So I was reading this -
http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=7d6e885d-e082-468f-90d1-755d68a6a1f6
Which led to me checking out Snopes.com - one of my favorite myth debunking sites - and it turns out Obama has his own page. The crazy, its impressive.
God, these type of viral email smears piss me off to no end - I’m no longer speaking with my uncle because he kept mailing this kind of crap to me and I had to slap him down over it.
Why do these things always seem to come from the right? Where are the liberal smears about McCain’s torture-induced schizophrenia?
That sounds like a fun QT3 forum game.
We could work through a few rough drafts and agree on a final form. Then we can forward it (fake it up to look like a mass forward I mean) to all the people who mass forward us stuff. If 10-20 of us do that, it ought to be all over the internet in a week. Winner of this game is of course the first QT3’er to receive a copy of this from one of their mass-forwarding friends.
We need to work in how the Viet Cong brainwashing techniques turned McCain into a ticking time bomb of a Manchurian Candidate.
Also - all those Skin Cancer operations? Touch-ups for his synthetic skin, 'cause - Android.
You’d think they’d be more impressed with the book of revelation predicting a religion that wouldn’t exist for another 5 centuries.
Is it so much to ask that fundamentalists read the one book they talk about all the time?
Oh they read it, they just conveniently re-interpret it to suit their latest paranoid fantasy. That’s the marvel of religious texts.
Just out of curiosity, Obama didn’t suddenly come out in favor of slavery reparations, did he? Because all I’d ever seen is stuff along these lines apart from newsmax hysteria, yet someone who claimed to be a former Obama supporter swore up and down to me that he had, in fact, promised to work to make them a reality. I was prepared to address the usual bullshit spread about him once the topic of Obama came up, but other than assuming the person was lying I really didn’t have much on this subject.
How are slavery reparations unreasonable tin-foil hat stuff? Especially in America whose lawyers and courts pride themselves on extorting gigantic damages for any possible and impossible cause? Reparations for slavery and the following era of widespread lynchings are well-deserved and long overdue. They compensate the descendants for their ancestors’ forced inability to accumulate capital from their work. That is certainly a better response to black poverty than intrusive anti-discrimination laws, let alone the anti-white racism of “positive” discrimination.
Compensating descendants for things that happen to their ancestors may have moral justification (I don’t really agree, but I’ll play along), but the precedent it sets would be practically disastrous.
40 acres and mule x 140 years of compound interest = you think the national debt is big now? Also, what the hell happens when the native americans get wind of it?
Sure. Writing checks to everyone who had a slave in their family 150 years ago is a better response than, say, telling a real estate broker they have to sell to black people as well as white people if they are equally qualified to buy.
EDIT: Oh, LK, Obama has clearly stated he is against reparations. I did some digging around and he clearly said so. What people (Newsmax, Free Republic) are trying to do is take another comment he made ‘stating he was against “just signing over checks to African-Americans,”’ – and implying that means he was for some other kind of reparations. Mostly they seem to be relying on the guilt-by-association thing. He talks to people who are pro-reparations.
Maybe you misread what I said, or are more interested in a different angle than the one I was referring to. Let me put it this way. AFAIK, Obama is neither a Muslim or an advocate for slavery reparations. It is my belief that both things are said about him not out of honest error but out of a desire to smear him as an advocate for ideas that would make him very unpopular with the general electorate in return for making a minority happy.
Regardless of what you personally think about reparations, it is a very controversial issue here.
Fixed that… etc etc.
That’s the same stuff I came up with. Thanks.
Something about it pushes the hot buttons of american culture. Go figure.
You mean the fucking insanity of paying someone whose ancestors 140 years ago were slaves?
Why am I not getting a check from the Radziwill family or the Polish government because way down my mom’s side of the family we were serfs?
Moreover, the fact that their ancestors were slaves is what permits them to live in America. This would be a fair deal: take your reparations check, hand in your passport and Social Security, sign over your citizenship, and off to Sierra Leone with you?
Weird, I don’t think I’ve ever agreed with Jakub before. First time for everything I guess.
Yeah, reparations are a dumb idea. Bad things happened in the past, we don’t do them anymore, the people they happened to are all dead. Reparations do nothing at this point.
Oh whew, I don’t actually fully agree with Jakub. I would never try to interject a rationalization for the happy shiny positive upside of slavery into a reparations discussion. Frankly, no mature individual should.
Reparations would be ridiculously difficult to quantify, qualify and administrate. They are also a piss poor solution to African-American poverty issues in this country. A much better alternative would be to spend a shitload of money on improving social services and education systems for the people in low income urban areas (a good number of whom would have been the same folks receiving reparations money) so that they can help themselves in the long run instead of relying on hand outs. Spend enough time and effort on that, and suddenly you don’t need Affirmative Action and similar programs anymore.
Reparations are “hand-outs” but social services are not? What?
I guess the lot of you are confused by the term “reparations”. These aren’t “hand-outs” as you arrogantly and demeaningly call them, nor are they hard-to-quantify damages for some kind of pain suffered. Rather, they are (or should be when properly done) delayed payment for work rendered.
Heirs are entitled to receiving any payments owed to the deceased, and liable for paying any debts owed by the deceased. I’d think that’s the same in America as in any legal system. Are you denying that the slave workers are entitled to receiving money for their work? Or are you denying that such claims pass on to their heirs?
If so, is this a special case for negroes because paying them would be inconvenient, or do you generally think that assets and debts cannot or should not be inherited? If so, what about any capital and plantations that survived the Civil War and were passed on to white heirs? What about households in the north that accumulated considerable wealth and saved a lot of money by not paying for the work of their slaves? If they didn’t inherit the debts to their former slaves surely they didn’t inherit those assets either, right?
Actually, at least in the US as far as I know, heirs aren’t responsible for debts unless they accept part of the estate. If you really wanted to get technical, you’d actually have to hold families that were slave owners (and had assets that could be traced back that far) responsible if you wanted to pay out based on historical evidence.
Honestly, rather than just cutting a check, I’d like to that money go toward educational reforms like a nationalized education system, with monies more equitably distributed to public schools, so poor districts aren’t penalized for being poor.