Gotta keep that 13th Amendment loophole open, I guess.
(I titled this post “Hope you don’t get an incompetent lawyer” for catchiness, but I guess none of the people who’ll likely see this on social media will ever have to face this problem, so… problem solved, I guess! \o/ )
I want to put this on a t-shirt but reverse-printed so I can read it in a mirror. The message is for me, not the rest of the world.
«I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block … is … the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice….»
Martin Luther King
Of course, if I was serious about that, I’d put it on a sticky note on my bathroom mirror and not a t-shirt. Well, there goes THAT brilliant t-shirt idea.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/12/empire-of-cotton/383660/
“My family’s not from the south. We didn’t even come to this country until 1900. We had nothing to do with that.”
«By the late 1850s, cotton grown in the United States accounted for 77 percent of the 800 million pounds of cotton consumed in Britain. It also accounted for 90 percent of the 192 million pounds used in France, 60 percent of the 115 million pounds spun in the Zollverein, and 92 percent of the 102 million pounds manufactured in Russia.»
Just kind of thinking in my mind about reparations for slavery and, oh, I dunno, Jim Crow racism. I’ve seen a figure for repayment for stolen labor (fair wages for the labor we paid darn near $0/hr), adjusted for inflation, being $16 trillion, counted from the founding of this legal entity we call “our country”.
And I wonder if that includes interest.
And then I’m thinking, “what about payment for the lives we cut short?”, which leads me to wonder how much IS a human life worth? Or a year of human life?
$100,000, by this flawed measure.
So, still thinking. But here’s a number.
Checklist! There’s a story behind this.
«The plane roared down the tarmac, lifted off smoothly, and climbed sharply to three hundred feet. Then it stalled, turned on one wing, and crashed in a fiery explosion. Two of the five crew members died, including the pilot, Major Ployer P. Hill.»
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/12/10/the-checklist
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/doc-the-boeing-b-29-bomber-lands-at-museum-of-flight/
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/05/17/ukraine-aid-divides-the-gop-00033078
«it’s alarming fellow Republicans who see it as a flawed argument and part of a disturbing trend toward isolationism.»
No!
I’m shocked. Shocked! To find that isolationism is going on in this establishment.
So, I posted this yesterday, but I had another thought.
We have to be careful not to hide racism under race-neutral language. The article gives a detailed history of the “conservative”* movement’s evolution through the 60s and 70s (as opposed to Weyrich choosing to focus on abortion only in 1978 because he couldn’t focus on segregation), but, still, to assert that racism is no component of the anti-abortion movement is wrong. As the article does state.
*”Conservative” in quotes because “conservatives” are really just unprincipled racists, sexists, fascists and nationalists. Actually, the more I think of it, maybe that’s what they’ve always been? Sorry, friends who think you’re principled conservatives, I think you’ve just been fooled. Possibly by yourselves.
This is the stuff they’re talking about: https://herereadthis.blog/2018/06/29/on-racism-and-the-pro-life-movement/
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/anti-abortion-white-supremacy/
And this: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-right-real-origins-107133/
Not sure how I feel about it, specifically, but… I know how I feel in general.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1525814394638286848.html
Good David Rothkopf rant on the recent Buffalo NY shooting.
Here, Read This 