Angel Mario Vega, a student at Minnesota State University Moorhead, tried a too-typical stunt: he got a couple of young women (one of them under age) disgustingly drunk, literally carried one of them to his dorm room, set up a camera, and filmed himself raping her. Oh, and of course he bragged to his buddies about it and invited them to come watch. Stupid and a rapist, that usual sweet combination.
But then something interesting happened.
It’s not a great morning. The sun is shining, I got a lot done yesterday, I got a good night’s sleep, and my class notes for tomorrow are all in order, so I get to just kick back and relax today, but it’s still not a good day. I started it by catching up on my email.
If you ever find yourself using that line, thinking it excuses you from accusations of racism, stop. Just stop. Think about what you are doing: you are taking a diverse group of people, categorizing them by the color of their skin, and are about to make a sweeping generalization about all of them.
You know what that is? It’s racism.
The old Warner Bros. cartoons have become increasingly painful to watch — so much racism, so much sexism. So what do you do? Throw the old classics in the trash? Pretend entertainment has always been fair and egalitarian? Warner Bros. is preceding the old cartoons with a disclaimer.
The cartoons you are about to see are products of their time. They may depict some of the ethnic and racial prejudices that were common in American society. These depictions were wrong then and are wrong today. While the following does not represent the Warner Bros. view of today’s society, these cartoons are being presented as they were originally created, because to do otherwise would be the same as claiming these prejudices never existed.
That’s an appropriate response, but I think I’d still rather not watch some of those efforts from the 1940s at all.
Why are the police losing face all over the place, but especially in Ferguson? Because they despise the communities in which they work, and go out of their way to express their contempt. By finding new uses for police dogs, for instance.
I don’t approve of homeschooling. I understand how sometimes, the local school is in a state of intellectual collapse and it becomes necessary (although I’d rather the state realized it has an obligation to maintain school quality in all districts), but too often it’s because parents demand a bizarre ideological purity — in particular, because they don’t want their kids exposed to liberal ideas like diversity and tolerance.
Which leads to…
Fresh off his stupid remarks about atheists, Kevin Sorbo has now made stupid remarks about the black people — excuse me, animals
— of Ferguson.
When you complain that people want all of their families to stand up for the rights, consider this photo below the fold: people brought their children to the lynching of Lige Daniels in 1920. What principle were they fighting for?
It’s this: while demanding empathy for the dangerous job of a policeman in an editorial in the Washington Post, a cop explains what he gets to do, with a complete lack of empathy for the citizen’s position.
Even though it might sound harsh and impolitic, here is the bottom line: if you don’t want to get shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a baton or thrown to the ground, just do what I tell you. Don’t argue with me, don’t call me names, don’t tell me that I can’t stop you, don’t say I’m a racist pig, don’t threaten that you’ll sue me and take away my badge. Don’t scream at me that you pay my salary, and don’t even think of aggressively walking towards me. Most field stops are complete in minutes. How difficult is it to cooperate for that long?
We greet the day with a heartwarming scene from the Midwest.
Scott Olson of @GettyImages
