http://www.theroot.com/articles/politics/2013/01/black_panthers_and_gun_control_the_nras_flip_flop.html

I agree, sheshe, the black gun toters would either be dead or in jail already.

The armed white militia is asserting, in there minds their constitutional rights. They are protecting what they believe is theirs. And what is theirs, in their warped belief, is their privilege to everything.

That much is probably true, TBH. After all, Ronny Raygun, back when he was Governator of California, ended up supporting gun control.....but only after the Black Panthers started packin'.

it's media coverage. My guess is that the higher-ups in the LE agencies there didn't want another potential "Ruby Ridge" happening.

First, Bundy has somehow been allowed to graze his cattle on Federal land for twenty years. You can't touch me I am white and I am a man!

http://www.ajc.com/weblogs/jay-bookman/2014/apr/15/bundy-ranch-standoff-sets-dangerous-precedent/

So if a black man had done this, you think the results would be the same? Not by a long shot!

Now we have an armed militia of, you guessed it WHITE MEN! Aiming guns at agents. They have armed themselves to protect a crook. This is what America has come to? I take what I want when I want and by force if I want.

As I said if these were black men they would have been shot. They would be dead.

Yes it is White Privilege.

and gender do not make you infallible.

This is about right wing terrorism. Nice try.

are basically hate groups made up of angry white men.


Cenk Uygur Cenk UygurHost of The Young Turks
Posted: August 10, 2009 04:39 AM

The Last Gasp of the Angry White Man

What we're seeing in these angry town halls these days is the last gasp of the angry white man. He's not quite sure what he's angry about, but he knows he's angry. It's not the world he used to know. He gets the disquieting feeling that he doesn't rule the roost anymore. And it's driving him crazy.

snip

And who is stoking these fires? Encouraging and egging on these screams, this anger, this fear? Conservative talk hosts all across the country (and, of course, special interest groups funded by the health care industry who are relishing using these poor schleps as fodder for their effort to kill health care reform). They're telling them the proper response is anger. Don't wait your turn. Don't listen to the congressman. Shout. Be heard. Be angry. Obama is taking this country away from you.

snip

It's beginning to smell a lot like banana republic around here. And there is no answer. If you try to suggest that they bring it down a notch, they scream censorship and warn their audience that their rights are about to be taken away from them. And so is their country. If you say it might not be such a good idea to have all of these weapons in the hands of all these angry men, they scream about the Second Amendment and tell their audience to hold on to their guns even tighter. And many have held on so tight that some of them even pulled the trigger.

How many more will? When does this stoking of anger and fear stop? And who would stop it? I really don't know. Here's one more thing I don't know. What happens if it doesn't?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cenk-uygur/the-last-gasp-of-the-angr_b_255273.html

Republicans.

Reminds me of Pangloss

https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/candide/quotes.html

Right wing nut jobs get away with alot more than normal people

Not only were cameras present, but he wasn't the only one armed. Starting a shootout involving hundreds of people isn't like shooting at a single man with a gun.

Another "Ruby Ridge" would not happen. Because a key element of the Ruby Ridge or Waco shitstorms was the right-wing media screaming about it.

Black men? They'd be dead. And right-wing media would be screaming about evil black terrorists.

Arabs? Dead, and right-wing media would be starting another "BENGHAZI!!!!" scandal over the White House not stopping it ahead of time.

Every event, every instance of criticism of Obama, every action taken is about race.

Or so some fixated hypocrites would have you believe.

And why are you bring Obama up here?

Do you or do you not have a problem with the so called patriots of the second amendment taking up arms to protect a god damn crook who hates the government and believes that it is his right to take what he wants!?

So that's okay with you? Yes he is white and yes he believes this is his God given right. If anyone else did this, a person of another color would either be under lock and key or dead.

because segregation by race was legal and practiced for most of our history.

because marriage between white and black was not legal in much of the country.

because places like South Carolina, people still want to fly a flag that represents the fight to keep black people as property, to keep slavery and to expand it.

because black people are more incarcerated, poorer, more likely victims of discrimination than whites.

it is pure logic as to why race is thought of as an explanation for many things --because it is the explanation, the most logical one, time and time again.

Last edited Thu Apr 17, 2014, 11:28 PM - Edit history (1)

White "privilege" doesn't exist. Not in a literal sense, anyway. Here, if you want to see some points I brought up, I'll link them to you:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=4832622


If we really want to educate people we need to ditch this sadly failed (and rather outdated!) terminology and go with something a little more straightforward, even if it can't be captured in a soundbyte; people will understand a straightforward article or list a lot better than a confusing & contradictory soundbyte, no matter how small or brief.

As I've pointed out, "privilege" does imply something above & beyond a norm.....and yet, white people just happen to be the so-called "default&quot do note the quotation marks, please). So white people can't be *literally* "privileged", because of that alone.

Of course, I do realize that the initial intent behind the coining of the term was not literalistic but more of a "Take a walk through somebody else's shoes" type of thing. And that's fine. But too many people have taken it literally, and more over, it hasn't exactly made liberals as a whole look good, either, TBH(just look at how much reactionary righties, especially the extremists, rant and rave about how "self-hating" and "anti-white" we supposedly are, etc.).

See, the basis of your argument is your definition of privilege. Your definition is not the only one.

How about this one:

If you use that definition, "But I don't feel privileged" becomes a rather stupid argument.


And that dumb argument got us people saying "I'm not a liberal! I'm a progressive".

When we flee from the right's terminology battle, we are surrendering the field to them. There is no magic term that will make the right agree. They are turning to terminology in the hope that people will waste their time arguing about the exactly perfect word to use, instead of actually fighting them.

Just as there's no way to appease homophobes without pretending homophobia doesn't exist.

a mere two-word phrase is so inflammatory as to cause the shutting-down of discussion...

Because it HAS been used as a *purposefully* inflammation tool by some less scrupulous individuals out there, from time to time. But more than that, it fails to adequately convey the truth of the matter as it is. Look around; even if happens to click for a select lucky few, it doesn't work for a very large majority of everyone else. It HAS largely failed for the purposes that it is usually utilized for in this day and age. And we Progressives can do better than that.

At least we can end this on a positive note.

and more white privilege.

Why Do Christian Right-Wingers Pretend America's Laws Don't Apply to Them?

Conservatives are demanding special rights to disobey universally applicable federal laws.

The situation with Cliven Bundy of Nevada should be a no-brainer for people from both the left and the right. Bundy has been stealing from the taxpayers for years, illegally grazing his cattle on federal lands while refusing to pay for the privilege. Both liberals and conservatives pay taxes, so such blatant theft should outrage everyone equally. Indeed, conservative media claims to take theft from taxpayers very seriously, with Fox News spending so much time on the miniscule problem of food stamp cheats that the number of minutes spent on it has likely long ago exceeded the number of pennies lost to this non-problem.

Bundy has stolen far more than any hypothetical food stamp cheat ever did, but when the government tried to show up and take what was theirs, he met them with armed resistance, pushing him from the “ordinary fraud” category to the “violent criminal” column.

And yet, for some reason, Bundy’s outrageous theft of services from the taxpayers is not being taken seriously by the right-wing press. As Roy Edroso of Village Voice and Eric Boehlert of Media Matters have chronicled, the conservative response to the whole incident has ranged from minimizing the seriousness of the crime to outright cheering Bundy on in his efforts to use the threat of violence to continue stealing from the taxpayers.

It’s tempting to write this reaction off as a matter of idiocy married to identity politics. Bundy is a white guy in a cowboy hat wielding guns, which reads as “one of us” to many on the right, so they refuse to accept that he’s a bad guy no matter how much he threatens violence against federal officers simply for enforcing a law that applies to everyone. And no doubt that is part of what’s going on here. But really, what’s going on runs deeper than a knee-jerk desire on the part of the right to believe every white guy in a cowboy hat is a good guy. This is the logical extension of a push that’s grown in recent years from conservatives to argue that they, and only they, have special rights to simply disregard any law they don’t want to follow. And unfortunately that’s an argument that may be making headway this year in the Supreme Court.

http://www.alternet.org/belief/why-do-christian-right-wingers-pretend-americas-laws-dont-apply-them

Yes it is white privilege.

See, the basis of your argument is your definition of privilege. Your definition is not the only one.

The problem is, Not every white person is on the same exact level, and gets the exact same respect from society as a whole. A poor white person, for example, isn't nearly as likely to get away with a light sentence on a drunk driving charge as a wealthy athlete or politician who happens to be black, or Latino, or whatever, despite whatever *social* disadvantages compared to the norm the latter may have faced; because the latter man's wealth gives him protection that the poverty stricken fellow wouldn't.

When we flee from the right's terminology battle, we are surrendering the field to them. There is no magic term that will make the right agree. They are turning to terminology in the hope that people will waste their time arguing about the exactly perfect word to use, instead of actually fighting them.

But that's not what we're trying to do. And this isn't about the right, Jeff; many of them can't be saved by our efforts alone. It's about those people on the fence.......those are the ones that can and need to be, woken up, by and large. And special snowflaking over who has the least "privilege", etc. sure as hell isn't helping us.

And privilege does not require that they all be on the exact same level. Nor do the people using the word privilege believe that they are all on the same level.

We're well aware that rich white people have more privilege than poor white people. Heck, rich minorities probably have more privilege than poor white people. But that's not the point.


Yes, it is exactly what you are trying to do. You are searching for a term that would be less offensive to the right.


The only one who's special snowflaking is you.

I'm a white male. That gets me a certain amount of privilege. I'm paid well, which gets me some additional privilege. However, I'm nowhere close to rich. Which means I lose out on some other privilege.

But there is not a single "privilege scale". You appear to be think there is one. Privilege is not a quantifiable value. We can't declare I'm a 6, while Alan Keyes is a 7. It does not work that way. It's a complex and highly variable multi-dimentional social effect.

Your objection to using the word privilege is over attempting to oversimplify down to a single metric. Since that oversimplification just does not work, it is wrong to change language based on it.

Additionally, there's little to no evidence that some other word is going to magically turn those fence-sitters into civil rights activists. However, it means we are spending time arguing over the perfect word to use instead of actually working on the underlying problem. Exactly like those on the right would like us to do. Perhaps we should stop indulging them.

You may sincerely believe that, but it's not the truth, however.

It's a complex and highly variable multi-dimentional social effect.

Although I can't speak so much for the other "privilege" theories at the moment(my knowledge primarily specializes on a certain one), This definitely doesn't really hold true for "white privilege", from what I've been able to observe. In fact, "White privilege", or at least the literalist interpretation, is anything BUT complex. It just does not adequately cover the very real social complexities that exist, even that relating to race/ethnicity.

And my opinion certainly IS backed up by facts, and fact-based objective observation. And if you've seen all my posts, you and I may intersect in places in terms of where we stand. But objectively, as noble as the intentions may have been behind its creation, "white privilege" has failed, by and large, as a teaching tool, not only because of its inherent contradictions, but also because of its abuse by some individuals as well; in fact, liberals as a whole have been hurt by this mainly because it's given reactionary conservatives ammo for their daily bullshitting routines.....kinda like how doomsayers have harmed the climate repair movement with their screams about the imminent collapse of civilization, or how the IPCC is supposedly not being honest about the full current, and possible future severity of climate change, etc.

It's not hard to figure out if people are willing to take their blinders off for a while and look around. I had to do the same thing once, quite a while back before I even joined this site.

is so deadly serious. If they demand that I and everyone else constantly cater to their aggrieved feelings, then fuck them sideways.

How many shootings of white men have you seen justified or rationalized by folks saying he was just a "thug" anyway? How many people have implied we should starve poor rural whites to stop them breeding so much? How many "jokes" have been made about reducing the welfare rolls through murder of white people?

Seriously, the level of vile, murderous racism in this country is such that I don't give a shit about any fucking idiot white person who claims they "don't feel privileged."

You left out a wee bit 'o history, oh, say colonialism?

Yes there is white privilege. It's not outdated; I would put forward that you simply do not understand it.

However, though, just because one disagrees with something, does not necessarily mean they don't understand it. This is very true in my case, and I'm not alone.

(Oh, and P.S., I didn't discount the effects of colonialism, either. Which is why I mentioned South Africa as a possible legitimate exception to the rule).

thought it was saying the asshat behind the barricade was 107

These "patriots" truly are upset about a liberal African-American having been successfully elected, twice, including by a fair number of "white" folks. To many of them, the so-called "browning" of America is supposedly the "death-knell" of Western civilization itself. Hence why you see "anti-racist is just a codeword for anti-white" and all this other bullshit spewed on sites like YouTube, Facebook, etc.

They do not own America. They are not patriots. Time to enforce the full measure of the law against them. Mollycoddling them just encourages their delusions.

Reactionary assholes is what they are. And many of them *ARE* indeed racist, sexist, etc.

oh, I forgot, they're just for brown people in the desert.

which is the essential linchpin of our socio/political/economic system, watch the attached video and learn some truth and history. As I keep saying: the left wing will forever chase its own tail in ignorance until it understands the profound role that race plays in America.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024751006

That next to last picture in "Cloven Hoofs" pocket, I can't see it well but it's Jefferson is it not?!

What an asshole!