye West is the human distillation of America’s social pathologies of greed, narcissism and a celebrity-driven culture of distraction and emptiness. Hyperreality is the state of being where these social pathologies exist, and through which they are mediated.

Ultimately, Kanye West is just one more character caught up in the orbit of the human black hole Donald Trump, in a malignant reality where the absurd is now the quotidian….]

Full article here: I love Kanye West | Chancey DeVega for SALON

 

The Problematics of Selective Progressivism, and Selective Media.

[What do you call a white Republican who is against same-sex marriage? If you call them a bigot, then you’re calling 90% of Muslims bigots. While you accuse others of racism, you are actually being racist here because you’re applying different standards to different people based on their race because Islam is viewed as a “brown man’s religion”. You are not being liberal by supporting illiberal ideas coming from people from different countries, religions, and cultures.

I would ask somebody who reads Salon, if you claim to be against homophobia, like I am and many people are, you should stand against it whether it comes from the Evangelicals, the black church, or the Muslim in Saudi Arabia, Egypt or Iran. Otherwise you are the racist. If you think it’s acceptable for “other” people do it just because they’re a different race other than a “white male” then you’re not really a liberal — you don’t subscribe to the concept of equal rights and anti-racism. You’re propagating racism and you’re part of the problem….]

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Faisal Saeed Al Mutar is a secular and human rights activist who was awarded The President’s Volunteer Service Award, Gold, from the Obama Administration in 2016. He’s experienced life under Saddam Hussein and lived in Iraq during the American invasion and civil war which followed after. He escaped Iraq in 2009 after the loss of his brother, cousin, and friends to Al Qaeda. Faisal focuses on helping liberal, secular ideas and dissidents flourish in the Middle East and is currently writing his first book. He started the Global Secular Humanist Movement, and recently launched a podcast called the Grey Zone and joined the Secular Jihadists podcast.

I think many people who study liberal arts and subjects like sociology are exposed to only one type of history — which is white history and white colonialism. They’re inculcated with the idea that the Holocaust, genocide against Native Americans, and Japanese internment camps represent white people. When people are only exposed to these ideas, of one oppressor — meaning white people — what they’ll do when they hear a person criticize a foreign culture is to get immediately defensive on behalf of that culture. And they’ll do it to protect a former victim of imperialism, racism, etc. _____________________________________________________________________________________________

[But the people who are most hurt by this — by preventing this discussion — are the minorities within the minorities….

I think another problem is that people see Muslims as a minority, but they’re not a minority globally. They’re the second biggest religion in the world. The true minorities are those living within them who do not subscribe to conservative Muslim values….

I’m all for acknowledging the problem of Islamic extremism and how we should fight it. But that means you have to look for the people with good values within these communities, the individuals who subscribe to ideas of universal human rights, liberal values, and you have to stand with them. Because when you generalize, you are literally equating the fighters of the terrorists with the terrorists themselves. You’re equating the Maajid Nawazs’ of the world with Al Qaeda. That is so far from the truth. If you say that Maajid, Ali Rizvi, Sarah Haider and all of these people are as bad as ISIS, you’re literally advocating for killing us as well. If you’re saying the solution to ISIS is bombings and drone attacks and all of us are ISIS, you’re asking for us to be killed as well just because we share the same skin color and same language….

One of the things many people don’t know about Al Jazeera is that is mostly owned by the royal family of Qatar which is financed by oil and gas. It’s a company that doesn’t rely much on advertising because they have other sources of revenue.

The version I grew up with of Al Jazeera is a channel that is literally the spokesperson for the Muslim Brotherhood and a light version of Al Qaeda. You can see them entertaining the idea of supporting groups like Jabhat Al Nusra in Syria — which is literally Al Qaeda’s affiliate. Let’s not talk about what they think about homosexuality and Jews and their anti-semitism, because it’s bad….

But then you have Al Jazeera English speaking about Black Lives Matter, pandas, climate change, because what they’re trying to do is make Islam look as good as possible. They want to make Muslims appear victimized. And they want to make the West look as bad as possible. They show the worst that exists in the West. Flint, Michigan — they were reporting on that constantly. Standing Rock as well, you get the idea.

But you never see them criticizing Islam, Islamists, or the Muslim Brotherhood. They only show you the side of Aleppo that is controlled by Islamist and Jihadist groups. They never criticize Qatar but they criticize Saudi Arabia because they’re rivals….

This is one of the reasons why many ex-Muslims and Muslims who support ideas about liberalism and separation of Mosque and State are afraid to speak out. They know they’ll receive a huge backlash from many out there.

The biggest backlash people like me face is actually from Islamists. They think my ideas are antithetical to Islam and an enemy according to their ideology.

The far-Left, or the regressive-Left as Maajid Nawaz refers to them, believe in the narrative that to criticize Islam and even Islamism is a form of imposing your own values on them. Regressives consider values like liberalism to be Western values so they think that you are imposing the white Western values on the brown Muslim — and to them that’s terrible. They think that Islam is a brown man’s religion. Even though there are many adherents to Islam who are white, black, Bosnian, Sudanese, Chinese. So any criticism of it from a white person is a form of racism. Any criticism coming from a brown person who was adhering to that religion is the equivalent of a black person supporting white slave-owners. That’s where terms like “Uncle-Tom” and “House Muslim” come from. They think  you are trying to assist the white imperialist “agenda” against the brown victims.

On the far-Right there are strong elements of xenophobia. There are many people who adhere to the concept of white superiority — which is a bad idea — and they subscribe to this idea that there is a clash of civilizations. That there is a war between the East and the West. That’s wrong. There are many people from the East who are liberals and who adhere to universal liberal values. Raif Badawi in Saudi Arabia, Ali Rizvi from Pakistan, I’m from Iraq. So there’s many people in the East who support universal human rights — sometimes more than the people in the West!]

https://areomagazine.com/2017/01/19/faisal-al-mutar-on-media-bubbles-the-two-faces-of-al-jazeera-and-nuance/

KING: Why I’ll Never Stand Again for ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ | JENNINGS: Why I Stand for the National Anthem

SHAUN KING

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS | Monday, August 29, 2016, 1:02 PM

There is more in the national anthem, The Star-Spangled Banner. It goes like this:

No refuge could save the hireling and slave

From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave,

And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave

O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

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I like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. In a dream world the bread is super soft, like the Wonder Bread of my childhood, and the sandwich will have crunchy peanut butter, strawberry jam, and a cup of cold milk to go with it.

Maybe PB&J isn’t your favorite sandwich, but I want you to imagine your favorite comfort food for a moment. Maybe it’s a hamburger, a piece of pie, or a fruit smoothie. Whatever it is, just imagine yourself enjoying the very best version of your very favorite food.

It’s perfectly delicious. Then, imagine yourself glancing up on the wall and seeing that the restaurant had a score of C minuses on their health inspection. Then you go to the restroom and it’s filthy. A man emerges from the stall having followed by the foulest odor you’ve ever smelled in your life, and you notice he’s still wearing his apron from the kitchen. Then, the unthinkable happens — the man who made your comfort food walks right past the sink and doesn’t even wash his hands.

You leave the restaurant in disgust. As you stand outside without even finishing your meal, you see the world’s largest rat dart out from under a gaping hole by the restaurant door. You are now completely undone. You are “call the health department and post an angry one-star review on Yelp” level undone. You don’t even want your money back. You just want to get the hell away from there. Your new dream come true would be to have one of those “Men in Black” wands waved over your face so that you could forget the implications of the meal you just ate.

Would you ever go back to the restaurant? Of course you wouldn’t.

To me, right now, “The Star-Spangled Banner” is that peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I used to love it, but now I regret ever going anywhere near it. The man who made it — who uses the bathroom in his apron and doesn’t wash his hands, is the author of our national anthem, Francis Scott Key, who, as it turns out, was a terrible human being.

Now that I have learned the truth about our national anthem and its author, I’ll never stand up for it again.

First off, the song, which was originally written as a poem, didn’t become our national anthem until 1931 — which was 117 years after Key wrote it. Most of us have no true idea what in the hell we’ve been hearing or singing all these years, but as it turns out, Key’s full poem actually has a third stanza which few of us have ever heard. In it, he openly celebrates the murder of slaves. Yes, really.

While it has always been known that the song was written during American slavery and that when those words about this nation being the “land of the free” didn’t apply to the millions who had been held in bondage, few of us had any idea that the song itself was rooted in the celebration of slavery and the murder of Africans in America, who were being hired by the British military to give them strength not only in the War of 1812, but in the Battle of Fort McHenry of 1814. These black men were called the Corps of Colonial Marines and they served valiantly for the British military. Key despised them. He was glad to see them experience terror and death in war — to the point that he wrote a poem about it. That poem is now our national anthem.

While I fundamentally reject the notion that anyone who owned other human beings was either good, moral, or decent, Francis Scott Key left absolutely no doubt that he was a stone cold bigot. He came from generations of plantation owning bigots. They got wealthy off of it. Key, as District Attorney of Washington, fought for slavery and against abolitionists every chance he got. Even when Africans in D.C. were injured or murdered, he stood strong against justice for them. He openly spoke racist words against Africans in America. Key said that they were “a distinct and inferior race of people, which all experience proves to be the greatest evil that afflicts a community.”

While San Francisco 49ers quarter back Colin Kaepernick has refused to stand for the national anthem because of the overflowing abundance of modern day injustice in America, he has helped bring to light the fact that this song and its author are deeply rooted in violent white supremacy.

I will never stand for “The Star-Spangled Banner” another day in my damn life. I don’t care where I am or who’s watching. The statue of the racist Cecil Rhodes, which stood tall in South Africa as a painful relic from white supremacists until March of 2015, was finally removed once and for all. It should’ve never been erected. It should’ve been removed a very long time ago, student leaders made it clear that they had had enough.

Like Kaepernick, I’ve had enough of injustice in America and I’ve had enough of anthems written by bigots. Colin Kaepernick has provided a spark.

“The Star-Spangled Banner” should’ve never been made into our national anthem. That President Woodrow Wilson, widely thought to be one of the most bigoted presidents ever elected, chose it as our national anthem, is painfully telling as well. We must do away with it like South Africans did away with their monument to Cecil Rhodes. We must do away with it like South Carolina did with the Confederate Flag over their state house.

Of course, removing the culture of white supremacy does not necessarily remove its effects, but we must simultaneously and passionately address both. I’m joining Colin Kaepernick, who joined in with the spirit of Rosa Parks, by standing up for our rights by sitting down. I hope you join us.

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EBENEZER SAMUEL

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS | Saturday, August 27, 2016, 6:49 PM

On Saturday, Jennings explained to the News that he’ll continue to stand for the national anthem. Jennings, 31, grew up in Virginia, and has strongly advocated for Black Lives Matter, so he understands much of the strife between the African-American community and police, understands the struggle against racism in the United States.

But the running back described himself as an “optimist,” and while some may see a nation that’s dishonoring its flag and its anthem, Jennings prefers to draw hope from the lyrics and history of that anthem: “I would say that it’s nice to know that we live in a country where sitting down during the anthem won’t land you in jail or worse. But I personally choose to stand and honor the anthem for what I hold it to represent to me.

I understand how back during that time when slavery was LEGAL, Francis (Scott) Key wrote the poem he entitled ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ based on his personal views and experiences with the war. When America decided to make the first verse of it our National Anthem, they left the controversial third verse out.

I’m an optimist. I figure if it was the intention of our founding fathers to keep America a nation of slaves, then it wouldn’t have chosen a song where all four verses end with ‘the land of the FREE and the home of the brave’ instead of ‘land of the free, home of the SLAVE.’

“Hey! I wish they would have kept verse four in, which says that heaven rescued us, God’s power preserved us and in God is our trust. But we don’t always get what we want, do we? I’m a black man who is free to achieve my dreams because I live in America and trust in God.”

South Carolina’s Waving, Soothing Confederate Flags

The Sanctity of the First Amendment

[A rather uneventful college commencement season full of the usual platitudes and bromides was shaken up by British novelist Ian McEwan’s refreshingly challenging the zeitgeist of trigger warnings, free-speech zones, and campus censorship at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania this week. McEwan did not shy away from addressing the current temper on campus, choosing to focus on the creeping group-think in faculty lounges and discussion sections instead of the all too easy targets of Russian crackdowns on free speech or the “industrial scale” state-sponsored censorship in China. McEwan directly confronted the problem of a country rooted in the tradition of free expression under the First Amendment meekly submitting to what he called “bi-polar thinking” — the eagerness of some to “not side with Charlie Hebdo because it might seem as if  we’re endorsing George Bush’s War on Terror.”

Read more here | The National Review

Uttering and Carrying the Colossal Historical Burden Of and In the Word “Nigger”; and Owning it

Bradley Knudson and his wife were celebrating New Year’s Eve with their daughter and her friends when their daughter’s friend alerted them to racist messages being sent to their daughter via Snapchat. The video and photo sharing service is enormously popular with teens because messages “self-destruct” after being viewed (warning to teens—they don’t disappear forever, as advertised).

When their daughter received a fourth message from the bullies, their dad recorded it. After weeks of attempting to contact the parents, he finally reached the father of the bullies and Bradley Knudson was so shocked at their blatantly racist response, he recorded it all and posted it to social media—with the blessing of the man in question.

 

 

So-called “New Atheists”: Neither New Nor Atheists

Scholar Reza Aslan calls Harris, Dawkins anti-theists, and as dogmatic, fundamentalist as true believers

[Like religious fundamentalism, New Atheism is primarily a reactionary phenomenon, one that responds to religion with the same venomous ire with which religious fundamentalists respond to atheism. What one finds in the writings of anti-theist ideologues like Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens is the same sense of utter certainty, the same claim to a monopoly on truth, the same close-mindedness that views one’s own position as unequivocally good and one’s opponent’s views as not just wrong but irrational and even stupid, the same intolerance for alternative explanations, the same rabid adherents (as anyone who has dared criticize Dawkins or Harris on social media can attest), and, most shockingly, the same proselytizing fervor that one sees in any fundamentalist community.

This is precisely what Albert Einstein meant when he warned about “fanatical atheists [who] are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who — in their grudge against traditional religion as the ‘opium for the people’ — cannot bear the music of the spheres.”]

Read the full article | SALON

ELANE PHOTOGRAPHY (NM) | Does Not Have a First Amendment Right to Discriminate | Supreme Court Ruling

ELANE PHOTOGRAPHY (NM) | Does Not Have a First Amendment Right to Discriminate | Supreme Court Ruling

ACLU | 7 April 2014

Supreme Court turned away a photography business’s claim that it had a First Amendment right to break New Mexico public accommodations law and discriminate against gay customers.

No court has ever held that a business has a First Amendment right to discriminate in the commercial marketplace. For over 150 years, states have passed public accommodation laws saying that if a business voluntarily decides to open its doors to the public, they can’t pick and choose which customers they will serve.

Colbert Report’s Stereotype-Smashing Segment on the Openly Gay Mayor of Vicco, Kentucky

“To get your point across, sometimes you just gotta laugh,” Mayor Johnny Cummings told Mother Jones, after the segment aired. “That’s how I look at it. So I thought, OK, The Colbert Report would be perfect.”

“If God makes ’em born gay, then why is he against it?” a Vicco resident asks in the clip’s moving final moments. “I can’t understand that. I’ve tried and tried and tried to understand that, and I can’t.”

People Who Destroy America: Mayor Johnny Cummings

Stoning Gays | Meet NYC Pastor James David Manning

Stoning Gays | Meet NYC Pastor James David Manning

Luke Malone, for Vocativ

Proving that the Bible Belt doesn’t have a monopoly on homophobic zealots, the leader of ATLAH World Missionary Church in New York’s Harlem neighborhood hit the news after local blogger Marie Viljoen wrote a post about a billboard outside his church: “Jesus Would Stone Homos.”