- Christchurch Massacre: I’d like to say “as many of you remember….”, but most people have probably forgotten the massacre of about 50 Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand by this point. In fact, most people probably remember the white boy who hit another white guy with an egg more than they remember the fact that…. well, about 50 Muslims were killed for no other reason than the fact that they were Muslim. Some white man with a bunch of guns and some massive insecurity decided to kill a bunch of presumably peaceful individuals because…. he was from Australia? He likes PewDiePie, the racist gamer? He couldn’t handle, as a white man, living in a majority-white region of the world (Australia is about 70-80% white)? He didn’t try hard at life and was mad that his whiteness didn’t automatically entitle him to being the billionaire CEO of NazisWhoPlayVideoGamesAllDay, Inc?
I don’t try to hide the fact that I practiced Islam for a few years. Not “Nation of Islam”-Islam (which I gave my opinion on in an FAQ entitled “FAQ” a few pages back), but actual Islam (the mosque I attended was very diverse…I wouldn’t say I was practicing any particular subset of Islam like “Sunni” or “Shi’ite” … just Islam). In fact, I’ve practiced all three of the major Abrahamic religions in their various forms, and in my honest opinion Islam was probably the most welcoming and peaceable of the three. The mosque I attended was the Kalamazoo Islamic Centre in Kalamazoo, MI. I had never been (and haven’t been since) in a place where so many diverse people were all equals in one room. I have fond memories of late-night dinners with the brothers there; nights where I would sit between the black student from Senegal who was teaching me Arabic, and the white retiree from Croatia who brought me dates from Saudi Arabia that he brought back from his pilgrimage, and where I’d be helping an Arabic professor from Iran and a East Asian business owner from Indonesia cut and cook some goat and veggies for the curry being made by an Indian-Pakistani mechanic. It was easily the most inclusive environment I have ever been in. Was it perfect? No. One of my more disappointing memories was when my brother from Senegal called my African-American brother (who I’ll refer to as K) a “bad brother”. It was…disappointing. K and I were great friends and he was more family to me than my actual family. He always will be. If he called me tomorrow and said “Jonathan/Talal (which was my Muslim name), things a messed up and I need your help now”, I’d drop whatever for my brother. I wouldn’t do that for the people I share a last name with, but I would do that for him. But the point is, that was nothing more than a family squabble. That was the worst thing I ever heard there. At NO POINT did I ever hear “We must all rise and kill these whites!” or “Death to the Christians!” during my time at KIC, or in my time communicating with any other Muslim community in any other place I’ve lived. And it breaks my heart every time Muslims have to pay (far too often with their lives) for the few fanatics that practice a corruption of an otherwise tolerant and peaceful religion. All religions/philosophies have violent fanatics in their ranks, but it seems like the world only focuses on radical Islam and paints the entirety of the religion as being extreme. I’m an atheist/5%er at the end of the day, but if someone made me chose between the 3 major Abrahamic religions, I’d choose Islam all day. It was easily the most inclusive of any religion I’ve been a part of. My time at KIC was a period of time where I experienced a sense of acceptance and community that I hadn’t experienced in any other house of worship of any religion before, during, or since.
So, I admit, my personal experience with Islam shapes my reaction to the massacre at Christchurch. As I said, it breaks my heart. It took a lot for me to not shed a few tears in front of some people who were in the same room. It breaks my heart every time I hear about another “war on Islam” or some such, where hundreds (if not thousands) of people are injured and/or killed simply because they aren’t white Christians. White Nationalism is a problem. ANY ethnocentric nationalism is a problem. This shit has to stop.
And right now, I’m going to stop on this particular topic, because I could go on for another 700+ words. But I will end by saying: Donald Trump is wrong to say white nationalism is just a few people, and it’s no big deal. He only says that because he benefits from it. If his support base was majority ISIS, he would be saying “ISIS is just a few people, and it’s no big deal”. He’s an opportunist with no spine. I try to keep my language mostly clean on this blog, but (to quote the Nipsey Hussle/YG song) fuck Donald Trump.
I also want to say: it really makes me sad that things like this can happen and it’s out of the news cycle in a few days. We really have become pathetic, apathetic, and utterly “drivable”/distractible … as a species. The second biggest tragedy of this event is that the kid who threw an egg at a guy will probably be the most remembered event of this whole tragedy because memes are more important than reality.
As an aside, I hear far too often the phrase “We need comedy now because things are so rough/scary/heavy/whatever and we need to laugh!”. No. We need to take all of this very seriously and stop hiding behind escapist humour. We don’t need more good political humourists, we need more good politicians and public servants. We also don’t need more prayers for change, we need actual action for change.
2)The Mueller Report: I, personally, wasn’t expecting to hear “WE GOT HIM!” when the dust settled and the special council finished the report. We’re talking about some Russian internet trolls. Did anyone really think there was going to be a direct link between Donald Trump and some guys/gals doing troll stuff on their computers in Russia? As much as I dislike Donald Trump, I find it hard to believe that there would/could be any direct link between him and some people posting memes from Russia. At the end of the day, no one who believed the “fake news” the Russian trolls posted was voting for Hilary anyway. Do any of you reading this blog really think thousands of people were sitting there on Facebook thinking “Well, I WAS going to vote for Hilary, but then I was swayed by a meme (but not an actual news report or police report) saying she was running an underground child sex ring out of a pizza shop….so I voted for Trump”? People who voted for Trump were, by and large, going to vote for Trump regardless of Russian trolls. These are the same people who were saying Trump represented their Christian values AFTER they heard him say he would grab women by their…. well…you know what he said. I won’t say it here because it makes me sick. The same people who said he’d be a good president because he was a good businessman…who filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy multiple times.
I think it's kind of sad the media put so much time into covering this investigation while giving real tragedies like a day or two of coverage before being like "50 or 200 or however many people were massacred! There's active slave trades going on in modern society! But whatev's! Now, back to the exact same stuff we've been saying about the Meuller Report for the last 2 years!".
3)Green New Deal: As I said in my post about AOC’s “70 % marginal tax on income greater than $10mill/yr”, I’m not sold on the Green New Deal. It’s too vague. It’s too unrealistic. It assumes that the mass production technology needed to make such a quantum leap is extant AND affordable (note: it isn’t). The Green New Deal she proposes only helps rich people. Which is ironic, since it’s supposed to help poor people. Electric cars aren’t particularly affordable. Neither is fixing them. Making them mandatory won’t make them magically more affordable. I’m still not 100% sure what the Democrats are trying to do with this Green New Deal, but from what I can tell…. it’s a Christmas list written by a 5-year-old: a bunch of unrealistic wishes. Honestly, between Trump and AOC, I’ve pretty much written American politics off as hopeless. We’re truly betrodden to bipartisan, polarized politics. I don’t know if the rest of the world is any better, but as an American… right now, it’s really disappointing to be an American (to put it lightly). It’s really hard to look at pictures of people getting paid over $150,000 per year to govern us as they decide our fate by…. Uhhhh… showing pictures of Ronald Regan riding a dinosaur while shooting a machine gun (Republican), or showing a slide consisting of three words with the 1st letters of each word underlined like it’s a 9th grade history class power point presentation done at the last minute (Democrats).
It’s sad to see “our nation’s future” be treated as the impetus for what amounts to a gang war. Both sides are completely illogical, running off of pure emotion. Is climate change a problem? Of course. But neither “everyone: get married and have babies!” nor “build a giant fleet of electric busses and cars and subways and boats and planes and use zero petrol-fuels!” are realistic ways to combat the problem. There has to be a transition. In intuitive mathematical terms, if we think of the set of possible solutions to climate change as the set [0,1] on the Real Number line, there exists an open set between the two extremes wherein an infinite number of solutions exist. Obviously, something closer to “use only alternative fuels, no one is allowed to reproduce, and live 100% sustainable lives” is preferable to “use as much gas as possible, make as many babies as possible, and live 100% unsustainably”, but the point I’m trying to make is… there are more realistic solutions than the extremes.
4) RIP Nipsey Hissle: It was sad to hear Nipsey got gunned down. Nipsey is one of those people who was really doing his utmost to improve the lives of others despite his own troubled upbringing and life. He’s a prime example of why I say things like “I don’t judge someone who has a gang affiliation in their past”. He moved on from that. He became something more positive. He started businesses that employed people from his neighbourhood living in poverty. He was working with the city Los Angeles to find a solution to gang problems. He wasn’t just a reformed Crip; he was a man trying to reform others. I’ve been a fan of his music since the first Marathon mixtape, and I’ve been a fan of the man behind the music for just as long. Rest in Palaces, G.O.D...
5) Easter Massacre in Sri Lanka: Basically, my reaction to this is the same as my reaction to the Christchurch massacre. Too many people died because a few ethno-supremacists couldn’t deal with the fact that the world is a diverse and complicated place, and so they decided they had to resort to what I’ll call “massacre-tactics”. I’ll never understand what makes someone/some group make the jump from “I don’t like this situation” to “Well, I guess I have to kill hundreds or thousands of people…”. I honestly just can’t wrap my head around the mentality that people who perpetuate these crimes against humanity have.
While I’m all about privacy and freedom at just about every level…. sometimes I wish there was a microchip in everybody’s heads that would alert authorities world-wide when someone was planning an attack like this, or like Christchurch or like Columbine or like... there’s just too many to list…
6) Surprise! Some police are still racist: I’m getting so sick and tired of having to watch videos of black kids getting shot by cops for sitting in a car (Stephanie Washington at Yale) or getting their face bashed into the ground for picking up a cell phone (a young man named DeLucca in Florida) while people like psychopathic-ass Dylan Roof get a police-chauffeured ride for a hamburger after being peacefully detained.
I’ll never say “ALL police are racist!”, because a lot of police are good people doing a really, really tough job that relies on instinct and in-the-moment decision making. But when instinct and in-the-moment decision making are informed by racial prejudice, you get…. Well, you get incidents like these and the thousands of other instances (both covered and not covered by media) that have occurred through-out the decades. Sometimes I wish there was a microchip inside of everybody’s heads that would…well, you know…
I just feel like there has to be a better process for vetting racists applying for policing jobs, so all those good cops just upholding the law don’t have to deal with the “all cops are racist!” blowback they face because of all the dirt the racist cops get into.
7)Notre Dame: I was sad to hear about Notre Dame burning (mostly) down. It's a beautiful piece of architecture. I got a chance to visit in 1997 when the French Clubs of the 2 Portage (MI) high schools did their biannual French Trip. We stayed in Paris for a few days (most of the trip was actually at a home-stay in Nice, which I thought was a nicer city than Paris, to be honest), and saw a lot of the "tourist checklist" sights. I'm not particularly partial to touristy sights (e.g.; I didn't bother going up the Eiffel Tower), but Notre Dame was definitely one I'm glad I got to see. It really is... immense, well made.....just impressive all around. I put it up there with architectural wonders like the Pyramids in Egypt, or the Great Wall in China (neither of which I've seen...yet).
I do think President Macron (who I, in general, like from what I know of him) is being a bit ambitious when he says he wants to reconstruct Notre Dame in 5 years, but hey...if he can get it done, while dealing with the other internal issues (e.g.; les gilets jaunes) he's dealing with, more power to him and his crew.
I do think White House SpaceFiller Trump shouldn't be sending funds for the Notre Dame rebuild when he's not funding things like...clean drinking water in Flint, hurricane relief in Puerto Rico and the American South East, rampant murders (both of the mass and individual type), and other basic "living condition" issues Americans are dealing with. I get that Trump's a Euro-centric racist (who, somewhat ironically, is disliked by an overwhelmingly large number of Europeans*), but you can't go trim your neighbour's hedges when your own kitchen is on fire.
8)Anti-Abortion Bills Being Passed: It's....dismaying that Missouri, Georgia, and Alabama are passing bills with (in my opinion) unreasonable limits on abortion access. I'm adamantly pro-choice, and I certainly don't think a handful of people (the [edit: VAST] majority of them men) in positions of power should be making these decisions for millions of women. I think it's shameful that supposed representatives of all people are only representing the desires a distinct minority of people in their respective states and, potentially, the country. This could end up being a 9000 word section in this post. But what it comes down to is...it's not a politician's job to limit freedom of choice (and certainly not under the guise of servitude to some imaginary floaty-in-the sky "deity"). It's shameful our country is slipping back, deeper and deeper, into pre-scientific, superstitious lawmaking. I'll probably add more to this particular section of this post after the current term ends, but for now.... I'll leave it at: some politicians have no business being politicians.
-I'd like to add/say that, personally, I don't think that RoeVs.Wade will get overturned. I don't think the SCotUS is that stupid. You alienate some of the most populated states in the country by doing that. You risk the wrath of too many millions of people. I'm not saying it's impossible that the SCotUS won't make a huge error in judgement (and a fundamentally un-American decision) and try their best to fight RVS.W...never discount idiocy...but I just don't see them saying "It's worth it to piss off the majority of the population".
9) Robert F. Smith: Shout out to Robert F.. Smith for pledging to pay the student loan debt of the ENTIRE class of 2019 at Morehouse College! Some of the best, most positive news I've heard in a while. I mean, I'm sure the classes of 2018 and 2020 are kind of disappointed right about now, but from an outsider's point of view...this is great. Black students have proportionally higher student loan debt than white students. I feel like that plays a huge part in the way the post-degree job market shapes up year by year. When you have a ridiculously large amount of debt staring you in the face, you're not thinking "grad school" or "wait for the best opportunity", you're thinking "I need to pay this off NOW before that interest really starts compounding". Add in the inherent racial bias in hiring practices, and things can be pretty bleak. And so when someone like Robert F. Smith steps in and does this kind of thing, it opens up some doors. I hope these youngsters make the most of this generosity and choose grad school and/or take the time to get the best possible job that can make the most positive impact on the broadest swath of society. I hope they can capitalize off of this and get some more black faces in those truly influential high places. I just think this is amazing. Thank you Robert F. Smith. You're a true hero.
I'm sure I'll add more to this post soon...but I'm also working on some new math research and some updates to old projects (e.g.; I recently discovered the concept of the "super-ellipse", which seems very relevant to what I'm doing ).
*I always thought it was funny how Euro-centric white nationalists in America (especially) are almost always overwhelmingly disliked by Europeans. Like, for instance, Dick Spenser, or whatever that guy's name is. He had/has a group called "Europa Identity"...yet he wasn't/isn't even allowed in most European countries. It's like... how are you going to call your racist group "Europa Identity" when Europe doesn't even like you or identify with you? Last I checked, Trump had like a 9% approval rating in France and a 10% approval rating in Germany. I LOL'd a lot when I saw that.