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Polk County Sheriff’s Office, in Florida — where Hurricane Irma is about to strike — just sent out the following tweet yesterday:

If you go to a shelter for #Irma and you have a warrant, we'll gladly escort you to the safe and secure shelter called the Polk County Jail https://t.co/Qj5GX9XQBi

— Polk County Sheriff 🚔 Grady Judd (@PolkCoSheriff) September 6, 2017

As if to underline this, it also sent this as a follow-up:

If you have a warrant, turn yourself in to the jail – it's a secure shelter https://t.co/UFNGNafJh8

— Polk County Sheriff 🚔 Grady Judd (@PolkCoSheriff) September 6, 2017

So, here’s the deal.  Warrants aren’t just given for rapists and murderers. In Florida, the vast majority seem to be given for “unresolved traffic tickets, failure to appear in court, and unpaid court fees.”

And they can be common. We don’t know how many are in Polk County, last I checked, but Ferguson, for example, infamously had 21,000 people, and 16,000 outstanding warrants. Now, warrants aren’t necessarily issued to people in the city; they’re issued to anyone committing a violation while in Ferguson. But it’s probably safe to assume that the majority of those outstanding warrants are from Ferguson residents. And that’s just one location.

So let me get this straight: Polk County residents devastated by the hurricane will be afraid of going to a shelter because they’ll be taken to jail? For outstanding warrants on traffic tickets?  I can think of few things worse than to be locked up in jail for a traffic ticket while you’re wondering who is alive, what you’ve lost, how bad the floodwaters are, and trying to tell your family you’re OK.

Plus, jails have a terrible track record on this. One of the worst examples is in Hurricane Katrina, where prisoners were not evacuated until being in chest-deep water for four entire days. Also, many prisoners and guards who experienced Hurricane Harvey claim that the conditions were horrific (although the claims are disputed by higher officials). So not only do you not have access to what’s going on outside in the most stressful time in your life, and not only can your family not contact you, but you may also be trapped in horrific conditions.

This is not right. Although I can understand people being apprehensive about those with violent crimes under their belt being in a shelter with children, this action will also jail people guilty of misdemeanors, deterring them from seeking shelter and possibly causing their deaths.

The Daily Beast actually tracked down the spokesperson for this policy, and got the following information:

 “While we are checking, if we see someone with an active warrant we have to place them under arrest,” she added. She didn’t seem persuaded by the criticism that this would discourage people from showing up in the first place. “That is a risk a person would run,” Horstman said. “I think it is much safer to be in our jail than to expose yourself to a Category 5 storm. You are using the phrase, ‘people who are scared to go to jail.’ If you have a warrant, legally you should be in jail. You should turn yourself in and be safe in our jail rather than risk your life waiting out a storm.”

Sheriff Grady Judd himself weighed in, in the video below:

If you have an outstanding warrant, we’re going to shelter you safely…in the county jail because we have a legal obligation to execute the warrant. We gave you four or five days’ warning. If you have one of those minor outstanding warrants, you got choices. The choices are: Go to booking, take care of it, get out, and then you can come to the shelter. The number two thing is, your sign is “We warned you we were looking for people with warrants at the shelter. So we gave you a warning. You can make other arrangements if you don’t want to turn in, and still stay safe. Never before did I think that I’d be beat up for giving people a warning and keeping people safe, but hey — that’s OK. We want the people of this county, this community, and the state of Florida to know: You’re going to be safe in our shelters.

By the way, when it comes to indicating that those with warrants are obligated to go to jail, Grady either does not know the truth, or is lying. The Atlantic took the question to an outraged University of South Carolina law professor named Seth Stoughton, who said that “no such legal obligation exists—officers can use their own discretion.”

Furthermore, checking for warrants may not even be legal:

Stoughton also expressed skepticism that officers can lawfully check whether evacuees in a shelter have outstanding warrants. Every state allows officers to demand identification during a traffic stop, he explained. Some states, including Florida, also have “stop-and-identify” laws that allow officers to demand identification when someone is walking along the street. But to demand identification, the stop itself must be lawful, meaning the officer has a “reasonable suspicion of criminality,” Stoughton said. “When someone shows up to a shelter, they’re not being lawfully detained by police,” he added.

And apparently the sheriff has gotten in trouble with this kind of cruelty before, leading me to suspect that people may not be safe in his jails. As Newsweek Reports:

The Southern Poverty Law Center sued Judd’s office in federal court in 2012 for “regularly subjecting children held at the county’s adult jail to abuse, neglect and violence—including the placement of children in a cage for punishment,” according to the nonprofit. While one federal judge overseeing the case criticized Judd in 2013 for using pepper spray against juveniles, another federal judge ruled in favor of Judd in 2015 and threw out the suit, the Orlando Sentinel reported.

Nor is this policy standard in these circumstances. As The Atlantic reports:

Some counties in Irma’s danger zone ruled out stringent measures regarding which residents are allowed into shelters. A Palm Beach County representative said that evacuees only need to show proof of residency to enter the county’s shelters when they open on Friday. Martha Ann Kneiss, a spokeswoman for the Martin County Board of Supervisors, told me that residents on sex-offender registries will be allowed in emergency shelters there, but that they would be kept separated from others. Officials in Broward and Miami-Dade counties, two of Florida’s largest jurisdictions, did not respond to requests for comment.

So, lemme get this straight. You’re going to take people at the most vulnerable times in their lives and put them in jail for traffic tickets based on warrants that, in many cases, they may not even know they have until they are arrested.

They won’t be able to check on their homes or possessions. They won’t be able to check on their kids, and their kids won’t be able to check up on them. They won’t be able to tell you they’re OK. During the worst time to be in jail, where you have no access to the outside world and those who don’t know you’re there have access to you — just before a frickin’ Category V Hurricane — you’re going to be thrown into jail for a traffic ticket, separated from your children that you brought to the shelter. Or, you’ll stay holed up at home, keeping your family together and potentially killing them.

And the sheriff’s office does not have to do this. Other counties are not doing it. It might even be illegal. Yet he’s looking the country in the face with a smirk and saying, “That’s just the way it is.”

So, I did some research on what we can do about it, and after calling around, this is what I found:

You can call the office at: 863-298-6200, and request to be transferred to someone who responds to media inquiries. Urge them to stop this. I did it — and they may give you the run-around and say it’s what they have to do. It’s not. They’re lying.

Their office hours are on Friday,  from 8-5 EDT.

Thanks for reading.

Now pick up the phone.

PS: I want to thank all 34 of the patrons who support blog posts like these — it’s a pleasure to work with you.

I don’t know whether you should punch neo-Nazis or not outside of immediate physical self-defense, but I’m a lot angrier at the people who say you shouldn’t than the people who say you should, even if I can’t quite jump on the hard “should” bandwagon. Because the people arguing hard you shouldn’t — it sounds like a dog whistle indicating that they don’t understand how grave and serious the situation is. The people who think you should…I really hate hurting people. Do we HAVE to hurt people? I’m not sure we’re necessarily there yet. By “I’m not sure” I don’t mean that we’re definitely not there. I mean “I’m not sure.”

Neo-Nazis are so good at doublespeak and covering up that I don’t know how many of them there are, how many undercover enablers they have, or how quickly they could take over the country. So they likely pose a real threat, but I’m not sure how serious the immediate threat is. I think that some can be fought with reason and friendship in some cases, because people have actually done that, but I also know that a technique many have is to convince you that you can defeat them on an open battle of ideas when you actually can’t, so I’m not sure that’s always the best method. Also, it’s cruel to tell someone to make nice to someone who is abusing them, and I don’t think anyone should be encouraged to do that, as a matter of principle.

So if talking doesn’t necessarily work or is not necessarily advisable, there’s violence. But first…what’s the threat? The actual violent threat? Can we effectively fight against armed militias? Most liberals don’t believe in guns, it seems, and those that do…aren’t equipped, necessarily, to fight armed militias. And we could try to catch up, but is that a winning strategy? Would that start an arms race? Is that a necessary evil? Or will that accelerate violent actions by neo-Nazis? If we open with violence, won’t neo-Nazis be more violent back?. I don’t know if we have the power to win or not, if that is the case, because I don’t know how powerful neo-Nazis are, how many enablers they have, or how many followers they have. If we fight them, will we squelch them? Or will we just send them deeper into hiding and growing, preparing for the next attack? This is especially a concern in the age of Trump.

Trump uses violence to get his way. He incites violence, on purpose, to separate people and invigorate his base. He is good at this. It’s how he won. It is, incidentally, largely how his buddy Putin basically got a dictatorship in Russia — setting people to war on social justice issues while he attends to his agenda.

There’s also the troubling issue of neo-Nazis and white supremacists being the actual instigators of violence. Many on the left say that they are actively encouraging violence on their side, and that antifa (who is a distinct group, not just people against fascists — let’s be honest) is protecting people who have been attacked. If that’s the case, then I fully support self-defense. I don’t know how often that’s the case; honestly, I’ve looked at several videos, and sometimes it seems as if antifa is fighting “peaceful” protestors, and sometimes it looks like it’s the other way around.

It’s been argued to me that neo-Nazis and white supremacists are intrinsically violent, and thus fighting them is always justified. This is a strong argument, but I am not sure that violence is the best way to attack them. Not because it’s wrong in and of itself, but because I am not sure about the consequences, as discussed earlier.

I also think that the reasoning here seems a bit confusing. Are we attacking these people because they have physically assaulted us, as an immediate response? Or is the argument that, even if they haven’t, we should fight them as a matter of principle?

If it’s the latter, a secondary question regards who we should consider a Nazi. Some people seem to actually mean self-proclaimed neo-Nazis, while others expand that to white Supremacists, others to the right, and still others insist that it includes many who would be categorized by most as centrists. The difficult part of drawing the line is that we aren’t just fighting against neo-Nazis — the war gets larger when you include those who focus disproportionately on black-on-black crime and undocumented immigrants of color; the majority of white Americans still think that racism against whites is worse than racism against blacks. One of the questions I have been struggling with regarding this larger category some on the left label “white supremacists” is how closely affiliated they are with neo-Nazis. I already know that in many ways they are enablers, but are they so inseparable that we have to be violent towards them, too? And would we win?

Because let’s be honest – one of the reasons why we have laws against violence is that we don’t want people to be violent against us. At the end of the day, my main goal isn’t to kill all neo-Nazis – it’s to protect people of color, and by extension people in general. That’s honestly what I’m here for.

There is the possibility that the threat of violence, and the moral view that this violence is OK, may hush up neo-Nazis, whether it is acted on or not. However, many people of color already have the reputation of being violent, so I’m also worried about ripple effects. We already have cops who shoot first and ask questions later – if the reputation of black people being violent becomes more prominent, then how much worse would things be? I’m not sure.

I also think that, partly, there is a dichotomy here that is delicate. Some violence is justifiable, possibly, but I want to be clear about why I’m in favor of it. If I’m not in favor of the violence primarily because it was self-defense, but rather because it involved neo-Nazis (or Nazi enablers), I’d like to be concrete about that. Many seem impatient when I wait on the facts concerning whether violence by groups such as Antifa are responses to concrete instances of physical violence or instigated by them, and it seems to me that the reason many want to see them as responses is because it doesn’t matter if they are responses are not; Nazis should be punched on account of general principle, and the people holding this view are thus more prone to believe further justifications of that violence. But those further justifications are not necessary if Nazis are supposed to be punched as a matter of general principle.

But, back to the question a few paragraphs ago: If we aren’t just talking about self-admitted neo-Nazis, but also about the larger “alt-right” category, or the even larger conservative/libertarian category, or the larger conservative/libertarian/centrist category….when does the violent fight become unjustifiable? Is it possible to simply focus on neo-Nazis, or must we focus on this larger category of Americans? Because that could scare a lot of people; whether it is right or not, even if we won, it might require fighting against nearly half (if not more) of the country, and while there may be some glorious stories of martyrdom, my main goal – which is to keep innocent people from getting shot – may not actually happen on this rout. If there is a localized and specific problem, we could remove it much more easily and with more focus than something decentered and vast. While the rest may be enablers, removing what they are enabling might be the most effective route of action. This is not to say that the enablers wouldn’t be attacked, but the focus would be on neo-Nazis, and the hard task would be to expose these enablers (even to themselves) as enablers.

I’m of course well aware that the Civil Rights movement often put people through quite a bit of violence to accomplish goals. This was largely due, I think, to black people who purposefully went into harm’s way, convicting the moral consciousness of much of the United States. I am not sure that method is viable now. First, many have repeatedly shown, in my experience, an averseness to MLK, especially his practice of marching without a permit, when they condemn Black Lives Matter. Second, most people these days aren’t willing to take violence lying down; I doubt MLK’s nonviolent program would work. Although it’s true that many of MLK’s methods were unpopular at the time; still, I’m not sure how effective this violence will be under a Trump administration.

There’s also the reality that violence brings destruction. It’s true that the destruction can be constructive, in that it often gets attention from administrations and can be an attack on sources of oppression. At the same time, at some point much of what is destroyed may have to be built back up. So one thing I’m wondering is that – if we really burn things to the ground – are we willing to build things back up? Because that’s difficult. On a large scale, there’s a history of destruction of hierarchies eventually leaving a vacuum. Who would fill it? If the fight is based on violence and destruction, who is to say that the leader who arises will not be violent and destructive teirself, or that the resulting populace will not have a penchant for violence and destruction? This is not to say that destruction cannot be engaged in, but that if it is engaged in it might help to have a game plan for what happens if we actually win. This is also a very difficult project, so I wonder if it might be more advisable to just work on changing the current system than building the entire thing from scratch.

There’s also the matter of what to encourage other people to do. Encouraging people to be violent can have very dangerous consequences for the people who are convinced. I wonder if it might destroy their lives more than it helps them (getting them thrown in prison, etc. — many black people I’ve seen have said they won’t be violent, although they approve of it, because of the possibility of negative consequences to their person). So, I wonder – are there safer, effective ways to fight? I suspect there may be.

This is not to obligate someone to nonviolence. If someone must be violent to neo-Nazis, I think it should be understood that they may have a visceral reaction that somewhat justifies it, and I am always in favor of self-defense (however, I’m not necessarily sure about physical violence as the best way to fight institutionalized violence in the age of Trump, although it is certainly the best way, it seems, to fight physical real-time violence in by neo-Nazis). I also doubt that discussions as to whether a violent reaction is right or wrong in an abstract moral realm are actually productive – perhaps it would be more advisable to focus on making actions productive. We could demean violence and thus hurt the fight against neo-Nazis, or we could encourage understanding of violence without necessarily stating that it is the best strategy for future efforts. My concern is less on morality and more on the simple fight to not get harmed by neo-Nazis.

Anyways…I’m thinking about several facets of this, and will continue to. It seems a bit complicated to me, but at the end of the day my position on the issue is focused on what seems to work. And I don’t think the same thing works for every person. I’m not a great organizer, for example. But when I write, several people read. So I choose my battles based on what I’m good at. I think our fight requires a certain amount of consideration for different ways of engaging; people can and should serve where they are most needed, which it seems takes some focus, self-awareness, and a bit of courage.

The end goal, again, is not on disembodied morality, for me. It’s on what works. What will actually make things better for black individuals, and how can what I advocate contribute to that? And there may not be a perfect answer to that, but we still each have to act from our vantage points, with our abilities, based on what we know, with the flexibility to shift with an ever-changing situation.

Thank you for reading.

PS: I want to express my appreciation for all 34 of my patrons for making posts like this possible. Thank you.

I’ve been asked a zillion times, and nearly always accusingly, who I feel grateful to. I’m an atheist…so apparently, the reasoning goes, I can’t be thankful for stuff.

Sometimes it feels like an interrogation…

Where is my gratitude for all my stuff, for the experience of every day, for the beauty I see in the blessings I experience?

It’s a really strange question if you think about it, because it has such a simple, obvious answer:

I thank people.

I mean, when I sit and eat a meal, I’m not thinking about God miraculously making it appear on my plate. Because — well, let’s be real. That’s not how it happened. A lot of people put their blood, sweat, and tears into making that food possible. THEY deserve all the credit for the food that’s on my plate. Nonexistent deities doesn’t deserve one iota.

Honestly, when you think about it…it’s kinda rude to thank God for getting you to a destination safely, or getting that job, or buying that house. No, I’m not saying that you’re thinking it’s rude, Christians, and I’m not saying that YOU’RE rude when you do — at least, not in spirit. I’m sure you’re a decent person who is trying to do the right thing by being grateful to your imaginary friend. This isn’t a guilt trip…but in all fairness, I probably have the right to a guilt trip, considering all the times people have tried to guilt me for deciding not to pray.

Just take this thought at face value, and think about whether it makes sense.

In spite of the fact that the United States is 70% percent Christian, I see a major gratitude deficit among quite a few people who thank God profusely for everything they have. The people who thank God for their McDonald’s food, but argue regularly that the guy working there hardly deserves minimum wage because of the supposed uselessness of their labor…which made the burger in their hands. Those who are thankful to God for their new job, but vote in ways that snatch pay out of the hands of the teachers who busted their asses trying to get them there. The people who thank God for a great vacation, and then turn right around and demean the many people, from the garbage collector to the immigrant who wiped the hotel floors, who made such a pleasant trip possible.

Thanking God creates an enormous gratitude deficit. It gives an out for people to thank something that doesn’t exist in order to get out of thanking and recognizing the people who actually do.

When I think about it…it just seems like people are paying a LOT of respect to God that really belongs elsewhere.

It’s just strange that you’re thanking a nonexistent God instead of the people who did the actual work. For you.

The gratitude doesn’t belong to you.

It belongs to the people who are actually doing the work.

I mean…even when I was a Christian, I kinda appreciated it when people went beyond just “thank you God,” and started praising at least one person who made the food possible.

But what if we took God out altogether, and in that void, we put the people who made each of our experiences possible? Wouldn’t our sense of gratitude run over?

How much more connected to each other would we feel? How much more grateful for each other would we be? It would be a whole paradigm shift. Instead of thinking that you have a natural right to everything you have because God, and that natural right allows you to take a crap on everyone who worked hard to make what “God” has “given” you possible, you would have to realize that you have what you have because other people made it possible, and the gratitude you show belongs to them and only them.

So you see, hopefully, why I get confused when other people are confused about where atheists put their thanks.

The switch could make for a more beautiful, full, complete, connected life — and not just for you. For the people that change helps you to love and see deeper value in. For the work you have found new thankfulness in.

I dunno. Just a thought to think about.

Thanks for reading.

PS: Speaking of thanking people, I want to thank all 35 of my patrons for supporting my writing. I deeply appreciate it.

So, I was looking through my emails today and I noticed something interesting:

That tweet, by the way, was this:

https://twitter.com/KWintie/status/898976924013391873

It seems encouraging that Chelsea Clinton “liked” it — it indicates that she, and tens of thousands of others, recognizes something important.

And by the way, you should recognize this and like it as well, too. Hard.

Because the message those who, like Clinton, “like” this tweet are sending is that this frog represents very disturbing ideas of white supremacy, of far-right ideals, of extremism. It’s true that the people behind these ideas usually can’t mention these things clearly. So the frog represents a jovial, joking way to go about racism and verbal abuse. Disturbing ideas are just “trolling.” It won’t seriously defend Nazism — at least, not most people who use the frog — but it will joke about defending Nazism and focus more on the danger of what anti-Nazis believe than the danger of what Nazis believe. It hides behind its ideas with a joke, but the joke is a way for those ideas to gain currency and influence. I mean, the flag of their “ironic” imaginary state is reminscent of a Nazi battle flag. The top is a Kek flag, below, and the bottom is — well, you know. To say the similarity is obvious is an understatement.

And as their laughter camouflages a serious message. You see, after the 1960s, the racists had to go underground. And after 2012, increasingly, the anti-lgbtq people have had to go underground. So if you hold these views or want these views to have influence, you have to do it in a jovial manner that doesn’t allow your audience to seriously consider what you are saying. And, at the same time, you have to make your words and actions have influence as if they were true. So, for example, when someone “jokes” about the supposed absurdity of a specific trans woman looking for a restroom that represents her gender, the point is to get the audience to laugh while shaming the trans woman and getting the audience to see her as inferior. When someone jokes about how black people are criminals who can’t be trusted, the point is to get the audience to laugh while at the same time encouraging them to fight against groups like BLM and to encourage stronger police forces.

Laughter is a remarkably successful tool. You get away with saying, “that’s a joke” when you express your extremist views, and yet those views actually have influence in the real world. When people laugh, they don’t realize what you are doing.

That’s why we need to expose the joke. Whether the people with the frog think they are joking or not is irrelevant. If we are going to stop culture from being damaged by the joke, we need to expose the dangerous impact the “joke” has, and however humorous the frog may be intended as a symbol, its use has very real and serious consequences in the world.

And the end point of the joke, as you can see around the net, is to drown all suffering in the mirthful laughter of those who cause it. Gone is the image of the shouting Nazis — that’s been replaced by a laughter at the holocaust in many places and a mockery of those who can’t stomach it that has the potential to have nearly the same effect. Have emotions? Compassion? Empathy? Then you are a “cuck.” The thing to do is to hurt people and laugh at their pain, and as long as you laugh and get other people to laugh you are winning the culture war.

The game ends when the laugh is shown for its effects. When we see it for what it is — the latest technique in a line of bigoted actions that attempt to destroy people’s lives.

And this meme is doing that for each person that sees it.

So “like” it, will ya?

And thanks for reading.

PS: I have a Patreon, in case you want to help me do what I do.

 

What is it you want me to reconcile myself to? I was born here almost 60 years ago.

I’m not going to live another 60 years.

You’ve always told me it takes time.

It’s taken my father’s time. My mother’s time. My brother’s and my sister’s time. My niece’s and my nephew’s time.

How much time do you want for your “progress”?

— Famous agnostic James Baldwin, major and hard-working civil rights leader, especially during the days of MLK and Malcolm X (although he was active his entire life). Quote is from the mid 1980s.

He died of stomach cancer in 1987.

Last weekend, on Saturday, August 12th, the day of the Charlottesville, Virginia incident, I “celebrated” my 34th birthday.

The last birthday I ever looked forward to was thirty. Ever since then, it’s been a matter of getting older and realizing that my time is going to run out. Experientially speaking, I’ve lived more than half of my life, already — the second half is going to seem much faster than the first half. And if I’m going to be honest, this first half hasn’t seemed all that long.

My mortality has mattered less on earlier birthdays, because until I was 28, I believed in God. I thought that when I died I would spend eternity in paradise, and everything would work out perfectly. So I could plug on here, patiently, as long as I knew that after my death everything was going to be relieved in a happy-ever-after.

When I stopped believing in God, I had to give up heaven. Yes, it was more than worth it, because I also no longer had to convince people that they deserved eternity in hell. But I’m not going to pretend it wasn’t hard. At first it was difficult to figure out what my life meant — to even figure out how to get out of bed in the morning — when I found out that I would never see the heaven I had intended to spend my whole life pursuing. I would never hear a “well-done” at the end of my life, and the problems in this world wouldn’t be resolved in a Great Beyond…they would keep going long after I had lived and become a rotted corpse.

That’s a tough reality. But it also gives me a truth — I’m not working to be in the Great Beyond. I’m working for the here and now. And when I die, that’s it.

And here, I’m going to be selfish a bit because, as the old saying goes, at some level each of us have to live and die alone.

I’m not being normative here. I’m not telling you what you should or shouldn’t do.

I’m saying that something that’s been on my mind ever since I saw the cruel and harsh reminders of racism on my 34th Birthday, and then the tragedy of Trump’s defense of that racism on that day and a few days later, is that I can’t sit around waiting expectantly for something that’s never going to come.

I did that as a Christian — I spent nearly half of my projected life span waiting for a happy-ever-after that I’ll never get to experience, and that makes me angry. I’m done with that. A big part of me doesn’t want to spend the rest of my life waiting for an equality that will never happen.

“But,” you say, “that’s kinda selfish. It’s not about you. It’s about the people who came after you. Just be patient.”

Here’s the thing…

My ancestors have been saying that for hundreds of years. During the days of slavery, abolitionists were told, “Slow down. The slavery problem will take care of itself. Naturally. Just let it run its course.”

Same with voting rights, desegregation, etc. I’m not going to say that things haven’t got better…but what I saw on my 34th birthday is that we haven’t gotten nearly as far as we thought we’d get. Was all the hope worth it, if it brought us to a Donald Trump?

I know these aren’t the best questions. I’m supposed to be hopeful. But, in addition to being an atheist, I’m a skeptic about heavens and hells and utopias. Time does not guarantee that things will get better. And the other side is waiting, too, for their own utopia. Why would I think my utopia would just naturally supercede theirs? I don’t believe there’s a God. I don’t really believe that goodness has an inherent advantage, and history doesn’t indicate that it necessarily does. WE have to make it happen. And I don’t really believe in faith these days, but…try as I might, I don’t have a ton of faith in us.

Anyways…back to being selfish. Not talking about the big movement, not talking about huge political movements or grand rallies or front-page stories.

Just like two people sipping on drinks in the quiet corner at the back of the bar, being honest with each other, like old friends.

From me to you:

I can’t wait, man.

I can’t wait.

I can’t spend the next 34 years of my life yearning for a Utopia that will never come. I know what the facts are. I’m not going to go over all the stats here; I’ve given a bit of it elsewhere. But I’m talking to you as a friend; I’m not trying to start an argument with you here. I’ve spent 34 years black in America. I know something about what it’s like.

How long am I supposed to sit around and wait?

How long am I going to have to sit in endless dialogue on race, fighting the white supremacists and Nazis and Confederates who can’t let 150 years ago and a slave era go? How much patience am I supposed to have while endless and pointless debate sucks away the rest of my lifespan, and I die with the problem still intact.

And to be honest, that’s made me rethink my morality. Before, I was content to be more patient; there was, after all, a happy-ever-after waiting for me. But now that I know that’s not there…patience is starting to look less and less like a virtue, and more and more like a waste of the precious time I have.

Fight or flight is starting to kick in.

And honestly…sometimes I don’t want to fight. I know something about black history, and I’ve read hundreds of pages on the great plans and utopias blacks in the past thought would be realized today. To say this hasn’t happened as of August 12th seems something of an understatement. So maybe, I think sometimes, fighting for the utopia is a waste of time.

But it does anger me to be a second class citizen when I have absolutely no business being one. I want equal rights — I just don’t want to waste the rest of my life fighting for something that will never come. And this impacts my morality, and gives me a sense of urgency, because my life is happening NOW. Not just tomorrow, not a year from now, not thirty years from now. RIGHT NOW.

I wanted to be treated equally NOW.

There is no heaven. There is no happy-ever-after save what I make of this current life span. And so I’d like to be treated equally, now, and the urgency I feel in the face of the fact that I have lived half my life already is that I want it through methods that will ensure that I actually get it.

And sometimes I suspect there is no way that will work, given the failed attempts in history, and I honestly don’t want to try. Maybe that’s unpopular. But I can’t work for something that’s never going to happen.

It’s not like I’m picking one option or the other and sticking to it. These two positions are constantly warring with each other. Sometimes I want to give up and just enjoy my life. And sometimes racism makes it so that I can’t enjoy my life, and I realize how urgently I want it gone.

I know that sounds really selfish. But it’s the honest truth. And I think that getting a clear picture of the problem in a “grand scheme” type of way requires looking at the way the problem is embodied in the individual people who are affected by it. To give them a right to speak freely from their position.

Maybe that insistence that we black people always connect our narrative to something larger than ourselves as individuals is a way to delegitimize our experiences, in favor of crafting us into concepts to be pitied, sensualized, or exotified instead of real, individual, flesh-and-blood people who react to racism in a myriad of deeply complex but individually felt and profoundly unique ways. And so, in that sense, to be a human being, to speak your unique individual experience of what it feels for YOU to be assigned blackness in America is an act of rebellion that clarifies the fact that we are not talking about types. We are not talking about an undifferentiated group of “blacks.” We are talking about individual, unique people with real lives that are disrupted, individually, uniquely, and complexly, by ideas forced onto their identities that have no place there.

At any rate…it’s just…when I see Charlottesville, Virginia, on my birthday…it gets really discouraging, and I also get a sense of desperation when I glimpse at the hourglass that is my life. But I also know that I am equal — and that’s part of the sense of urgency in the despair. I largely know what I deserve, and a big part of me wants to simply claim it. To see the pride in myself and what I am due and not compromise. Because I can’t wait for you to see me as equal. I can’t wait for you to recognize that I have equal rights. I will have to take them; I can’t simply wait in a Neverland for you to give them to me.

That’s my attitude. Of course, the process of taking those rights is hard and frustrating. I’ve been through several conversations on whether racism existed in which the person I was arguing with was in denial although they seemed to KNOW, underneath it all, that racism is real, and this gives me doubt that the new debates are coming from a genuine place.

It’s also why I don’t want to waste time giving anyone cookies. I did not ask to be born a second-class citizens. Anything you give me to make me equal is merely recognizing who I am supposed to be. Because I am not claiming my rights later, and waiting for you to politely give them to me. I am claiming them for myself now, and so when you recognize them — as far as I’m concerned, you’re recognizing something I already have.

And if I speak strongly or engage in strong action, realize that it comes from the simple fact that I am aware that I can’t wait; if I am going to experience more equality, I have to do it now, in this life, and it depends on people. God isn’t going to do anything about it; He doesn’t exist. It’s all us. And either the White Supremacists will win, or we will. Either I’ll experience more or less discrimination. Either I’ll get get treated fairly by employers and law enforcement, or I will not be — which can have severe consequences for my actual life.

And if I decide to take time out to simply enjoy my life and forget about racism for awhile, that’s part of my decision to live my best life now. I’m not asking for your advice on how to live my best life in this regard; this is my life, not yours. I’m simply writing down my thoughts. I’m simply recognizing the reality that there will be no heaven for me.

This is my last chance to live my best life. I can’t afford to sit around patiently for white America to straighten out its own issues. I need to go after the life of equality I want in the here and now because, as an a black atheist, after I die I won’t be able to do it anymore.

This is my only chance, and it’s nearly halfway over.

It’s a side effect, I guess, of being a black atheist:

I can’t wait.

Thanks for reading.

PS: I want to thank all 33 of my Patrons for helping me write. You’re awesome.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the last few months, and the sacrifice of Heather Heyer, a white woman who was killed protesting against the alt-right last Saturday, kinda brought it to a head.

I think that there are decent white allies, and I cannot say to white people, “You are not part of this struggle.”

You do not understand this struggle completely. You never will.

If you’re an atheist who has talked with a Christian who has read Christian apologists, you’ve probably run into the notion that atheist morality is a failure because it is bankrupt of assigned meaning from God. You have no purpose, you have no meaning, you have no value, you have no worth. This is horrifying, in the Christian scheme, and crippling to the core. You are trapped in a nihilistic nightmare, they claim.

The problem, I think, is worse than that for Christianity. And, at the same time, better than that for atheists. To illustrate why, I’ll share a common text that Christian apologists love to quote, which is from the atheist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. I know it’s long, but it is one of the most powerful discussions of God in history. If you are somewhere where you can do it, get the full weight of the passage by reading it aloud:

Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: “I seek God! I seek God!”—As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated?—Thus they yelled and laughed.

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. “Whither is God?” he cried; “I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.”

So, the Christian apologist will read this and say that this is terrible. There is no purpose in the atheist scheme, no value, no worth, nada. And, therefore, they’ll continue, isn’t it better to be Christian? Wouldn’t you prefer to have purpose and value in your life?

It has seemed to me that this argument, each of the thousands of times I have heard it in my lifetime, is not fundamentally based on a rational discussion on the existence of God. The argument is based on the assumption that I want there to be some foundation to thought, I want to have purpose and meaning in my life. More fundamentally, I want to belong in the world, and to know I have a place within it that is fully rationalized and reasonable. I want to know that I have a right to take in every breath, and to do that, the implication is, I have to have a purpose, a reason why I am here. 

And if God exists, the argument goes, that reason is straightforward. I can embrace and walk the world as if I have a right to be here. Let the vast universe overwhelm the miniscule dot on an infinite timeline, that infinitely small speck I call “me” — that doesn’t matter, because the God of it all said that I matter. That’s where I get my worth and value from.

And so, people become Christian because of that insecurity, and they try to force you to share that insecurity too, so they find a Nietzsche quote that seems to them the picture of that desperation, cast it onto you, and insist that you have to accept or convert.

That would be a mistake.

What Neitzsche is doing is changing up the game of morality more fundamentally than these Christian apologists imply.

Now, I don’t agree with the entirety of Nietzsche’s philosophy, but the part I do agree with is his eloquent removal of God from the equation. All the way, down to the dregs. For Nietzsche to build his morality, he has to start with a God-free existence, one in which God has absolutely no authority to assign anyone purpose, to tell anyone to be humble, to create our horizons, or to give us a foundation.

He is burning the chess board we have been playing on and then yelling in our faces that it is over, it is done, the game is up, and taunting anyone who would dare try to move the pieces back in place or set up a firm external meaning. There is no God. There is no purpose from God, no foundation made up by God…at all.

All of the God-based morality, the morality that insists you have to be subservient to some type of higher “master” God — all that is wiped away. That entire view of purpose as something that is ordained, that you are given from a Great Beyond — it’s gone. And all we have left is…what? What is left? God has been so integral to our morality, to the way that we think of ourselves and the world, that we have to start over.

And Nietzsche wants to start over; he wants nothing of God left. We are starting completely and totally from scratch. He’s not even just talking about the idea of God itself — he’s trying to rip out the roots of where the concept of God has made an impact on the way that we think about each other and the universe, including the way those roots sometimes sink into society for people after they have pruned the above-ground concept of God from their lives.

Lemme make this concrete. When I left Christianity, I had to unlearn a lot. I thought that I had left God, but the old ways of thinking still were there. I had puritanical views for the next couple years, for example, when it came to things like sex and alcohol. Today, I still find ways that the concept of God has infiltrated my thinking or the thinking of supposedly secular society in ways that I had not determined before.

Getting rid of that and starting over is an extreme project. It requires washing away the horizons we have taken for granted, deconstructing the morality we have taken for granted and re-examining the reasons we hold it, and embracing a godless universe — which can (and likely should) be a jolting paradigm shift at first, as Nietzsche is articulating the above quote.

But Nietzsche did not see the problem of finding your way in a godless universe as unsolvable. After the God-concept is wiped from the slate, after he has burnt the chessboard of divine morality so that there is no game on the table, and he has forcefully articulated that there is no divine morality available and we have to start over, he has another step in mind, as is revealed when the quote continues.

“Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

We have killed him.

What does that mean?

When it comes to my personal life philosophy, I tend to start by going straight to nihilism. Right down to the dregs, and then I ask myself, “Why can’t I stay here?”

And I think that’s somewhat an important question to ask, for me. Not for everyone, but for me. Let’s start out with a clean slate, and see what is left.

Maybe you think this is harder than it looks, and I’d agree. First, the idea of a clean slate is, itself, one that we made up; it’s not “clean” itself. And the very thought that starting out with a clean slate is a good thing is a product of culture, environment, etc. Therein lies the great paradox of trying to find a clean slate — the concept of a clean slate itself is not clean, and so you’re doomed to failure from the outset.

But the concept is somewhat helpful, in that it forces me to continually answer the question, “Why?”

Why is it better to be selfless than selfish? Why is it better to be ambitious than lazy? I know people want you to be more selfless, and I know that, especially in Western culture, ambition and the amount you contribute are prized. But why? Why is that important?

I’ve found it a rather interesting feature of my education that, at every turn, what I learned deconstructed the value of education in various ways. The more I learned about the structure behind our patterns of thought and our values, the more I saw that things I took for granted or set in stone as good or bad weren’t that simple; they were constructs, made-up concepts, that at several points in the history of their construction could have been built one way or the other, although, after several generations, we take them for granted.

The disconcerting thing about knowing this is that the things you once knew as objective fact become accidents of subjective preferences that largely depended on happenstance. So you become less confident about a lot of things, which makes you curious about what else you don’t know. And so much of what we take for granted as reality seems so constructed that you get tempted to peak behind the curtain.

But there is no objective “behind the curtain,” I’ve found — there’s always, it seems, one more construction, one more “why” —  you’ve jumped down the rabbit hole, and it seems like you’re maybe going to fall forever, and there’s nothing, necessarily, to hold onto on the way down.

And so sometimes, in my case, I have to think, “What’s next? What do I hold onto to keep from falling?”

You might say, “People.”

Here’s the thing, though: People are fickle. And I think they have a right to be. No person should be there just to prop me up, to make me feel good, to take the emotional burden that is my life. Help them? Sure, I can. Depend on them? No, I can’t. And I’m not saying I should be able to; they have their own lives, and I should respect that. And altruism isn’t something to really hold onto, either, because it’s outside yourself; if you are altruistic for your own salvation, you’re not being altruistic, and sooner or later that’ll be exposed in an ugly way.

So, yeah. Maybe here you think I’m selfish. Maybe you think that existential angst is silly — that while I’m here questioning things, you’re working. Maybe you think less of me. Maybe, Maybe, Maybe…

How to respond? I could say, “F**k you, this is my life.” That has a certain utility to it. But the fact is that even though it IS my life, your judgment is your judgment, and you can think of me as you see fit. You can judge me and say about me what you like. It’s your life, it’s your right. Although it does make me uncomfortable…which puts me right back into the existential angst…

Why does it make me feel uncomfortable? Why do I care about what people think?

And you say, “Stop caring about what people think. I don’t, and it solves a ton of problems.”

I find it hard to believe that people don’t care what people think, although I think it’s awfully important to some people that other people THINK they don’t care about what other people think. I think, honestly, that most people who say they don’t care about what people think are either lying or are so privileged they don’t have to worry about what others think in their position of power.

Maybe that’s reflective of my own personal experience with trying not to care what people think, and at times thinking I succeeded. Anyways, my answer is no. I don’t care enough about what you think to impress you by trying to show off that I don’t care about what you think.

Anyways…we’re getting off topic. I was explaining how I’m falling down this abyss of constructed subjectivity and the accidents of circumstance that lies behind objective values, trying to get to the bottom of it. How I was trying to argue all the way down to nihilism.

And there have been moments in my life where…I think I glimpse it. It’s not the construct of the things — it’s what makes me want the construct of the things.

That desire.

Yeah, I know that’s all still constructed by circumstances and the brain and blah, blah, blah. I’m not talking about that part. I’m talking about the raw experience. That feeling. Everything else taken away, so far as I can see — I want to live because I feel desire, and I love the experience of having a desire fulfilled. The classic answer to, “Should I kill myself or get a cup of coffee,” for me is simply that the coffee tastes better.

And so from that basis, that feeling, I build my entire moral system, because I want to. It’s an openly selfish enterprise; I make no pretense about it being purely altruistic. And therein lies my hedonistic philosophy; I see morality as a thing I can help build to make as many people able to freely embrace their freely chosen desires as possible, simply because I love doing it. Same with social justice. Same with human relationships. These are all tools to help us achieve and realize desire, because my desire is AWESOME and fulfilling it feels great, and knowing that I’m causing others to fulfill it feels even better.

That’s been my view increasingly over the last few years. It’s the main reason I became an anti-theist and relaxed my own views on spirituality. I thought I wanted a perfect world…but then I realized that I just wanted everyone to be as happy and openly accepted in the past, present, and future as possible, and religion was only a problem when it was in the way of that, and that fighting directly against religion wasn’t really accomplishing my goal of encouraging or fostering happiness. So I shifted my position, a bit.

It’s what I hold onto in the face of constant learning and constantly shifting constructions — it’s what keeps me going. The reason I’m not a nihilist. Maybe it’s different for you. That’s OK.

I just hope it’s what you want.

“Finding my way through the darkness, guided by a beating heart…”

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_o6axAseak[/youtube]

PS: I want to thank all 32 of my patrons who make posts like this possible.

Hi.

I’d like to convince you to stop being ableist. Or try to, anyway.

I’m not here to point fingers. I don’t even know who you are; it’s not like I’m gonna know whether I’m successful or not unless you tell me. So relax.

I’m figuring you’re someone who doesn’t like it when people try to make others out to be terrible humans for using words like “retard,” “dumb,” “stupid,” etc. as insults.

When someone comes to you (or someone else) and tells people not to use those words, I’m guessing you probably have a couple reactions. First, there’s frustration. It’s unfair for someone to try to shame you for using a word — it’s just a word. It doesn’t reflect who you are or your intention when using the word. We probably seem like speech police, two inches behind your back bumper waiting for you to just barely say the “wrong” thing so we can call you out on it.

Plus, when we claim that we’re telling you to stop doing it for the sake of those with mental disorders…you think we’re being patronizing. You might think: People are stronger than they think. It’s just a word. They can take it.

Maybe you use the word out of spite, to show the morality police that they can’t control what you can’t say, that you are not affected by their attempts to bully people into silent guilt, and that it’s really no big deal. They should get over it.

And you probably see those of us who do avoid those words as people who are either doing it to bully, or as people who are bullied and have become too weak to stand up for themselves and their use of language. It looks like a cult to you, in which nearly everyone follows ridiculously silly rules that are designed to police, control, and manipulate their lives and the way they feel about themselves.

That’s why social justice concepts like “ableism” have to be gotten rid of. We need to just chill out. We need to stop acting like the speech police and end this cultlike mentality.

This is the general gist of what I hear. And I want to say that I hear you. I talk to you, I read your blogs, I watch your videos, and I listen to your arguments.

Now that I’ve heard you and given your grievances some thought, I’d like to tell you where I’m coming from.

So, about five years ago, I started trying to follow a rule in my Internet arguments. I found that I had grown cynical concerning many of the people I argued with when I dismissed them as “stupid” or something similar, and I tried something out. My general rule of thumb, somewhere along the line a few years ago, became this:

I would never insult someone in a way that would still apply to them if they agreed with me.

So I might, say, call someone “ignorant,” because that’s something that could be fixed. But more permanent insults that challenged the person’s fundamental ability to think, I tried to stay away from.

This was a hard rule to follow, but following it did something interesting to me. The value I saw in people started to change — not just in internet conversations, but also outside of them.

No, really! I swear…

I started paying more attention to the content of arguments, as opposed to focusing on a supposed permanent flaw in the mind of the person making them. And that turned my world upside down.

For example: if you call someone “ignorant,” that’s something that can be fixed. I’ve been ignorant before, and I’m still ignorant about some things. That’s something that can change with additional information.

But if you are wrong because you are “stupid” — you’re blaming the fact that your opponent is wrong on their overall intellect, which is much more permanent.

So, over time, I started working with them and identifying opinions that could change, and appreciating — instead of denigrating — things in them that could not change. It was really a remarkable phenomenon — if I disagreed with the person, I still saw value in the PERSON, even if I thought the argument was wrong. I started seeing more value in places I hadn’t seen it in before, and it surprisingly brightened up my world.

I mean, you could go through your whole life and miss out on that really beautiful perspective. Or…

Look, I think I might understand your hesitation. I’m not saying you gotta stand up on a mountaintop and say you’re doing it, or police your friends, or anything. Like, your friends aren’t really gonna notice, are they? I mean, they might notice a change in the way you view and seem to appreciate people after awhile, but they probably won’t be able to trace that change to something as simple as not saying a word unless you tell them you’re not doing it.

Chill out, man. It’s up to you; it’s not a commitment. You could just try it out, see if I’m wrong. Like, maybe for twenty days or so, and I can pretty much guarantee you’ll see the effects. Just try not saying those words, like I did, and see if your view of people doesn’t start changing in positive ways. No one needs to know.

Of course you don’t need to shame yourself in private or anything if you say it. I’m not the police; this isn’t a cult. I’m more like this guy on the corner of the interwebs, ushering you in away from your friends and society for a moment (no one else except you knows you’re reading this, anyway), and saying, “Pssst. Over here. I got some good stuff, man. It’ll blow your mind, I’m telling you. Just try it homie; I’m so sure you’ll like it, I’ll give it to you for free.” I’m just telling you that this simple decision to not use ableist words — in a way hardly anyone will notice — can rock your world. It’s like being high on weed or something while everyone thinks that you’re sober. (OK, not exactly like that. It’s an analogy, obviously. But you get the gist.)

Why wouldn’t you want it? Why would you miss out on that?

Just a question. Yeah…

Here’s the other thing: that change can give you deeper friendships.

I’ll be honest with you: the “life is hard, so you should use those words even if they’re offensive, because people need to toughen up” argument isn’t that convincing to me.

I mean…I don’t have a mental disorder, so far as I know. But my mind is very important to me. The biggest fear I have is that I will get Alzheimer’s, like my grandfather, and lose it, gradually. I can’t think of anything scarier. Can you? Like, the experience of having a mental disorder seems hard enough. And yeah, some people are tough enough to take additional abuse, or may pretend they are because you expect them to be. But…even I get depressed sometimes, like most I know, and my life is GOOD. I have all my limbs, and I don’t have to take any medications for any mental or physical problems.

The lives of disabled people are already hard. They already know that it’s rough, a lot more than I do. If anything, they need to teach ME. Like, if I started lecturing someone without an arm about how they had to get used to a hard world, and he got pissed, lopped off my arm, and said, “Get used to THAT before you lecture me” … I’d think he had a point.

Maybe that’s just me. But if someone has a harder life than you…are you really the person to teach them the lesson “life is hard, get over it”? If someone has a life that much harder than mine in ways that are difficult for me to imagine, and they tell me that using those words hurts their feelings…then what does that say about how tough hearing those words is? Because if I woke up tomorrow with their problems — it would suck. I’d have to change what I do for a living, and maybe choose between dying and getting on disability, and my family would have a hard time…and if someone in that position is hurt significantly more by my use of a word, that word must be really hurtful.

Plus — here’s the other thing — don’t you think they’ve heard those words before? How much would you really be contributing to all the “toughening up” they take every. single. day. if you kept using the words, like many of your friends or coworkers already might do?

I mean..they probably have heard it more than you. They may have lived through high school dealing being called those names — a vulnerable time when many commit suicide — and come out the other side. Do they really need you to remind them life is tough?

They know.

They know more than we could ever know.

Do you want to make a difference?

Here’s the thing — based on my experience, you probably, statistically speaking, have a friend with a mental disorder, or a friend very close to someone with a mental disorder. And that friend probably wants to talk about it, but is afraid of the stigma. Oh, they talk a good game with your friends. But alone…it’s really tough. And who are they going to talk to when they need a real friend, or when they are thinking about coming out to someone and admitting their heartbreaking struggle with schizophrenia, or bipolar disorder struggles, or a learning disability?

Who is going to be most likely to notice that you don’t judge people based on their mental ability, and that you don’t use words that mock people based on mental disorder stereotypes?

Not your non-disabled friends or colleagues without mental disorders. They won’t skip a beat. Come on, there are all these other words in the English language you’ll be using. They won’t notice that a few are missing.

But that one friend that’s struggling, that’s looking for someone to talk to — trust me, I know from experience. That friend will be the one who calls you up, direct messages you, takes you aside, and says, “Hey, life is hard for me right now,” and tells you what’s really going on. Because yeah, the world is cruel, but you don’t blend in with the crowd, and they need a break from the cruel world. You’ve been showing them that you won’t judge them by their mental state, because they can see that you don’t judge others that way.

And all those other friends? They’ll miss out. They won’t know who that person really is.

You will.

You’ll be that needle in a haystack.

Why wouldn’t you want that? I don’t have a gun to your head. I’m not trying to force you to do anything. I don’t even know you, in particular, are reading this. So you’re not losing any face, and I’m never going to be able to come to you proudly and say I won an argument.

This is just up to you.

But it’s done wonders for me. It’s helped me see more value in people, and increased the depths of friendships I can have with people, in ways that surprised me and that I wasn’t aware of before.

Just think…right now, you have a chance to change your life, and maybe the life of someone you love.

Why wouldn’t you want that?

Few of those truly meaningful opportunities in life are so easy to get, y’know?

Thanks for reading.

PS: I want to thank all 33 of my Patrons who make posts like these possible. Thank you!

I saw both of these awhile ago. But I didn’t write about it cuz I thought it’d be petty.

What bothers me, though, and why I’m finally writing this is that people are trusting these two YouTubers to be “experts” on topics that they know nothing about.

It’s not even primarily that I disagree with them. It’s that…they don’t know what they’re talking about. And they are so proud and sure their ignorant views are correct that they say things that are so………yeah.

*sigh*

First up is the YouTuber “Some Black Guy.” I’ve watched this part of his video several times to see if he’s joking. Because it is beyond my mind how anyone could seriously make the argument he makes.

And he seems serious. I dunno. I wanna believe it’s sarcasm. I really do. But the rest of the video is clearly serious, he integrates this statement into the rest of his argument, and he never says he’s kidding.

Like…this guy actually means what he said.

So, background on this video. Some Black Guy is talking about Kathy Griffin’s decision to make a disturbing photo of Trump — it’s basically her holding Trump’s severed head, which is covered in blood. And her original reason for the photo was that it reflected Trump’s statement once that she had “blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her…whatever.” So, Kathy Griffin, long story short, had a press conference about this in which her lawyer came out and, among other things, accused Trump of being “the most woman-hating and tyrannical President in US History.”

And Some Black Guy stopped the tape, and said that this was ridiculous. Donald Trump LOVED women. Here was his reasoning which, if you look at the tape (queued up here), seems to be said completely unironically:

Do you honestly believe that Donald Trump hates women?

I mean, he talks about grabbing them by the f-ckin pussy, man.

Do you think Donald Trump would wanna grab women by the pussy if he hated them?

That is actually the complete opposite. Obviously he loves them. He loves them so much that he’s willing to go out of his way and grab some f-ckin vagina. I’m not sayin’ that it’s right; I’m saying your words are sh-t.

Then, thinking that he totally pwned that point, he moves on.

Like…how do you…how….what? Can someone explain…how…this would even REMOTELY debunk the claim that Trump isn’t women-hating? What, the fact that he sexually harasses women is proof positive that he loves them?

This is the guy 200,000 subscribers look to for sage advice on feminism? Really? And the video has about 10,000 likes, and only 200 dislikes? Wat?

Or then again, maybe arguments like this narrow down his audience to only people who will “like” his videos. Like, I turned the video off after that. An argument that bad made me uninterested in what else this guy had to say, and I imagine I was not the only one.

To state the obvious: if “Some Black Guy” had given two seconds of fair thought to feminism, he would have known that sexual harassment is the embodiment of woman-hating and tyranny for any feminist. He is literally “debunking” a feminist argument by arguing it. To think that you are effectively debunking a feminist’s claim that you are “woman hating and tyrannical” because you want to sexually harass them is way too far from understanding feminism to be seen as a debate point against feminism.

And I’m not even saying that because I disagree with him. I’m saying that because he fundamentally, at the most basic level, misunderstands what the debate is about. He is so locked into his thought that “loving women means strong sexual attraction to them” that he thinks that even sexual harassment is proof positive of love. And he assumes that’s what Kathy Griffin’s lawyer is referring to – sexual attraction. Like, no — she’s talking about respect. Duh. How the…I mean, that’s the thing. And the reason I hate to debunk this is that, by talking about this, by even trying to diagnose what the hell he’s saying and why he’s saying it (far more than he has tried to understand the other side) I’m giving him the undue appearance og legitimacy. But this was so outrageous…I had to say something.

Here’s my point: as long as he is this ignorant, when “Some Black Guy” is criticizing feminism, no one should listen to him. Not because he’s wrong, but because he doesn’t even know ANYTHING about feminism, and he’s too proud to find out. He is not qualified to debate it any more than an American conservative who doesn’t know what a Democrat is would be qualified to run for President.

Like, really. There are some interesting people from “the other side” I can stand, but I had to stop this Some Black Guy video — not just because I disagree, but because HE DOES NOT KNOW WHAT HE’S TALKING ABOUT. And somehow he’s a respected YouTuber in the anti-SJW community. I’ve seen and heard of him gaining some prominence. With arguments like THIS. Which says very disturbing things about that community and audience.

OK. One more rant.

Blaire White.

Oh, Blaire White.

I’ve talked about her before, but didn’t get around to something that’s been bugging me about her last video. So I’ll get it off my chest.

When she criticizes Riley Dennis’s video, at the place he brings up “environmental racism” she pauses the tape and this happens:

Riley: [Racists could] laugh about the people of color who will die because of environmental racism.

Blaire White: Ah, yes. Environmental racism. I, too, remember Hurricane KKK. What the– what is environmental racism? Racist storms, or something?

Wow. Just…wow.

Wow.

What are you even talking about, Blaire?

No one is saying that storms are racist. No one.

NO ONE IS EVEN SAYING THAT. WTF?

How ignorant of the discussion on racism do you have to be to think that environmental racism is “racist storms”? Like…what? How dismissive of the term do you have to be in order to be THAT ignorant about it and think that admitting you don’t know what it is means you totally pwned? I can’t…

*sigh*

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrbeuJRPM0o&t=37s[/youtube]

OK, so environmental racism includes incidents like the disaster in Flint, Michigan (still happening, by the way) THAT HAS ACTUALLY KILLED PEOPLE. And environmental racism criticism is NOT due to racism causing Hurricanes (wat?) but rather refers to the fact that racism is a reason that people of color are often in places more prone to flooding, or that minority-rich neighborhoods may have buildings with less structural integrity that might be more affected by bad weather. It has to do with where companies release toxic chemicals into the air and water. It’s that whole discussion. You can agree or disagree with claims it exists (though, factually speaking, you’d have a hard time disagreeing with it — there’s a LOT of evidence it exists), but to reduce this down to racism causing hurricanes, or storms being racist, is a drastic misunderstanding.

Here’s the thing that is disturbing: Blaire White has 320,000 subscribers. And the video she made that contains this has over 250,000 views — with over 22,200 likes and only 341 dislikes. She is stifling this important conversation for a lot of real-life people, and setting them up for embarrassment. Because if you say in the real world of debate, “What is environmental racism? Lol pwned,” you’ll be dismissed. Not because you are wrong, but because you obviously don’t know what you’re talking about.

I can only chalk this phenomenon up to a proud ignorance. Blaire White and Some Black Guy are so confident they know the space they are talking about that they don’t know how ignorant they are.

So…yeah.

They are not, at all, reliable sources on these topics. If you want to know anything about feminism, regardless of what side you’re on, that will help you debunk it IN REAL SPACE with an ACTUAL FEMINIST, don’t rely on people like Some Black Guy. Not because he’s wrong, but because he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and you’ll be laughed out of the room so that the debaters who actually did their research can talk. Same with people like Blair White — the fact that she (and others like her) guffaws regarding Environmental Racism without knowing what it is may win points in her bubble, but people outside that will laugh her out of town.  So, word of advice: If you want to engage with so-called “SJWs” as an “ant-SJW” remotely effectively, don’t use her arguments to debunk racism. You’ll end up looking ridiculous if the person you debate knows even the slight a bit about what they’re talking about.

If you really want to “pwn” us and save yourself embarrassment in the “real world” of ideas…find people with better arguments.

Thanks for reading.

PS: I want to say an enthusiastic “thank you” to all 33 of my Patrons who make articles like this possible. Y’all are awesome.