I’ve seen the video of the professor in Missouri, demanding that the aggressive reporter be thrown out of a circle of students. And I have mixed feelings about it. So many people are reflexively aghast, and shouting about “freedom of the press!”, but I’m wondering if we’re going to have any limitations on freedom of the press.
The bad news: horribly racist incidents.
…at issue is the school administration’s handling of several racist incidents that occurred this fall. In September, Peyton Head, a senior and the president of Missouri Students Association, said he was called racial slurs as he walked near campus.
“I really just want to know why my simple existence is such a threat to society,” he wrote in a Facebook post.
That incident was followed by one on October 5 when members of the Legion of Black Collegians were called the N-word while rehearsing for homecoming festivities. Three weeks later, on October 24, a swastika was drawn with human feces at a university residence hall.
The good news: students and faculty reacted vigorously. Boy, did they react. Students protested; one went on a hunger strike. The student athletes refused to perform until action was taken, and the coach actually supported them, and said they were excused from practice. Faculty supported a strike and student walkout.
Somebody is finally taking the issue seriously.
And the really amazing news: it all worked, and university president Tim Wolfe has resigned. So it only takes a couple of months of strong protests and a threat to the football season to achieve victory.
The University of Iowa has some serious dissatisfaction with their recently appointed president. Maybe they need to get the support of the football team to get rid of the rascal.
The winners of the World Fantasy Award for 2015 have just been announced, so if you’re looking for interesting reading, there you go.
The winners are given that hideous statuette to the right, a bust of HP Lovecraft. Now we’re all winners, because it has just been announced that the caricature of the goggle-eyed racist will not be handed out in the future — winners in 2016 will get something that they won’t tuck out of sight and turn towards the wall (and here’s another take on the controversy over HP).
I’ve been a big fan of the Cthulhu mythos, but I agree with this change — if it were a statuette of Cthulhu, I would approve, but a statuette of HP Lovecraft the man is honoring the wrong thing, not the creation, but the horrible complicated twisted creator.
Look at the wonderful example the chief of police of Austin has set, in the case of a jaywalker manhandled by the police.
She was lucky. So, so lucky. If they hadn’t been such good police officers, they would have raped her. For jaywalking.
I am so filled with confidence in the Austin police. They won’t rape jaywalkers! Does anyone have any cookies we can send to them?
I tell you, there are wretched hateful people everywhere, even in the Empire of Nice that we call Minnesota. A woman of apparently, from her name, German extraction (“Burchard-Risch” — how totally un-American) got so irate at a woman speaking Swahili (“Asma Jama”. Is that less American than “Burchard-Risch”? Shouldn’t only people with good Lakota names like “Winona” or “Wasechun Tashunka” have the right to complain?*) in an Applebee’s that she got up and smashed a glass beer mug across her face, lacerating her horribly.
Asma Jama was there with her children having an ordinary conversation, when Burchard-Risch irrationally lost her temper at hearing a conversation that she had no part in, in a language she didn’t understand, and thought that was sufficient to cuss out the Jama family, throw a drink at them, and then violently strike her. Unbelievable. How can people have that degree of xenophobia? I wonder if Burchard-Risch is a Trump supporter.
There is now a fundraiser to cover Jama’s medical expenses. Be warned: front and center at that link is a photo of Jama’s seriously cut up face.
*Except, of course, that the Lakota culture of courtesy would mean they wouldn’t get up to smack around someone for the crime of speaking that foreign tongue, English. Or excuse me, American.
This is a thread dedicated to discussion of race issues in the US. Tony and rq are the curators, and they will be posting news and links here. Please feel free to add to the conversation, but this is not the place for argument; increase the information, not the conflict.
What are you doing reading me about that incident? Go read Sikivu Hutchinson.
Whenever there’s a black girl on a school campus wielding a dangerous weapon like a cell phone, white macho can always be counted on to come to civilization’s rescue with the full force of fascist violence. These days, unarmed black children rank higher than mass murderers with semi-automatic weapons as public enemy number one on American school campuses.
Now there’s an interesting contrast. We can ban cell phones, but we are somehow incapable of regulating those semi-automatic weapons even a teensy-tiny bit. A black girl takes out a cell phone and a policeman slams her to the floor and beats her up, a white boy murders nine people and the police take him to Burger King. It’s almost as if we aren’t seeing appropriate responses to the danger or severity of the crime, but instead the police are reacting to the color of their skin.
This retracted article is proof that there is a diversity crisis in Silicon Valley.
Forbes has removed a contributor piece titled “There Is No Diversity Crisis in Silicon Valley” after being hit with a barrage of criticism from readers, including many leading the tech industry’s movement to hire more women, Hispanics and African-Americans. The article, authored by journalist Brian S. Hall, argued that the healthy revenue streams and stock prices of companies like Apple, Google and Facebook were proof that the tech industry is doing well and has no reason to go out of its way to include more women or underrepresented minorities.
There is no crisis at all in Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley is doing absolutely gangbusters!Hall wrote, according to a cached version of the post.This is not a crisis. Silicon Valley is swimming in money and in success.
Join me in a journey to the gibbering throat of conspiratorial madness: a Breitbart article on Ahmed Mohamed and Irving, Texas.
This story isn’t just the usual whine that the “clock” (it’s now always in quotes — because although it was actually a clock in a pencil box cannibalized from an old Radio Shack clock, that is only its outward seeming, and in truth, it was a portent heralding the rising of an ancient evil) was not really an “invention”, therefore Mohamed was a liar. No, that was a circuit board of destruction!!!
It appears, the “clock” Mohamed brought to school this week was not the first of his circuit boards to look ominously like an improvised explosive device trigger. In fact, a photograph of one circulated by the Dallas Morning News was virtually indistinguishable from a circuit board used in a commercially available device used to train law enforcement and military personnel regarding how to identify IEDs.
