We are at the dawn of a new age of civil rights for our country. A time when we elect a president who only 200 years ago would have been a slave. Who only 100 years ago would have endured Jim Crow laws and the "Separate but Equal" doctrine. Who only 50 years ago, would have been able to get a job based on his qualifications rather than the color of his skin. Yet, today I am sad to hear that California may take a big step backwards for civil rights. It looks like California may actually pass Prop 8: The Ban on Gay Marriage. As the mayor of San Francisco Gavin Newsom said, for the first time in the history of our country the people have used the constitution to take away rights from a group of people. This is the same state that overturned the ban on inter-racial marriage 19 years before the rest of the country did.
I'd like to know why the people who voted yes did what they did.
I'd like to know if those who said they were "protecting marriage" or afraid that their children would be taught about gay marriage were genuine in their motives. Are they truly concerned or are they simply using these as excuses to hide a real intent to condemn the gay and lesbian lifestyle?
If someone was afraid that their children would learn about gay marriage, I wonder, what harm would come of it? Does one believe that the knowledge of the possibility that two people of the same sex who want to spend the rest of their lives together can form a legal union would somehow make their children gay?
I would ask these people to imagine the worst possible scenario. Suppose allowing gay marriage meant that it must be taught in elementary schools and that their children had to learn about and on top of it you would be forced to explain it to them at gun point. Now imagine what you would say. Would you start talking about homosexuality? No, you wouldn't even talk about heterosexuality when explaining "traditional" marriage so why would you introduce any form of "sexuality" to elementary school students... you perv. If you really thought about it, you would say something like "marriage is an agreement between two people who love each other to care for each other for the rest of their lives no matter what happens.".... See, that wasn't so bad. Do you think this would scar your children?
If you're worried about confusing your children, then let me ask you this. Is your job as parents to avoid educating your children about everything that might confuse them? Is it your job to keep them naive and afraid of everything that is different from them? Do we condition them to be intolerant of other peoples beliefs because they are not your own?
I am a proud parent of baby girl and I hope that one day, she will be a peace loving human being who is tolerant and respectful of her fellow man despite his/her skin, race, religion, or sexual orientation while still retaining her own belief system. And I hope that she will be treated with the same respect regardless of her beliefs or sexual orientation and that she be judged solely on her character and her ideas. Is this the world you want for your children? A world free from bigotry and discrimination.
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 05, 2008
Monday, March 24, 2008
Comment for Inside the Mind of Mar's blog entry "Creationism is incredibly interesting".
I couldn't post the Youtube URL in the comments section so I'll embed the video on my blog.
Lewis Black sums up my views on Creationism pretty well.
I couldn't post the Youtube URL in the comments section so I'll embed the video on my blog.
Lewis Black sums up my views on Creationism pretty well.
Thursday, November 29, 2007
My reply to "What's Wrong With Warm Weather"
from the blog
A Few Things Ill Considered
This blog entry tells us that what's bad about global warming, is not the final temperature, but the rate of change of temperature. If the temp changes too fast, then all sorts of bad things happen.
This is essentially a truism. Anything that is too fast is not good, otherwise it wouldn't be "too" fast. Its pretty much impossible to argue with a truism as it is inherently true, but the problem with truisms, is that they also don't tell you anything of value.
The blog could have escaped its truism label if it only tells the point at which fast climate change becomes too fast.
I, on the other hand, will make the conjecture that any climate change rate that has occurred in the last 20,000 years of this planet is a safe climate change rate. We can see in their graph (shown below) that climate changes quite quickly and frequently. So if our current climate were to change with the same rate and frequency, there should be no concern, or do you presume that prehistoric man was altering the climate even then?
So let's look at a particular peak in the graph around 8000 years ago. If you look closely, you'll see that the rise in temperature is about 3 degrees Celsius. I blew up that peak and superimposed a ruler to show you just how wide (how long it lasted) the peak is here:
Since each tick mark on the grey line represents 2000 years, I used a ruler that breaks that interval into 20 section. This make each of my ticks represent 100 years, or one century. As you can see the rising edge of the highest peak lasted one century. This equates to a 3 degree rise per century. So according to our planet, a 3 deg/century change is within expected operating parameters. Its not for us to decide whether or not this rate of change is good or bad. All we can say is that this has happened before so it is not out of the ordinary to see it happening again.
Now let's compare this to what's happening today. The IPCC's 4th report states that "Warming in the last 100 years has caused about a 0.74 °C increase in global average temperature." Then in its projection for the next 100 years, the IPCC states that the temperature rise will be from 1.8 °C to 4.0 °C based on its "low" and "high" estimates. Averaging the high and low estimates gives you 2.9 °C/century which is still within the norm. If you don't like my averaging methodology, then consider this: The IPCC lists 6 scenario families and a temperature rise predicition for each. Of the 6, only 2 of them have predicted temperatures over 2.9 °C. Couple this with the fact that world oil supplies are dwindling and that we could run out in less than 100 years means that the worst scenarios like A1F1 (4.0 °C) becomes increasingly less likely to occur (we won't really run out of oil, it'll just not be cost effective anymore).
Now let's look at the period 12,000-10,000 years ago. Doesn't it seem weird that temperature rise occurs before CO2 rise? Here's a closeup with some vertical lines put in to help you align everything.
Notice how the temperature increase starts occurring even before any CO2 increase. Also the temperature peaks before the CO2 peak. If there is a cause and effect relationship between temp and CO2 it must be concluded that temp change cause CO2 change and not the other way around. This also means that there is no historical evidence that CO2 change has caused temperature change on this planet (I'm not saying that it cannot, I'm just saying that it hasn't been shown to us so far in the past 20,000 years).
The proponents of anthropogenic global warming base their argument on two main points. First, historical measurements tell us that CO2 causes global climate change. Second, computer models show us how our temperature will rise if we don't control our carbon emissions. These models are validated against historical data to give them credibility. The problem I see, is that if the historical data doesn't show that CO2 causes climate change, then how can this model show it?
from the blog
A Few Things Ill Considered
This blog entry tells us that what's bad about global warming, is not the final temperature, but the rate of change of temperature. If the temp changes too fast, then all sorts of bad things happen.
This is essentially a truism. Anything that is too fast is not good, otherwise it wouldn't be "too" fast. Its pretty much impossible to argue with a truism as it is inherently true, but the problem with truisms, is that they also don't tell you anything of value.
The blog could have escaped its truism label if it only tells the point at which fast climate change becomes too fast.
I, on the other hand, will make the conjecture that any climate change rate that has occurred in the last 20,000 years of this planet is a safe climate change rate. We can see in their graph (shown below) that climate changes quite quickly and frequently. So if our current climate were to change with the same rate and frequency, there should be no concern, or do you presume that prehistoric man was altering the climate even then?
So let's look at a particular peak in the graph around 8000 years ago. If you look closely, you'll see that the rise in temperature is about 3 degrees Celsius. I blew up that peak and superimposed a ruler to show you just how wide (how long it lasted) the peak is here:
Since each tick mark on the grey line represents 2000 years, I used a ruler that breaks that interval into 20 section. This make each of my ticks represent 100 years, or one century. As you can see the rising edge of the highest peak lasted one century. This equates to a 3 degree rise per century. So according to our planet, a 3 deg/century change is within expected operating parameters. Its not for us to decide whether or not this rate of change is good or bad. All we can say is that this has happened before so it is not out of the ordinary to see it happening again.Now let's compare this to what's happening today. The IPCC's 4th report states that "Warming in the last 100 years has caused about a 0.74 °C increase in global average temperature." Then in its projection for the next 100 years, the IPCC states that the temperature rise will be from 1.8 °C to 4.0 °C based on its "low" and "high" estimates. Averaging the high and low estimates gives you 2.9 °C/century which is still within the norm. If you don't like my averaging methodology, then consider this: The IPCC lists 6 scenario families and a temperature rise predicition for each. Of the 6, only 2 of them have predicted temperatures over 2.9 °C. Couple this with the fact that world oil supplies are dwindling and that we could run out in less than 100 years means that the worst scenarios like A1F1 (4.0 °C) becomes increasingly less likely to occur (we won't really run out of oil, it'll just not be cost effective anymore).
Now let's look at the period 12,000-10,000 years ago. Doesn't it seem weird that temperature rise occurs before CO2 rise? Here's a closeup with some vertical lines put in to help you align everything.
Notice how the temperature increase starts occurring even before any CO2 increase. Also the temperature peaks before the CO2 peak. If there is a cause and effect relationship between temp and CO2 it must be concluded that temp change cause CO2 change and not the other way around. This also means that there is no historical evidence that CO2 change has caused temperature change on this planet (I'm not saying that it cannot, I'm just saying that it hasn't been shown to us so far in the past 20,000 years).The proponents of anthropogenic global warming base their argument on two main points. First, historical measurements tell us that CO2 causes global climate change. Second, computer models show us how our temperature will rise if we don't control our carbon emissions. These models are validated against historical data to give them credibility. The problem I see, is that if the historical data doesn't show that CO2 causes climate change, then how can this model show it?
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Global Warming: Round 2
It seems that as time goes on, more and more people are believing Al Gore's rendition of global warming. I believe there is a lot of psychology involved in this phenomenon. I say psychology because people's belief aren't grounded on reading actual scientific reports or conducting their own analysis, but on their perception of the people dishing out the information. We know not to trust studies sponsored by the tobacco company on the effects of smoking to lung cancer. We know that we should listen to our doctor when they tell us to eat a healthy diet and exercise. Do we feel the same way when we hear on the news "Researchers discovered..." or "Scientists found ..." on the news? Often times the news media will tell us which scientists are making the claim and how they came about doing it, but would you still believe the report if they didn't?
I'd like to point out the irony of skepticism. When we first heard about global warming we probably had some reservations, but eventually we accepted it because that's what mainstream media has accepted and surely, if most people accept it, then it must be true, right? We didn't really research the data that was out there, we demanded that news media digest it for us and provide us the Cliff's notes. Then when the skeptics voiced their concerns we branded them as heretics. "How dare they challenge mainstream perception!", "The opponents are just spokespersons of big oil". We were immediately skeptical of the skeptics, but we lost all skepticism of the topic at hand.
This brings me to the next point. If only Galileo was here. Galileo was an astronomer in the 1600's who was branded a heretic by the Church because he was a proponent of a solar system where the earth revolves around the sun instead of the sun going around the earth. The church couldn't challenge his theories with science so they would just say that his ideas were absurd and heretical. When people cannot challenge something logically or scientifically, they resort to name calling and non-scientific labellings like "that's stupid" or "only idiot's would believe..." without backing up their argument with any facts. The declaration of stupidity alone seems sufficient for the end of debate. I'm sure all of us are guilty of this phenomena. Haven't you called someone's idea "stupid" and marveled at how they could still keep talking about their idea? You would think to yourself "Why would they keep talking? I told him/her it was a stupid idea to begin with!". We thought the stupidity was so obvious that we did not have to justify that the idea was stupid. This is because we all have an intuitive sense for what is stupid, but our intuition is not always grounded in logical reasoning. Sometimes our intuition comes from what others tell us, like "the 5 second rule" where its okay to eat something that has fallen on the ground for less than 5 seconds. If you're a fan of Mythbusters, you'll know that the number of seconds something is left on the ground has almost no correlation to how many germs it picks up. So if you manage to rescue absorbent $100/lb black truffle mushrooms that fell onto the counter covered with salmonella infested chicken blood within a second, don't let your friends tell you you're stupid for throwing the truffles out. They would be hard pressed to come up with support for their case other than the "5 second rule". This leads me to the point that when people make unsupported claims that something is absurd or stupid, its because they don't really have anything to support their case.
What's my point?
1. Commonly accepted does not mean true.
2. If you have skeptics, be skeptical of what you are supporting. You can only make your case stronger by alleviating their concerns rather than shedding even more skepticism on the skeptics.
3. Challenge those who call you names to support their arguments and avoid the temptation to become a name caller by always supporting your own claims.
We can only progress the discussion on global warming once we can get past the psychology and get to the science of it.
It seems that as time goes on, more and more people are believing Al Gore's rendition of global warming. I believe there is a lot of psychology involved in this phenomenon. I say psychology because people's belief aren't grounded on reading actual scientific reports or conducting their own analysis, but on their perception of the people dishing out the information. We know not to trust studies sponsored by the tobacco company on the effects of smoking to lung cancer. We know that we should listen to our doctor when they tell us to eat a healthy diet and exercise. Do we feel the same way when we hear on the news "Researchers discovered..." or "Scientists found ..." on the news? Often times the news media will tell us which scientists are making the claim and how they came about doing it, but would you still believe the report if they didn't?
I'd like to point out the irony of skepticism. When we first heard about global warming we probably had some reservations, but eventually we accepted it because that's what mainstream media has accepted and surely, if most people accept it, then it must be true, right? We didn't really research the data that was out there, we demanded that news media digest it for us and provide us the Cliff's notes. Then when the skeptics voiced their concerns we branded them as heretics. "How dare they challenge mainstream perception!", "The opponents are just spokespersons of big oil". We were immediately skeptical of the skeptics, but we lost all skepticism of the topic at hand.
This brings me to the next point. If only Galileo was here. Galileo was an astronomer in the 1600's who was branded a heretic by the Church because he was a proponent of a solar system where the earth revolves around the sun instead of the sun going around the earth. The church couldn't challenge his theories with science so they would just say that his ideas were absurd and heretical. When people cannot challenge something logically or scientifically, they resort to name calling and non-scientific labellings like "that's stupid" or "only idiot's would believe..." without backing up their argument with any facts. The declaration of stupidity alone seems sufficient for the end of debate. I'm sure all of us are guilty of this phenomena. Haven't you called someone's idea "stupid" and marveled at how they could still keep talking about their idea? You would think to yourself "Why would they keep talking? I told him/her it was a stupid idea to begin with!". We thought the stupidity was so obvious that we did not have to justify that the idea was stupid. This is because we all have an intuitive sense for what is stupid, but our intuition is not always grounded in logical reasoning. Sometimes our intuition comes from what others tell us, like "the 5 second rule" where its okay to eat something that has fallen on the ground for less than 5 seconds. If you're a fan of Mythbusters, you'll know that the number of seconds something is left on the ground has almost no correlation to how many germs it picks up. So if you manage to rescue absorbent $100/lb black truffle mushrooms that fell onto the counter covered with salmonella infested chicken blood within a second, don't let your friends tell you you're stupid for throwing the truffles out. They would be hard pressed to come up with support for their case other than the "5 second rule". This leads me to the point that when people make unsupported claims that something is absurd or stupid, its because they don't really have anything to support their case.
What's my point?
1. Commonly accepted does not mean true.
2. If you have skeptics, be skeptical of what you are supporting. You can only make your case stronger by alleviating their concerns rather than shedding even more skepticism on the skeptics.
3. Challenge those who call you names to support their arguments and avoid the temptation to become a name caller by always supporting your own claims.
We can only progress the discussion on global warming once we can get past the psychology and get to the science of it.
Monday, August 20, 2007
Cult of the Elitist
The other night when I was watching the Colbert Report, he had on the author of the book Cult of the Amateur: How today's Internet is killing our culture, Andrew Keen. Usually I like the authors that come on The Daily Show and The Colbert Report but this time I couldn't help getting exceptionally ticked off about this author.
Keen theorizes that because the Internet allows anyone to produce content and anyone to access that content for free, real art is being trivialized. Real artists cant make money so they get wiped out. Objective internet journalism is thrown out the door because of lying, cherry picking facts, and corporate sponsored bloggers. Additionally, pirating over the internet is preventing traditional content creators from making money.
Despite the flaws in his argument, what really annoyed me was that Keen also believes that we need well-educated people to provide us with the content with which to form our culture. Us pig farmers shouldn't be allowed to define our culture. Does Keen suppose that there's a committee out there carefully mitigating the deluge of media that gets into our heads so that minds don't implode and we all de-evolve into a bunch of monkeys, and that the internet is somehow circumventing this process?
Since the beginning of culture, culture has always and will always be built upon the democratization of ideas. Video killed the radio star, not because people were making videos, but because the people were willing to watch it en masse. Thus, the age of video was born. Did our culture die with MTV and America's Funniest Home Video? Some would say yes, but if that were true the internet wouldn't be able to kill a dead culture now, right? Did the automobile kill our horse-drawn carriage culture? Yes, but it didn't destroy our culture. Our culture has always evolved to accommodate the technologies that we embrace. Even today [despite its environmental effects] the American car culture has become one of the defining aspects of life in the US.
To further prove my point, that culture is essentially the democratization of ideas, lets examine the only times when a culture has successfully been killed. Take for example the ancient Mayans and the Incans. Their cultures were not destroyed until the Spanish annihilated the people's of those cultures. When a society is decimated like various the Native American tribes, the ones that are still alive keep their culture going regardless of their social status or education. If they all start running Indian casinos, then casinos will become part of their culture, even at the dismay of their ancestors nonetheless.
Perhaps Keen isn't really saying that the internet is killing our culture. Maybe he's saying that it's killing traditional media. Of course, how are you gonna sell a book entitled How the Internet Killed Traditional Media? Everybody already knows how. No... you'd have to cast a wider net to make book more evocative so somebody will buy it. So let's say that the internet is killing culture, but really write a book about the internet killing traditional media.
BTW, you can buy Keen's book on the culture killing internet from his own very webpage here:
http://andrewkeen.typepad.com/the_great_seduction/2006/10/my_book_now_not.html
See the Colbert Report interview below:
The other night when I was watching the Colbert Report, he had on the author of the book Cult of the Amateur: How today's Internet is killing our culture, Andrew Keen. Usually I like the authors that come on The Daily Show and The Colbert Report but this time I couldn't help getting exceptionally ticked off about this author.
Keen theorizes that because the Internet allows anyone to produce content and anyone to access that content for free, real art is being trivialized. Real artists cant make money so they get wiped out. Objective internet journalism is thrown out the door because of lying, cherry picking facts, and corporate sponsored bloggers. Additionally, pirating over the internet is preventing traditional content creators from making money.
Despite the flaws in his argument, what really annoyed me was that Keen also believes that we need well-educated people to provide us with the content with which to form our culture. Us pig farmers shouldn't be allowed to define our culture. Does Keen suppose that there's a committee out there carefully mitigating the deluge of media that gets into our heads so that minds don't implode and we all de-evolve into a bunch of monkeys, and that the internet is somehow circumventing this process?
Since the beginning of culture, culture has always and will always be built upon the democratization of ideas. Video killed the radio star, not because people were making videos, but because the people were willing to watch it en masse. Thus, the age of video was born. Did our culture die with MTV and America's Funniest Home Video? Some would say yes, but if that were true the internet wouldn't be able to kill a dead culture now, right? Did the automobile kill our horse-drawn carriage culture? Yes, but it didn't destroy our culture. Our culture has always evolved to accommodate the technologies that we embrace. Even today [despite its environmental effects] the American car culture has become one of the defining aspects of life in the US.
To further prove my point, that culture is essentially the democratization of ideas, lets examine the only times when a culture has successfully been killed. Take for example the ancient Mayans and the Incans. Their cultures were not destroyed until the Spanish annihilated the people's of those cultures. When a society is decimated like various the Native American tribes, the ones that are still alive keep their culture going regardless of their social status or education. If they all start running Indian casinos, then casinos will become part of their culture, even at the dismay of their ancestors nonetheless.
Perhaps Keen isn't really saying that the internet is killing our culture. Maybe he's saying that it's killing traditional media. Of course, how are you gonna sell a book entitled How the Internet Killed Traditional Media? Everybody already knows how. No... you'd have to cast a wider net to make book more evocative so somebody will buy it. So let's say that the internet is killing culture, but really write a book about the internet killing traditional media.
BTW, you can buy Keen's book on the culture killing internet from his own very webpage here:
http://andrewkeen.typepad.com/the_great_seduction/2006/10/my_book_now_not.html
See the Colbert Report interview below:
Saturday, April 21, 2007
The Global Warming Myth
Like many of you, I watched Al Gore's presentation An Inconvienent Truth and felt the impending doom that man made greenhouse gases have brought us to. I was all ready to buy a Prius and install some solar panels until I discovered some other documentaries that takes a rigorous look at the evidence used to connect global warming to man made CO2.
Now I don't deny that global warming is happening, I'm saying that man didn't cause global warming. The proponents of man made global warming have egregiously twisted their evidence and cherry-picked their data to lead you to their desired conclusion.
Unfortunately, convincing skeptics is almost impossible in a single blog entry, but I promise if you watch this video in its entirety you will be thoroughly convinced that global warming is a fraud. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6031514559084805348
You can also download the slides for this video which also contains the links to the source of this data for you own verification. Some of the claims that are made in the beginning of this seem dubious (like banning CFC's caused thousands of Europeans to die in a heatwave b/c they couldn't afford the more expensive AC units), but I urge you to get past these initial claims since they do not contribute to the heart of the argument. The video answered all the questions that I could have had, but if you still have some please leave a comment and perhaps I or somebody else will be able to answer it.
Like many of you, I watched Al Gore's presentation An Inconvienent Truth and felt the impending doom that man made greenhouse gases have brought us to. I was all ready to buy a Prius and install some solar panels until I discovered some other documentaries that takes a rigorous look at the evidence used to connect global warming to man made CO2.
Now I don't deny that global warming is happening, I'm saying that man didn't cause global warming. The proponents of man made global warming have egregiously twisted their evidence and cherry-picked their data to lead you to their desired conclusion.
Unfortunately, convincing skeptics is almost impossible in a single blog entry, but I promise if you watch this video in its entirety you will be thoroughly convinced that global warming is a fraud. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6031514559084805348
You can also download the slides for this video which also contains the links to the source of this data for you own verification. Some of the claims that are made in the beginning of this seem dubious (like banning CFC's caused thousands of Europeans to die in a heatwave b/c they couldn't afford the more expensive AC units), but I urge you to get past these initial claims since they do not contribute to the heart of the argument. The video answered all the questions that I could have had, but if you still have some please leave a comment and perhaps I or somebody else will be able to answer it.
Thursday, April 12, 2007
Imus the Bigot
As you might have heard on the news, Don Imus, a radio talkshow host, was punished with a two week suspension for calling the Rutger's women basketball team "a bunch of nappy headed hos". Let's face it, America is upset about the "nappy". If he had just said "hos" there wouldn't have been any dilemma. It's pretty interesting how America has gotten all upset over racial related to African Americans. Look at all the anti-Arab/anti-Muslim racial comments he made before this. He certainly used more biggoted comments then, but how dare he use the word "nappy" now?
Don't get me wrong, I agree with most people that say he shouldn't be on the air. I just don't get why this is the tipping point for public outrage. Why should African American racial slurs carry more weight than other racial slurs? Are we racial slur racists?
I think one of the factors is Rev. Al Sharpton. Lately, it seems like he's got nothing better to do than to scour the media looking for something racial that he can spearhead into a riot or something. I believe he'll do pretty much anything that will draw attention to himself from the media, perhaps for another run at the presidency. Yet the irony is that he doesn't have to look very hard to find racial slurs and imagery depicting black people as a negative part of society, he can just pick up a copy of 50 cent's CD. Some people would object to my reasoning with "...but, 50 cent's black, so that's ok". I would counter by saying that by being black, and by being the self appointed representative of black people, he should have the most influence and the most reason to straighten his people first. If racial epithets shouldn't be used to refer to his people then his people should be to first ones to stop using them. Is it not hypocritical to preach one thing to one group of people, and sit idly by while the people you represent make a mockery of your preachings? To drive my point home let me share with you an interesting quote: "Let us consider a more concrete example of just and unjust laws. An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal. By the same token, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal." - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., "Letter from Birmingham Jail". Here, Dr. King is saying that you can't make laws that don't apply to everyone, especially yourselves. Although he's referring to legal laws, does this not apply to social laws too?
I like to talk about Sharpton because I see him as such a waste of valuable potential to the African American civil rights cause. No person, race, or civilization has ever risen up by the continued guilting or pleaing for reparations from a dominating person, race, or civilization. The last thing that anyone who cares about his people would do, would be to foster an attitude of "the white man needs to give me something because I've been oppressed". African Americans will never be judged fairly if they don't pull themselves up with their own drive to become successful. You simply cant end stereotypes that hold true more often than not.
Sharpton should be advocating an ethos of self-reliance, pride in one's culture, the willingness to support your brothers, and a passion for true justice regardless of race. Then again, I can see why Sharpton doesn't want to elevate the status of black people in America. Without a suffering race, you cant claim that you're oppressed. If your race is not oppressed Sharpton can't incite anger and place himself as their liberator. I wonder, if God presented Sharpton with a secret choice (1) racisim would be eliminated in the world, but he would be unknown in the media forever or (2) racisim would continue status quo, but he would depose Jesse Jackson as the sole leader of the African American civil rights leader, ...I think he would pick the later choice. If you read this additional research that I did on him you'll be convinced why.
In my opinion the biggest No-No that Sharpton has done was to pull out the racial card at every court case/police beating where race wasn't even a factor and still try to support the black guy despite the enormous evidence to the contrary. A true leader would be the first chastise a criminal as a disgrace to their people, not make wild accusations in an attempt to bring attention to yourself and sow increased racial discontent while drawing attention away from the facts in hand.
As you might have heard on the news, Don Imus, a radio talkshow host, was punished with a two week suspension for calling the Rutger's women basketball team "a bunch of nappy headed hos". Let's face it, America is upset about the "nappy". If he had just said "hos" there wouldn't have been any dilemma. It's pretty interesting how America has gotten all upset over racial related to African Americans. Look at all the anti-Arab/anti-Muslim racial comments he made before this. He certainly used more biggoted comments then, but how dare he use the word "nappy" now?
Don't get me wrong, I agree with most people that say he shouldn't be on the air. I just don't get why this is the tipping point for public outrage. Why should African American racial slurs carry more weight than other racial slurs? Are we racial slur racists?
I think one of the factors is Rev. Al Sharpton. Lately, it seems like he's got nothing better to do than to scour the media looking for something racial that he can spearhead into a riot or something. I believe he'll do pretty much anything that will draw attention to himself from the media, perhaps for another run at the presidency. Yet the irony is that he doesn't have to look very hard to find racial slurs and imagery depicting black people as a negative part of society, he can just pick up a copy of 50 cent's CD. Some people would object to my reasoning with "...but, 50 cent's black, so that's ok". I would counter by saying that by being black, and by being the self appointed representative of black people, he should have the most influence and the most reason to straighten his people first. If racial epithets shouldn't be used to refer to his people then his people should be to first ones to stop using them. Is it not hypocritical to preach one thing to one group of people, and sit idly by while the people you represent make a mockery of your preachings? To drive my point home let me share with you an interesting quote: "Let us consider a more concrete example of just and unjust laws. An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal. By the same token, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal." - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., "Letter from Birmingham Jail". Here, Dr. King is saying that you can't make laws that don't apply to everyone, especially yourselves. Although he's referring to legal laws, does this not apply to social laws too?
I like to talk about Sharpton because I see him as such a waste of valuable potential to the African American civil rights cause. No person, race, or civilization has ever risen up by the continued guilting or pleaing for reparations from a dominating person, race, or civilization. The last thing that anyone who cares about his people would do, would be to foster an attitude of "the white man needs to give me something because I've been oppressed". African Americans will never be judged fairly if they don't pull themselves up with their own drive to become successful. You simply cant end stereotypes that hold true more often than not.
Sharpton should be advocating an ethos of self-reliance, pride in one's culture, the willingness to support your brothers, and a passion for true justice regardless of race. Then again, I can see why Sharpton doesn't want to elevate the status of black people in America. Without a suffering race, you cant claim that you're oppressed. If your race is not oppressed Sharpton can't incite anger and place himself as their liberator. I wonder, if God presented Sharpton with a secret choice (1) racisim would be eliminated in the world, but he would be unknown in the media forever or (2) racisim would continue status quo, but he would depose Jesse Jackson as the sole leader of the African American civil rights leader, ...I think he would pick the later choice. If you read this additional research that I did on him you'll be convinced why.
In my opinion the biggest No-No that Sharpton has done was to pull out the racial card at every court case/police beating where race wasn't even a factor and still try to support the black guy despite the enormous evidence to the contrary. A true leader would be the first chastise a criminal as a disgrace to their people, not make wild accusations in an attempt to bring attention to yourself and sow increased racial discontent while drawing attention away from the facts in hand.
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