Once again...anything from the "to listen to" queue that has a beat may be linked below.
This is not really a post. This has not really seemed like a day. I've been in the most unpleasant part of a glyphosate reaction. It mixes badly with a heat wave. All I've really wanted to do all day has been lie down and think of ways to produce these sensations in people who don't feel them as simple glyphosate reactions.
Glyphosate Awareness
It's unfortunate that the Supreme Court upheld restrictions on the liability of corporations that sell poisons. Or is it? People who honestly didn't know glyphosate was making them ill filed their suits ten years ago. The ones still filing today are likely to be bitter clingers,
Time to consider the liability of people who have sprayed poison and thereby harmed other people. We are no longer talking about old farm laborers with cancer. We are talking about people who've deliberately ignored warnings and claimed they had a "right to spray." As those people react to blood tests suggesting they may indeed have cancer, they deserve to be hit with lawsuits from the neighbors they've harmed. They deserve to go into chemo knowing that people who know them are thinking, "If cancer must happen it couldn't happen to a more deserving blighter. I hope he swells up so that he can't even see his feet. I hope all the relatives of anyone put in the same hospital room with him complain because he's constantly covered in blood-flecked froth." They deserve to know that when they come out of the hospital their neighbors are going to own their homes and they should go straight to a homeless shelter, from which they can send the address if anyone feels charitable enough to send any of their personal paraphernalia through the mail.
Goops and How Not to Be Them
Predictably, someone answered ex-President Obama's interview with "Are the slave owners in the room with us now?" Meaning, of course, that although Islam teaches that freeing slaves is a righteous act every Muslim should do, Islam does not actually forbid some people trafficking in slaves in the first place. The usual argument. "Well, you know these people are generally a bit retarded and incompetent--some of them may have been kidnapped for ransom but most of them sold themselves, or their families sold them, so that someone could teach them how to work, which is the best thing for them really," and although many of the Arab countries have officially outlawed slavery, that is still what people know their "guest workers" are there for. Not to be exposed to the roots of their faith tradition.To be beaten and raped and trafficked around and treated worse than the "honest dust" of the earth. In a few parts of Africa people can actually be led out in chains and sold at auction.
Right. But I want to say this as a legally White person. We personally, we Anglo-Americans, have never owned a slave. (Maybe a follower who enjoyed being talked to and treated like one, maybe a college student who reenacted a slave auction as a fundraiser, but that's different. Those people were having fun.) Likely we have never even practiced race discrimination. We think segregation was stupid. We've corrected clerks who turned to us first when someone who looked different had been waiting first. We may have called people to tell them why they ought to hire our Adult Ed students. Some White people who may be reading this have legally Black grandchildren. And we want to help the young Black Americans making all the noise these days outgrow socialism, too. We think "reparations" for bygone generations is pretty stupid, especially when, if people trace their ancestors, some of them are going to come to a handful of Black and/or indigenous Americans who owned English-born slaves. But we would absolutely love to have dinner with Thomas Sowell or share a work space with Tim Scott. We voted for Ben Carson, would have voted for Condoleezza Rice, will be voting for Tim Scott if he ever seeks a promotion...
And. Still. Even though some of the "microtraumas" that perturb the young are "micro" indeed. Even though, considering a different minority pressure group, we think it would be good sadistic fun to watch today's college freshmen explain to Hillary Rodham Clinton exactly how having to ask for access to the computer with the voice recognition program (you know, because the older student working in the library didn't remember that they were the ones with the micro-disabilities) hurt them. Even though the idea of celebrating how slowly the news reached Texas in the 1860s would have seemed silly even if it hadn't been sponsored by Joe Biden.
Can we please, please, take a little time off from ego-defending and consider one way we personally can show good will to some member of some minority group today? Special good will, to help them see what's missing in what they've heard about White Americans being everyone else's enemies?
Music
War, the band.
Steely Dan.
Aukai.
Headstones.
Matthew Halsall.
The Mamas and the Papas.
Robert Gromotka.
Luke Brogden.
Yeahman.
Frenic.
Boogie Belgique.
Neil Young.
Emancipator.
Santana.
Ringo Starr.
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