Please. You're better than that.

and people say i am naive. maybe you should live in the real world, i know plenty of whites that abuse the system and i see a lot of whites who get busted for crack.

Naivete is not believing that those ideas were actively pushed by the Republican Party, regardless of your own personal anecdotes.

Google Lee Atwater and learn some facts.

um yea, just cause you say to do so is reason enough not too

so people posting on an obscure Pearl Jam message board are equivalent to some fat, monstrous, over-opinionated addict that is able to reach 20 million people

as usual, you are nuts





He said "Google" not go to DailyKos or MediaMatters

I admire your intellectual curiosity. It will take you far.

i could care less where it is rooted in, or why it was started. the fact of the matter is, yes, may people do believe that you should have to pass a drug test in order to obtain benefits from the government. it doesnt matter if this idea was first thought by the KKK or whatever

On occasion, even the low-hanging fruit is tempting. You caught me at a weak moment.

Well, I guess we'll have to disagree on that point, since my entire point is that it absolutely matters where the idea first came from and why. But you've consistently shown over many years that you don't have much care for where your own opinions come from or why, but simply stand by them solely because they are yours, now.

But back to the larger point of the whole KKK thing, why would you expend so much energy and effort defending a person like Rush Limbaugh, not on his political ideas but on his CHARACTER, which even a great many of those who largely agree with his politics, such as our own LW, would not deign to defend. Even if he would, he certainly would not do so with such vigor and vitriol as you have, making the patently absurd comparison of Rush Limbaugh to three people on this board (a personal attack that came out of ABSOLUTELY NOWHERE, BTW).

Why would you take an attack on Rush Limbaugh, of all people, personally? Reacting to a comic, albeit offensive, attack on a public figure with personal attacks on the people who found humor in it demonstrate that you have taken it personally, so don't insult all of us by denying it. What do you see in Rush that would make you take personal exception to attacks on his character? He is a putrid, tumescent, ignorant blowhard who has been unable to sustain any lasting personal relationships in his life and will undoubtedly die alone and miserable.

Peeps, you probably have me on ignore, but anyways...
Sometimes it does matter where legislation, trade deals, etc. is derived. ie. "trade the Indians whiskey and guns for land" sort of stuff, knowing full well native americans couldn't handle their whiskey physiologically. A society of "equality" just simply doesn't exist in the truest sense and to expect it to exist and leave people to their own devices is irresponsible. As we do still strive towards the unattainable with every intent of goodness in our motives, it makes sense to accept that some people are at a considerable disadvantage based upon no fault of their own.

There is nothing more oppressive than being asked by society to swim across a deep pool with a weight tied around your ankle when #1 you may have never learned to swim, or #2 you aren't a strong swimmer to begin with.

Another unfortunate fact of humanity is that there are evil vindictive people in the world and they'll utilize any tool they can to undermine people they hate.

I think Peeps is, for the most part, just having some fun in this thread.
However, the point I think he may be trying to make is that taking delight in this:



does not necessarily make you wonderful people.

Wow, David. I can't pretend to understand the set of circumstances you experieneced that led you to believe what you do about racism, but I can't understand why you assume that applies to everyone elses thinking as well.

The problem I have is you associating a certain viewpoint to racism when it may well, in fact, have absolutely nothing to do with race at all. I personally believe that if a person genuinely needs assistance, then there should be some form of assistance made available to them. In the spirit of the discussion, I also believe that if that same person decided to take that assistance $ and begin purchasing illegal drugs with it, they should be cut off so that the funding can go to people who will use the money as it was intended. This has absolutely nothing to do with race. NOTHING. Just because you can tie this ideology to racism, somehwere along the line, doesn't make it an evil racist plot. It's really no different than you or any other liberal on this board getting pissed when someone dumbs down a thread about Obama by calling him a "socialist".

I've long thougth about starting a thread where we could discuss racism, specifically as it applies to racism being continually brought up in situations where it really isn't as relevant as it once was. I tend to think that, in order for racism to dwindle in any significant way, not only are people going to have to learn tolerance, we're going to have to move past the notion that every percieved wrong to a minority is the fault of some deep-rooted racist ideal. There are only a handful of people on this board that I would trust to have an intelligent conversation about this though, so I've decided against it.

Defending a man like Limbaugh as he does the same thing doesn't exactly make anyone a credible character reference either.
In fact, defending any political pundit or politician for that matter always manages to backfire, as a rule.

I feel terribly that I supported John Edwards, and look how he has shamed himself.

dont mistake my contribution to this thread as me defending him. i think i have listened to him once, other than soundbites that are in the news. i just dont see why people waste so much time on him if you hate him. im willing to bet hes in the same situation as howard stern. he has his faithful listeners and then he has people who listen to him just to hear what the next fucked up thing he says.

He didn't say it "doesn't make me a wonderful person". He equated me with Rush Limbaugh. Now, I am quite familiar with peepslogic, wherein any one point of similarity equals a perfect analogy, so I'm not going to take the insult personally. Mainly, I don't take it personally because I know that in fact I have little if anything in common with Rush Limbaugh. It's kind of like being called a poopiehead. It doesn't bother me in the least because I know I don't have poop on, in or near my head. I learned that lesson from Little Bill. See, I would only take an insult personally, and I think this is true of most people, if whether consciously or subconsciously, I see a great deal of truth in the attack that resonates against me at the deepest levels of my being.

Little Bill!!!!!!
I love little Bill!!!

This isn't really about "other people's thinking". This about verifiable facts. The GOP's Southern Strategy was about exploiting racial resentment. That doesn't make all Republicans racists, and I think that's where people start getting offended. I'm sure my friend on FB is not a racist. He just obviously had not thought his position through thoroughly enough to realize that the monetary cost of running drug tests on every person seeking public assistance would wipe out most if not all monetary benefit that might come from denying a small percentage of them benefits for their failure to pass. Much less to have thought it through enough to realize that the suggestion to drug test all welfare recipients was almost certainly first proposed out of the racist belief that urban black people on drugs are living the good life off of the hard work of working class white folks.


I see what you're saying. One major difference in your example is that I, and many others, have little problem with calling people socialists. This is mainly because I understand what socialism is, and I understand that we have TONS of socialist programs at work here in America, and truly that any taxation that flows downwards from the rich to the benefit of the populus as a whole (rather than flowing upwards such as in Monarchical structures where the poor are taxed to fill the king's coffers) is also a form of socialism.

Most people who advocate policies that have radically disparate detrimental affects upon different racial or ethnic groups are unwilling to acknowledge the disparity, much less explore whether or not that disparate effect was intended by the ultimate architects of the policy. The people supporting the policy may be supporting it out of completely non-racist reasons, but being unwilling to examine whether they are being unwittingly used as the vehicle of racist policy is not really an excuse, IMO.

I'll quote Lee Atwater, for those who are frightened to read his wiki page:




I think in order to move past racism, it is equally important to acknowledge that racism still exists, even when it's hiding behind code words and facially non-racial policies.

Do you remember that chart from the Democratic Presidential Primary that showed which states Obama won and which states Clinton won, and how Obama won the states with very high African-American populations (which voted overwhelmingly for him) and he won the states with very small African-American populations as well, but lost the states with African American populations in the middle range? You are from Wyoming, which is a state with a very small black population. It is completely understandable that you would fail to see racism where it is hidden. There is probably very little racial resentment in Wyoming because blacks have never been a large enough force to be any kind of threat to jobs, or the power structure. Black folks are probably seen as close as equals in places like Wyoming as they are anywhere in America. They're just another individual, trying to work and earn a living like everyone else.

But if you go to the South, or to the old urban centers of the Northeast, where there has been a past history of racial resentment and competition, those "dog whistles" are heard loud and clear by racist whites, by blacks, and by those others who are sensitive to racism. It takes being exposed to racism to become sensitive to it, so I don't blame you, or other good people who have not been exposed to it for not being sensitive to it.

As for my own personal experience, I grew up in suburban New York at a time when overt racism was frowned upon, but not yet extinct. So I've seen it, yet I've always known it was wrong. My high school, for example, was about 47% white when I went there, maybe another 30-35% black, and the rest Hispanic and others. While overtly racist statements or actions were rare by the late 80's, we had all come through school in a time when there was enough overt racism in some of our homes to make it so that cliques that formed were rarely cross-racial. I had black friends, but frankly, the friends of mine who were black were the kids who were smarter, in the honors classes I took, and often came from families that were more well-off and well-educated than most of the black kids at school. In short, we had more in common.

Anyway, this isn't really where I wanted this thread to go.

Can we please drop this "there are no criticisms of Obama because they'd be deemed racist" bullshit? The Onion has had far more articles lampooning Obama than Rush. They just had one that basically implied he was tired of leading the country and left to "get some cigarettes." Basically calling him a deadbeat dad. But Obama has a family and is a generally a pleasant person, so an article like this one about Rush just wouldn't be that funny. That's why they didn't write it. Their whole point is to make people laugh...remember?

I missed that one. Were they Kools?

yea, cause writing a article about wanting someone to die is LOL worthy