Are White Republicans More Racist Than White Democrats? (Part Four)

Next up in our series on racism within the GOP is this question.

An interesting question to say the least. It is indeed heartening to see the trend moving downward for both parties but note the uptick (again) right after the president gets elected. It's much sharper with Republicans. I'll be interested to see the data from the last two years.

The Pope Sides with Terrorists on Charlie Hebdo?

While en route to the Philippines the pope talked about the massacre in Paris. And he really screwed the pooch on this one:

The Pope also condemned the Paris violence. “One cannot offend, make war, kill in the name of one’s own religion, that is, in the name of God,” Francis said. “To kill in the name of God is an aberration.

He broke it down in everyday terms, something that is coming to be known as classic Francis teaching style. “If [a close friend] says a swear word against my mother, he’s going to get a punch in the nose,” he explained. “One cannot provoke, one cannot insult other people’s faith, one cannot make fun of faith.”

The pope is trying to have it both ways: first he condemns Islamic terrorists, and then he condones physical violence as retaliation for verbal insults. He believes that if someone says something sufficiently demeaning you have the right to retaliate physically.

This mindset is exactly why mass mayhem ruled Europe for centuries during the slaughters between Catholics and Protestants over disagreements on religious dogma -- nonsense like transubstantiation, for God's sake -- in what we would today call religious terrorism.

Is the pope really this oblivious? Violence begets more violence.

Is the pope really this oblivious to the ways of the world? When Joe calls Mike's mom a slut, and Mike punches Joe out, it doesn't end there. Joe punches Mike back. Then Mike picks up a bottle and smashes it over Joe's head. Then Joe hits Mike with a chair. Then Mike tackles Joe, throwing him to the floor and cracking his skull open. Then Mike goes to jail for killing Joe.

Violence begets more violence.Wasn't it Jesus who advocated turning the other cheek when someone smites you? Now the pope says it's okay to strike first?

Is the pope endorsing duels? Medieval trial by combat? The idea that might makes right? Or is he simply trying to understand and explain the reactions of unsophisticated brutes to insults, which is extremely insulting in and of itself?

In any case, what difference do insults make? If Mike's mom is a slut then it's a true statement and therefore not actionable. If she isn't, then Joe is a liar and scumbag and unworthy of response. Or, if the charges are public and sufficiently slanderous, Mike can take Joe to court.

The entire business of proselytizing religions such as Christianity and Islam is to demean other religions.

Now, on a larger scale, the entire business of proselytizing religions such as Christianity and Islam is to promote themselves, and to demonstrate their superiority over other religions. This inevitably means that other religions must be cast as inferior, and their basic tenets and practices must be derided as false and risible.

Christianity's official positions on Mohammed have ranged from him being a liar, a warlord, a polygamist, a false prophet and according to Luther, "a devil and first-born child of Satan." How much more insulting can you get?

Whenever another religion disagrees with yours on matters of theology, it is insulting your faith and demeaning your beliefs. It doesn't matter whether they use angry four-letter words or euphemisms couched in civility.

Because, truly, what's the difference between saying that A) Mary, the mother of the Church, was not a virgin her entire life, and B) Joseph and Mary fucked like minks? Why will A get a throat clearing, and B elicit a papal punch in the face?

Popes during the Reformation orchestrated religious wars and the deaths of thousands in Europe for centuries. They executed thousands of people simply for denying abstruse points of theology. In the Middle Ages popes demanded Christians go to the Holy Land and slaughter thousands of Muslims because their religious beliefs insulted the Lord.

And this nonsense isn't over. Some sects of Islam consider the very existence of other sects to be an affront to their religion. This is why the Sunni/Shia schism in Iraq is so bad -- the Saudi/Al Qaeda branch of Sunni Islam is determined to kill all Shiites, apparently by blowing up one mosque at a time.

So listen up, Francis. If you condone beating people up for calling your mom a slut, then you condone beating gays for insulting God's laws, then you condone the murder of doctors who disagree with Catholic dogma, then you condone terrorists that slaughter cartoonists who defame the image of the one true prophet of Allah.

You can't have it both ways. Once you condone physical violence as retribution for mere words, ideas or pictures, you endorse all-out war. Because physical violence always escalates. The bigger the insult, the more violent the retaliation.

Are White Republicans More Racist Than White Democrats? (Part Three)

Next up in our examination of racism within the Republican party is this.

These numbers are fairly shocking for both parties. The Democrats seem to have leveled off but that humber is still too high. And, as I have been saying right along, the Republicans have a serious problem with racism against black people. Combine this graphic with my previous two graphics and it's just plain awful. In addition, note the spike when President Obama took office.

Honestly, there's not really anything positive to take away from this question.

The Death of Email?

I just went through the arduous process of changing my email addresses. It took several hours to go through all the websites I use and test that everything still works. It was a lot more work for me than most people because I had to change both my personal email as well as several business emails, and change some software that uses them.

I had to do this because my old email addresses have become useless. I get hundreds of emails a day, and 99.9% of them are spam. Real email messages are then lost in that sea of crap.

Why did I have to do this? Hackers have attacked several major websites in recent months, stealing hundreds of millions of credit cards and email addresses. Spammers also scour web pages across the Internet, harvesting any email addresses they find.

Spam is the perfect example of a libertarian paradise where there are no government controls on business.

But changing my email address won't solve this problem for very long. It's only a matter of time before more websites get hacked, or the address books of the people I correspond with get ripped off. Or one of the websites I gave my email address to sells it to spammers. And then these new email addresses will become useless.

The act of creating new email addresses means I have to give them to other people, from whom spammers will ultimately take them, therefore defeating the entire purpose of creating the new emails in the first place.

Email is essentially a completely open and free market, without no central controls. If you want an idea of what life would be like in a libertarian paradise with no government controls on what business can do, spam is the perfect example.

The Tragedy of the Commons
The current state of email is the tragedy of the commons on steroids. This is an economic theory, first postulated by William Forster Lloyd and reiterated by Garret Hardin, which states that people acting independently and rationally in self-interest ultimately behave contrary to the best interests of the group.

Originally the "commons" was the actual common village green in an English village, which was shared among villagers. Everyone could pasture their cows and sheep there, which of course led to overgrazing that quickly turned the village green into a barren pit of mud.

The metaphor extends to all resources held in common, such as:

• The ocean, which is being overfished and polluted by dumping and toxic runoff.
• The atmosphere, which is used as a dumping ground for automobile exhaust, coal-burning power plants and industrial pollution.
• The freeway system, which gets overcrowded at rush hour, making it useless for everyone.
• The stock market, which can be manipulated by insider trading, high-frequency computer trading and hedge fund rumor-mongers for personal gain while trashing market value for everyone else.
• The financial system, which was nearly brought down in 2008 through bad lending practices by individuals increasing their personal gain at everyone else's loss.
• The telephone system, which is exploited by con men and phony charities, like those calls from Apogee Retail begging for used clothing in the name of real charities, to which they give nothing.

The percentage of spam in email has fluctuated over time. It has been estimated to be anywhere from 68% to 90% of all email in recent years. I can't find reliable current stats, but my personal experience is that there has been a significant uptick in spam in recent months after a significant drop last year.

Spam filters help, but are no panacea. Real emails get lost when they're falsely flagged as spam, or when mailboxes get filled. And spammers are getting better at making spam look like more like real email that gets past the filters.

Another way to deal with spam is to simply reject any email you get from an address you don't recognize. That might work for individuals, but it doesn't work for businesses that need to accept queries from customers. To avoid having to deal with spam, those businesses instead turn to web forms (which have those annoying captchas to prevent spammers from sending spam through web interfaces).

Then there are the economic costs: worldwide millions of man-hours are wasted each day simply by people having to spend time weeding out and deleting spam.

If 60-90% of email is spam, that means that 60-90% of the network capacity, the server horsepower, and the very electricity that powers all the Internet infrastructure devoted to handling email is being wasted.

That adds up to hundreds of billions of dollars a year.

Which means people are just going to start giving up on email. And many of them already have: lots of people send texts, or use Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or other texting apps on their smart phones in preference to email.

So, the Internet had better come up with a real solution for spam, or email is going to go the way of snail mail.

Are White Republicans More Racist Than White Democrats? (Part Two)

Our next graphic has just as much to do with anti-government sentiment as it does with anti-black sentiment.

I think the anti-government sentiment and the fact that a black man got elected president in 2008 explain the rise on the Republican side. This question seemed to be trending downward for both parties but there was an uptick after the 2008 election. Thankfully, the Democrats are down to the single digits now.

The Republicans, however, clearly have their work cut out for them. If a third of their party believes that too much money is spent on improving the conditions of blacks, they do not have a grasp of history. Let's review

400 years of slavery
100 years of Jim Crow
50 years since the Civil Rights Act passed.
20 years (maybe) of white people being less crazy and a little more nice.

The whole "get over it" meme doesn't really work when you consider the depth of devastation done to black people in this country over time. This is where an anti-government type like Rand Paul could capture the black vote. It was the federal government that allowed slavery for how many years?

Let's also remember this piece from a while back. The biggest recipients of welfare?

The South.

Robbing A Gun Store

I've been assured by the Gun Cult that no one would ever consider robbing a gun store least of criminals. They would be deterred by the mere presence of that which is to be worshiped while gently fondling one's penis!

Well, there goes another bullshit lie.

Much of downtown Shawnee went into lockdown in the minutes following the attempted robbery and shootout at a gun shop there on Friday.

So, if there were schools full of guns and armed people like this gun shop then it would really make any difference.

When are we going to stop listening to these people?

Are White Republicans More Racist Than White Democrats? (Part One)

A recent post on race elicited several highly defensive and steeped in denial remarks from two of the five people who actually read comments. As is usually the case with conservatives like these gentlemen, they quickly redirected the conversation to me, issuing imperial declarations originating from an unfortunately deep insecurity and an inability to admit fault.

I did take away one thing from their feedback, though, and that's the fact that a more detailed examination of just how exactly Republicans are more racist than Democrats was required. For the next few days, we're going to be taking a look at polling done by a few different outfits on this issue. The main ones are going to be the General Social Survey and Nate Silver's 538 site but before we take a look at the first question, let's examine a fundamental fact about Republican party strength. Take a look at this map.

131 electoral votes come from the Old South and you'll note that today these are solid red states through and through. In the 2012 election, the popular vote in these 12 states was roughly 18 million people which is just shy of a third of the Republican votes in that election. Suffice to say that the South represents a substantial portion of the GOP base.

Given these facts, it's not surprising we see data like this.

A couple of interesting things to note. There are still plenty of white Democrats who have a problem with race. Sadly, some are in my family and, again not surprising, they are from the South. I also think it's interesting to note the uptick after Barack Obama got elected. Conservatives like to downplay the president's race but that's like my 12 year old son trying to downplay his black teeth when I ask him if he got into the Oreo cookies.

The positive to this graphic is that the trend is downward. Much of this has to do with old, white people dying off and taking their bullshit with them. Most people under the age of 40 don't have the same views on race as people over 40 do. Go even younger and it gets even better. We can thank our education system and its commitment to diversity and sensitivity on race for that sea change:)

So, it's clear from this graphic that more Republicans than Democrats think that black people are more lazy than hard working which is a classic racial stereotype. Given that a substantial portion of the GOP base is from the South, this myth about black people is likely more prevalent in those 12 states and drives the number higher for Republicans.

(Postscript: I suspect that this post and the ones on race that follow are going to cause a few bowels to be blown. I'm going to request that when commenting on this and future posts in this series, please offer a counter argument (if you disagree) that is based in reason and leaves me out of it.  I won't ban or delete any comments that are Markadelphia obsessed as they essentially illustrate avoidance and denial of reality thus leading to confirmation of my assertions here. But I at least wanted to offer my usual five commenters the chance to really focus on the evidence presented here and post a true counter argument complete with their own assertions. 

After all, they repeatedly claim that they are superior to me in several ways. Now's their chance to prove this to be true:))

You Are Not President

Uh...Michele?

You aren't president and this is not the result of anything you did.

I'm completely shocked that a conservative doesn't understand fundamental economics.

All Economic Signs Good!

Yesterday's paper had a great piece on how well the economy is doing here in Minnesota and in the rest of the country. Check out this interactive graphic that illustrates the five key indicators (jobs, unemployment, consumer sentiment, gas prices, and GDP) clearly showing just how much our economy has improved during the Obama years.

Any retractions out there yet?

Why Globalization Is A Rising Tide That Lifts All Boats

The video below shows exactly why globalization and capitalism are indeed very good things. Take a look at how the bubbles, even in underdeveloped countries, rise over 200 years. Rosling's stuff is amazing and I highly encourage all of you to check out his interactive graphic where you can track the progress of each country, crunch the data, and be a complete social studies nerd like myself.



Despite what the apocalyptics on both the left and the right tell you, our world is improving every day.

Still On Board The Zimmerman Train?

George Zimmerman has been arrested...again. This time, it's aggravated assault.

I'm wondering if folks are still hitching their wagons to his star.

The Girl Effect

If there was one clear reason why there is inequality in the world, it's this.



This would be exactly why globalization isn't the evil demon that some on the left make it out to be.

The Obummer Destruction of the Economy Continues

Today's jobs report was very positive with the unemployment rate dropping to 5.6% and 252,000 jobs added in the month of December. November's jobs number was revised upwards to over 350,000 jobs. Overall, the economy added nearly three million jobs in 2014.

I look at this graph and I have to wonder, where is the "Obummer Destruction of the economy" I hear so much about from conservatives? Certainly, you can't credit the president completely for the improved economy but his policies have most definitely helped.

As always, I'm still waiting for that "tough history coming." Any day now...:)

Good Words

From my most recent question on Quora...

The Southern Strategy is overwhelmingly the biggest reason for the shift in American politics, and that strategy DOES have its roots in the opposition to the Civil Rights movement in this country. There were residual issues from that era that bled into the '70's-notably Affirmative Action, Busing/educational issues, urban issues, etc. All of these issues essentially had a Black face. 

In addition, other movements were making their mark as well-Cesar Chavez in the '70's started the labor movement among Hispanic/Mexican immigrants, and Stonewall (beginning of the gay rights movement) occurred in the later part of the decade. Hispanics and gays are also next to blacks on the Republican bullseye. All of these things changed America from a white dominated culture to a more multicultural country-and the most conservative, racist individuals in the South reacted by using racial coding to give aid and comfort to a white population that was uncomfortable with the changes. 

You have to remember: after the 1964 Civil Rights Bill was passed in the US, many Southern Democrats-called Dixiecrats-left the Democratic party for the Republican party in protest. They were vehemently against the concept of equal rights for blacks. That spirit of the Dixiecrats is still alive thanks to the "Southern Strategy". Starting with Nixon, Republicans took that spirit and fanned the flames of the anti-Civil Rights act movement for political gain. Prominent Republicans have confirmed that the "Southern Strategy" was part of their election strategy. 

And here is an example of the famous "black hands" ad for a Republican Senator in the '80's:RNC Adviser Alex Castellanos Admits That His Infamous Jesse Helms Ad Hurt Race Relations 

There are more examples of race based strategies, coding, baiting, and slips of the tougue as well. One can turn on any right wing media outlet and hear it for themselves. And of course, in the present day, the most notable recent example of the residue of this strategy is one Steve Scalise, who was caught speaking to a white supremacist group, and labelling himself "David Duke without the baggage (whatever the hell that means). 

So, yes, it is not an exaggeration to say that racial animus on the part of conservatives, specifically Southern conservatives, was a huge reason for the shifting of American politics to what you see now. And this history is why nonwhites in this country don't trust conservatives, and don't vote for them in such large numbers.

I'm wondering if any of my five commenters are courageous enough to respond to this and engage in a much larger forum than here:)

Free Speech: Racist Epithets vs. Blasphemy

The massacre of cartoonists and journalists at Charlie Hebdo in Paris by Muslims outraged by the publication's depictions of Mohammed brings up an important question: why do liberals consider Charlie Hebdo's cartoons of Mohammed, the Piss Christ and The Interview to be expressions of free speech that should not be silenced, while they routinely condemn derogatory racist and sexist epithets applied to minorities?

Is it simply hypocrisy? Political correctness run amok? Or is it a principled stand against the oppression of the weak by the powerful?

Blasphemy is irreverent speech about religious figures such as god, or Mohammed, or Jesus, the Pope, Kim Jong Un, or the books and institutions of a religion. Those institutions are powerful and influential and are completely capable of weathering criticism from cartoonists and late-night comics.

Christians, Muslims and North Koreans are equally free to condemn this irreverent speech. What we cannot abide are threats and physical harm to blasphemers and, not just coincidentally, the persons and property of the religious.

Historically, charges of blasphemy are usually leveled at competing sects from the same religion that consider the very existence of the other sect to be a blasphemy. The Sunni-Shia schism and the Christian Gnostic blasphemies come to mind.

Racist and sexist epithets, by contrast, lump an entire class of underprivileged people together as something less than human, providing justification in the minds of racists for systematic discrimination and personal ad hominem and physical attacks.

More to the point, the people who condemn racist and sexist epithets in public discourse are simply condemning racism and sexism. They may call for racists and sexists to be socially shunned or their companies boycotted. But they're not advocating that the haters be killed or jailed for their hateful speech, except when that speech crosses over into actual threats of violence.

It's not an abrogation of a conservative's right to free speech or "political correctness" when others upbraid him for calling something "gay," or express outrage when he makes watermelon and fried chicken jokes about the Obamas, or call him a dick for telling sexist jokes. They're simply exercising their First Amendment rights.

Just like he did when he spouted that crap in the first place.

Scary!

Dick Cavett on Ayn Rand

From a recent interview with Dick Cavett...

 CAVETT: Oh, well, that’s so, too. You can piss away valuable hours of your life reading Ayn Rand—her wretched appeal to the young, her wretched writing, her wretched person. She was supposed to be on my show; I was kind of sorry she wasn’t, because I was kind of laying for her. I did not succumb, as a kid, to being enthused by Ayn Rand, and that sense of power, as every kid was at one time until they outgrew it. The old bag sent over a list of fifteen conditions for appearing with me, or for appearing with anyone, I guess. One of them was, “There will be no disagreeing with Ms. Rand’s philosophy.” 

GREEN: You’re kidding. 

CAVETT: No! I wrote at the bottom of the list, to be sent back to her, “There will be no Ms. Rand, either.”

No disagreeing with Ms. Rand's philosophy...gee, that sounds awfully familiar:)

The above quote kinda reminds me of another quote...

“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.” — [Kung Fu Monkey — Ephemera, blog post, March 19, 2009] ― John Rogers

More Guns In Chicago

One of my favorite bits of fiction peddled by the Gun Cult is that Chicago, a city that heavily restricts guns, is a great example of what gun control really does...create more violence and leave ordinary citizens defenseless.  So, by this logic, if Chicago were to loosen its gun laws and allow more people to have guns, violence would decrease, correct?

I'm curious...what is the basis for this line of thought? And how would a fully armed Chicago look if the laws were indeed changed?

Democrats Still Got More Votes Than Republicans

Across the 2010, 2012, and 2014 elections., the current Senate of 46 Democratic Senators got just shy of 68 million votes while the 54 Republicans about to take office only got 47 million votes.

I wonder if conservatives truly understand what this means...

The Southern Strategy Explained

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

For the full interview, click here.