Riot Day in Ferguson, Missouri

[mike]

Your computer is not sustainable nor is your bicycle car or home.


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We all have our impact on the planet, thats unavoidable. The question then, is do we try and be mindful of that impact, doing our best to minimise and mitigate where possible.

Or just say bugger it, and go at it like a swarm of mindless locusts.

Damn the consequences, isnt a reasonable mindset imo

 

[boomerang]

Now try and steer this thread back on track.


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[Burnt State]

Sustainable communities produce what is needed for the whole of the community so all can share in the products and profits of the community. Unsustainability begins the moment someone wants a hierarchy, and then wants more than their fair share just because they have the power.

What we see unfolding in Ferguson is a historical response to the unsustainable actions of robbing people from their homeland, employing them as slaves, forcing them to fight for freedom and equality, and these are the sad remnants of those thrusts of power.

A lot of people say, "get over history," but that's not so easily done when your own history, identity and even place of origin was stolen from you. There are social effects from such actions that will last generations. The perpetual inequalities from that era are alive today and can be seen while counting the faces of white millionaires and billionaires who owe their fortunes to the slave trade and can be seen in the impoverished faces of those who descended from cycles of inequality and poverty as a result of slavery.

America has yet to build a sustainable society based on principles of social cohesion because it continues to be an inequitable society. It has yet to make reparations for its power defining past that is alive and well in the present where protestors are telling us, "they can't breathe," as they are stifiled by the continued brutality of their brutal past alive and well in the brutal present.

 

[Burnt State]

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It did in fact launch a whole new tangent to the discussion that folded back quite neatly into notions community building, equity and why Ferguson became Ferguson followed and preceded by many other historic black protests.

 

[smcder]

Well no, there's a really interesting twist where the stars aligned to create something different for me. As previously mentioned, in my Catholic high school i was taught some interesting books that sensitized me to oppression in a profound manner including those other two and Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. Learning and living compassion in the concentration camp was a head trip for me as a teenager, especially up against the palpable hypocrisy of the school system i was in. There were so many scenes of watching students get demeaned and beaten by teachers; the priests were the worst - some good ultra violence with weapons there. I remember the one kid vomiting in grade nine science class because he had never seen anyone beaten before, and there was his teacher beside him pummelling the only aboriginal kid in the school - he had just been pushed too far. His torments continued throughout the semester of grade 9 biology - some extreme moments.

Years later I read The Ecstasy of Rita Joe in grade 12 English class which educated me about what Aboriginals were going through in Canada. I read every book on the subject in our school library and then moved on to abortion rights. Books changed me deeply. I challenged the staff repeatedly. Years later i would discover that not just one but both the priest principals of my school were brought up on charges of sexual assault of students, one being quite infamous in fact. But i also recently met the teacher who taught me these two books on the right. I explained to him how that had shaped my teaching on a profound level and that equity and and anti-oppression work along with compassion were cornerstones in how i taught and that he was the reason. He started crying right there in front of me in church. Decades later he still had never had a student tell him that his teaching had impacted them in any way. It was an interesting moment.

But the other thing that was pivotal in my early years is the role of my father. He taught me about domestic violence and the challenges of men caring for their sons. He did the best with the tools he had i suppose. He was also an engineer at our steel plant who had come from Austria as a visiting engineer; they were always bringing over people from all over the world to that mill to cultivate diverse global skills in steel manufacturing and design processes. My father stayed in the city for various reasons and played on what was the only multicultural soccer team in the city. Every visiting foreign national that came into his engineering division found his way onto that soccer team, or to our house and in our car on soccer trips, so I met people whom he befriended that were Taiwanese, Iranian, North African etc. some becoming life friends. I learned a lot about other people from around the world up close and personal while growing up.

My anti-racism training began at a very early age up in Northern Ontario and that made all the difference in the world up against the extremes I was seeing. To this day it's not abnormal for guys attending the local university there, who are African International students, to get followed home by the cops from the mall and then get arrested mistakenly when they get to the university dorm. Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario - it was a teaching city for me.

I've been meaning to come back to this ... sorry it had taken me so long.

I read Frankl's book and later several by Weisel and visited the concentration camp at Dachau in Germany when I was 16. I've kept this book:

Conscience and Courage: Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust: Eva Fogelman: 9780385420280: Amazon.com: Books

close the past twenty years so that I don't forget the complex nature of people.

He started crying right there in front of me in church. Decades later he still had never had a student tell him that his teaching had impacted them in any way. It was an interesting moment.

wow ... I can't imagine that feeling, teaching, done well is demanding and to not have anything back - to never be told it made a difference ...

But the other thing that was pivotal in my early years is the role of my father. He taught me about domestic violence and the challenges of men caring for their sons. He did the best with the tools he had i suppose. He was also an engineer at our steel plant who had come from Austria as a visiting engineer; they were always bringing over people from all over the world to that mill to cultivate diverse global skills in steel manufacturing and design processes. My father stayed in the city for various reasons and played on what was the only multicultural soccer team in the city. Every visiting foreign national that came into his engineering division found his way onto that soccer team, or to our house and in our car on soccer trips, so I met people whom he befriended that were Taiwanese, Iranian, North African etc. some becoming life friends. I learned a lot about other people from around the world up close and personal while growing up.

I had a bit of this too at the college where my dad taught, a young man from Vietnam in the 70s whose name was pronounced "Hi Boy" (he made lots of jokes about this) taught me to play chess, another man from Africa John (pronounced phoenetically: Carry ooo key) told me about the gorillas in his back yard and read to me in Swahili. My father assisted a math professor from Russia in coming to the United States and our families carpooled to school in Junior High. These were important events before my brother went to Australia and I went to Germany as an exchange student.

My anti-racism training began at a very early age up in Northern Ontario and that made all the difference in the world up against the extremes I was seeing. To this day it's not abnormal for guys attending the local university there, who are African International students, to get followed home by the cops from the mall and then get arrested mistakenly when they get to the university dorm. Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario - it was a teaching city for me.

 

[smcder]

It did in fact launch a whole new tangent to the discussion that folded back quite neatly into notions community building, equity and why Ferguson became Ferguson followed and preceded by many other historic black protests.

It's a picture of a natural gas well in the Fayetteville Shale about 2 miles from our house.


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[Burnt State]

Looks like a rocketship.

 

[smcder]

Looks like a rocketship.

Yep - My wife came in the house one night and said she had heard what sounded like a missile ...


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[pixelsmith]

Sustainable communities produce what is needed for the whole of the community so all can share in the products and profits of the community. Unsustainability begins the moment someone wants a hierarchy, and then wants more than their fair share just because they have the power.

What we see unfolding in Ferguson is a historical response to the unsustainable actions of robbing people from their homeland, employing them as slaves, forcing them to fight for freedom and equality, and these are the sad remnants of those thrusts of power.

A lot of people say, "get over history," but that's not so easily done when your own history, identity and even place of origin was stolen from you. There are social effects from such actions that will last generations. The perpetual inequalities from that era are alive today and can be seen while counting the faces of white millionaires and billionaires who owe their fortunes to the slave trade and can be seen in the impoverished faces of those who descended from cycles of inequality and poverty as a result of slavery.

America has yet to build a sustainable society based on principles of social cohesion because it continues to be an inequitable society. It has yet to make reparations for its power defining past that is alive and well in the present where protestors are telling us, "they can't breathe," as they are stifiled by the continued brutality of their brutal past alive and well in the brutal present.

Define sustainable society a little further please.

 

[manxman]

If theres a word that describes the below in a non racist way, then thats what i mean.

Black people scare white people for reasons ive already stated, we talked about taking the child out of africa, and giving the child equal opportunity, i believe most would flourish.
Theres a but, you leave that child in africa and he could very well become a butcher of fellow africans, and would almost certainly be involved in tribal warfare at some point in his life.

This is what you need to find the non offensive descriptor for, he can become a butcher because black africans just do not have the empathy for their fellow man that we have, you can take the boy out of africa, but you cannot take africa out of the boy, they are not alone in this world in that respect, different race's are at different stages of empathy, and we know, we sense it, and we fear it, whether we admit it or not.

I believe people can live in a multicultural co-existence, to do that they have to leave their previous culture completely behind, no baggage, they have to make a public commitment wholeheartedly to the new culture they join in the language of that culture, and give respect to the society they join by using that language 100%.


None of that will ever happen, i started with 'i believe' because he was a dreamer aswell.

 

[smcder]

If theres a word that describes the below in a non racist way, then thats what i mean.

Black people scare white people for reasons ive already stated, we talked about taking the child out of africa, and giving the child equal opportunity, i believe most would flourish.
Theres a but, you leave that child in africa and he could very well become a butcher of fellow africans.

This is what you need to find the non offensive descriptor for, he can become a butcher because black africans just do not have the empathy for their fellow man that we have, you can take the boy out of africa, but you cannot take africa out of the boy, they are not alone in this world in that respect, different race's are at different stages of empathy, and we know, we sense it, and we fear it, whether we admit it or not.

I'm not sure there is a non racist way to say there is a genetic tendency to violence among certain groups - if that's what you are saying?

Empathy and violence are complex and influenced by more than a simple concentration of genes.

A very small group might collect enough factors to show a tendency toward violence among it's members ... And psychopathy is heritable but even psychopaths aren't necessarily violent.

See also:

Between and Within group variation
Epigenetics
Definition of "race"


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[pixelsmith]

I have friends who came from Sudan and a couple from Somalia. None of them seem to be racist against whites because it was their own kind killing their families. One Sudanese woman was 12 when her and her family of about 30 were going about daily routine in their village of mud and grass huts. They heard horses coming and many hid as best they could. She watched as her whole family was slaughtered with machetes. They took her and raped her next to her decapitated mother then took her as a sex slave and forced her to travel with them as they went from village to village killing everyone they could. She lived with them as their primary sex object for 3 years when she finally escaped when they went to a larger town for some reason. She ran to an American couple from New York and asked for them to save her.. long story short, they did. And she ended up in New York then 5 years later in my photography studio for modeling photos. She is very racist against her own people. Seems strange.

 

[smcder]

If theres a word that describes the below in a non racist way, then thats what i mean.

Black people scare white people for reasons ive already stated, we talked about taking the child out of africa, and giving the child equal opportunity, i believe most would flourish.
Theres a but, you leave that child in africa and he could very well become a butcher of fellow africans, and would almost certainly be involved in tribal warfare at some point in his life.

This is what you need to find the non offensive descriptor for, he can become a butcher because black africans just do not have the empathy for their fellow man that we have, you can take the boy out of africa, but you cannot take africa out of the boy, they are not alone in this world in that respect, different race's are at different stages of empathy, and we know, we sense it, and we fear it, whether we admit it or not.

I believe people can live in a multicultural co-existence, to do that they have to leave their previous culture completely behind, no baggage, they have to make a public commitment wholeheartedly to the new culture they join in the language of that culture, and give respect to the society they join by using that language 100%.


None of that will ever happen, i started with 'i believe' because he was a dreamer aswell.

This is where it's hard to tell if you mean something innate or learned:

"you can take the boy out of africa, but you cannot take africa out of the boy"

?

And here:

"they are not alone in this world in that respect, different race's are at different stages of empathy, and we know, we sense it, and we fear it, whether we admit it or not."

Can you list the "races" in order of empathy?




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[Stagger Lee]

Perhaps Manx was referring to the Islam Extreamist, as one example. Can't speak for the Man, but I think I got his point.

 

[Burnt State]

I teach kids from various countries in Africa all the time. None have had any experiences of faminine, poverty, violence, killing their family members, their neighbors or anyone else for that matter. Africa has the most diversity of any other continent on the planet, and in her countries we see more languages and ethnic identities than anywhere else on earth. I think that the tv does the entire continent a huge injustice by positioning it as famine/disease stricken and war ravaged, when in fact there's a lot more going on there.

I have yet to see any one group own more empathy than any other. The one characteristic I notice from kids I teach who have come from Kenya, Nigeria, Egypt and the Sudan is that their family dynamics are much stronger than their North American counterparts. Kids are highly respectful of their parents, heed their advice and have very close bonds with their siblings. Frequently these kids are tops in their classes, run for student council and occupy a lot of leadership positions in the school. This may have to do with the fact that these kids are coming from middle class or better family spaces.

History has taught me that it's one thing to develop some kind of cultural competency but it's something else to stereotype groups. I tend to notice characteristics that are positive cultural markers and leave the stereotypes out of the picture. Makes things more productive for all involved.

 

[Constance]

I believe people can live in a multicultural co-existence, to do that they have to leave their previous culture completely behind, no baggage, they have to make a public commitment wholeheartedly to the new culture they join in the language of that culture, and give respect to the society they join by using that language 100%.

The statement in blue makes no sense. How can a 'multicultural' society result from the homogenization of all of its members, requiring that they strip from their minds and hearts all associations with the culture and personal history within which they've grown up? It's not only morally and intellectually unreasonable to demand that -- it can't work in situations in which particular groups in a country like the US have long been isolated and excluded from the mainstream. Both the Black Power movement and the Rainbow Coalition have been necessary contributions to the progress of American society in overcoming the continuing effects of its appalling historical racism. We need not to erase the past but to confront and comprehend it, and then work together to transcend it.

 

[Burnt State]

I've been meaning to come back to this ... sorry it had taken me so long.

I read Frankl's book and later several by Weisel and visited the concentration camp at Dachau in Germany when I was 16. I've kept this book:

Conscience and Courage: Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust: Eva Fogelman: 9780385420280: Amazon.com: Books

close the past twenty years so that I don't forget the complex nature of people.

He started crying right there in front of me in church. Decades later he still had never had a student tell him that his teaching had impacted them in any way. It was an interesting moment.

wow ... I can't imagine that feeling, teaching, done well is demanding and to not have anything back - to never be told it made a difference ...

But the other thing that was pivotal in my early years is the role of my father. He taught me about domestic violence and the challenges of men caring for their sons. He did the best with the tools he had i suppose. He was also an engineer at our steel plant who had come from Austria as a visiting engineer; they were always bringing over people from all over the world to that mill to cultivate diverse global skills in steel manufacturing and design processes. My father stayed in the city for various reasons and played on what was the only multicultural soccer team in the city. Every visiting foreign national that came into his engineering division found his way onto that soccer team, or to our house and in our car on soccer trips, so I met people whom he befriended that were Taiwanese, Iranian, North African etc. some becoming life friends. I learned a lot about other people from around the world up close and personal while growing up.

I had a bit of this too at the college where my dad taught, a young man from Vietnam in the 70s whose name was pronounced "Hi Boy" (he made lots of jokes about this) taught me to play chess, another man from Africa John (pronounced phoenetically: Carry ooo key) told me about the gorillas in his back yard and read to me in Swahili. My father assisted a math professor from Russia in coming to the United States and our families carpooled to school in Junior High. These were important events before my brother went to Australia and I went to Germany as an exchange student.

My anti-racism training began at a very early age up in Northern Ontario and that made all the difference in the world up against the extremes I was seeing. To this day it's not abnormal for guys attending the local university there, who are African International students, to get followed home by the cops from the mall and then get arrested mistakenly when they get to the university dorm. Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario - it was a teaching city for me.

I wasn't sure if you had finished here or not as you ended with my quote, but thanks for the book suggestion. Anything read multiple times by you must have great value. These books about people in extreme situations because of other people always seem to squeeze out humanity in a concentrated form.

It was very interesting to hear your own experiences of diversity at an early age. I haven't met anyone before who had some of these parallel experiences. I'm curious to know at what point you were sensitized to two other spaces: women's issues and mental health issues. Were there any specific moments for you that you would identify as turning points for yourself in these areas?

I'm interested to know at what point in time youth or adults develop empathic responses to different equity issues. I keep trying to figure out whether or not this can be established without having that experience as part of your personal life (i.e. family member, intimate other, or someone you live with). The rule of thumb I've learned is that if it's not part of your immediate life then people will rarely extend themselves towards others who are radically different than themselves.

This is why I'm very confused about sexism. A lot of men live with women. Why is there still so much violence in these intimate spaces?

 

[smcder]

@Burntstate

The short answer is that my momma raised me right! That's pretty much the long answer too but I can make it longer still with some examples ... I can respond to your question about key experiences too ... but mañana or el pasado mañana.

Bis bald den ... Tschuss!


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[Charlie Prime]

I have friends who came from Sudan and a couple from Somalia. None of them seem to be racist against whites because it was their own kind killing their families.

It's not that. African blacks are not racist against whites because they are not taught to be. American blacks are.

One of my fishing buddies is from Nigeria. We've talked a lot about this while alone on the water in the evenings.

Cultural Marxism employs the ancient Divide et Impera strategy. You can rule over people by making them fight against each other. This prevents them from uniting against your control system of taxation, and keeping their wealth and productivity for themselves.

The Oligarchs who developed Marxism in the early 20th century knew it was the most brilliant system of human farming ever developed. Proof of their wisdom is how incredibly wealthy they are today, while we struggle paycheck-to-paycheck just to eat wholesome food, and keep a roof over our heads.

 

[manxman]

Perhaps Manx was referring to the Islam Extreamist, as one example. Can't speak for the Man, but I think I got his point.

Yes i did lee, as far as my lifetimes general observations of looking in from the outside at other countries conflict's and social problems, ts like a leader board that each race/strain of humans, has a place on, maybe just plain empathy one human has towards another is not the correct way to assess, but it seems fine to me, ofcourse i realise we all have it still in us, but our soldiers need for more conditioning to kill.

Where do you think these animals are on the evolutionary scale.
BBC News - Pakistan Taliban: Peshawar school attack leaves 135 dead