Saturday Old Music

Section 25, Inspiration

I don’t know that it’s old school, but it sure is old. Even older than usual for me.

Friday Music

The Go-Betweens, Spring Rain

I don’t really know what to say about the clothes.

Palestinian Children

What we pay our taxes for.

(Video via Of Death and Conscience: All Things Related.)

(Maps via Kai’s place.)

Thoughts and Prayers

Thoughts and prayers are with everyone affected by the terrible disasters in Myanmar and China.

1 Year Blogiversary

Somehow it’s been a year already. Hey, I can have a “best of” retrospective, so I won’t have to write anything for … well, a couple of days, at least!

I Don’t Know

I don’t know if I’ve said all I have to say, or what.

But

But I’m still not blogging.  I want to make that clear!

Deja Vu (Rev. Wright Part 18)

Tired of reading pathetic warmongering gibberish under the “progressive” label? Check out the “America-Hating Black Preacher” series of comic strips at CANDORVILLE. Via Too Sense.

Repost: Whitosphere’s Ignorance Isn’t Hillary’s Bliss

From the Francis L. Holland Blog. (After posting this at MyDD, Francis was threatened with some kind of sanction there, apparently for using the word “whitosphere” in his post title—check the link for more info. I’ve lost count of how many times Francis has been banned from large white blogs.*) Here’s the post:

According to a search of Washington Post archives, the Washington Post has never once mentioned MyDD by name. By comparison, that same newspaper carried two articles this weekend about the political efforts of the afrosphere and the AfroSpear bloggers, here and here. This might give readers some sense of where the action is right now. And some of those efforts began as in opposition to the policies of MyDD.

It is raging online. A growing cadre of young black activists is using the Internet in an attempt to eclipse traditional civil rights organizations such as the NAACP and hit the refresh button on the civil rights movement. Bloggers with names such as the Cruel Secretary, and blogs called What About Our Daughters? and the African American Political Pundit, have railed against groups in the “black-o-sphere,” saying they do not understand young black Americans, are behind the times and react too slowly to incidents involving the younger generation.

The leaders of the fledgling movement — Van Jones and James Rucker of ColorOfChange.org — may not be familiar to many, but their work is. They circulated a letter and a petition last week promising that the Democrats will pay a “political price” if they overturn the will of black and young voters and choose Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y) as the party’s nominee over Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.). Washington Post, May 4, 2008

Even though Black people constitute twenty percent of Democratic Party voters and twenty percent of the delegates to the Democratic National Convention, still color-aroused ideation tells white bloggers that Black voters’ real opinions, beliefs and desires are not worth researching or discussing. In truth, most white-skinned bloggers couldn’t care less about what goes on at afrosphere blogs (most whites bloggers don’t read or link to Black blogs), and so white bloggers have no idea what Black bloggers are thinking.

Most white bloggers are as likely to be found at a Black blog as they are to visit a Black church on Sunday morning. White bloggers get most of their information about Black people from the same MSM white-news media for which the blogosphere was meant to be an alternative.

Everyone acknowledges that Obama wouldn’t be leading the delegate race and the popular vote without Black votes along with the white ones. And yet only two of the fifty blogs on the MyDD “Blogroll” is an afrosphere blog. If you include the “State Blogs”, of which there are more than fifty, then about 2% of the blogs two which MyDD is linked are Black blogs.

If you want to hide something from white progressive bloggers, then hide it online, at a Black blog. Just as Hillary Clinton has to HOPE that Blacks’ opinions won’t matter in 2008, since 90% of Blacks oppose her, so white bloggers at MyDD have to HOPE that their ignorance of the Black blog world will not put them at a disadvantage as they try to win the Democratic presidential nomination from a Democratic electorate that is twenty percent Black.

How does this effect white politicians and bloggers? If whitosphere blogs and the Clinton campaign were not so white-self-referential, then they would have realized much earlier the damage that the Clinton campaign was doing to itself in the Black community. While white bloggers at MyDD continue to argue that Obama is just as much at fault for color-arousing the campaign as is Clinton, this is an argument directed toward white people.

If you read Black blogs, you realize that this whitosphere argument has no chance whatsoever of winning over Black voters, now or in the General Election. In fact, the more times the argument is reasserted, the more determined Black people become NEVER, EVER to vote for Hillary Clinton.

The purpose of polls is to determine, as a matter of fact, what people believe as a matter of opinion. The fact that polls exist at all is reflects the fact that what people believe is at least as important in politics as what I or anyone else insists is “true.” And that’s where white pseudo-progressive bloggers are missing the boat. They don’t care what 20% of the Democratic electorate believes, and they HOPE that their ignorance won’t matter. But in political races decided by as little as 700 votes, ignorance is never bliss on Election Day.

The author is editor of the American Journal of Color Arousal (AMJCA) and the Truth About McCain blog.

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*If MyDD isn’t whitospheric, I don’t know what is. But the problem isn’t how they identify. I think the problem is that they want to say they represent everybody. Which sounds too transparently false to worry about except [EDIT: sometimes] they only need to convince each other.

Feliz Cinco de Mayo

In this famous piece of protest art, we see imperialism (and a would-be Emperor, Maximilian I) suffering a setback at the hands of Mexican troops. The artist, Edouard Manet, was not a supporter of Napoleon III, who initiated France’s 1862 invasion of Mexico and installed Maximilian as a puppet ruler. The Battle of Puebla, the first battle in which Mexican forces defeated the French invaders, took place on May 5th, 1862; Maximilian arrived in 1864 and was finally executed by Mexican Republican forces in 1867. XicanoPwr gives much more of the history, including a little-known twentieth-century episode ….

Here’s another article about the painting and the history, this time from a less mainstream source.