I'm sure that there will be folks decrying how The Mooching Rancher is too unsophisticated to know that uttering racist bile in front of a rolling camera is a bad idea.
Bundy and his defenders are proving the truth of Dr. Samuel Johnson's saying that "patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel".
UPDATE: The longer video, which is supposedly not as racist. In a pig's eye.
21 comments:
I always wonder how Bundy can simultaneously claim to be a patriot AND not a member/citizen of the United States. Cognitive dissonance -- too many notes for his kazoo to capture?
Dana Loesch-Bag has already said the nice old man just needs some media training.
A viewing of his complete remarks provides a somewhat different picture than the selectively chosen segment. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agXns-W60MI#t=27 Rough around the edges? Sure. I happen to disagree that blacks are worse off now than previously, but you'd have to be willfully blind not to see that 50 years of centrally-planned state handouts have DESTROYED the black community. I don't think that Douglass, King, Du Bois, et al would look upon our modern plantations of grinding poverty and broken families, kept alive by just enough handouts to keep them from rioting and to keep them pulling the lever marked (D), as a satisfactory conclusion to the Civil Rights saga.
Of course, I'm an evil racist cisgendered child of privilege who hates poor people, so that may be coloring my views.
Bundy whined that his critics are bringing race into a situation that isn't about race.
Uhm, if Bundy doesn't want his critics to talk about him talking about race, maybe, err, he shouldn't talk about race? Just sayin'.
If you want a giggle about the unintended consequences of forgetting/ignoring the fact that you're not the only one on the planet, just Google Bundy Fest.
-Doug in Oakland
The question wasn't about whether Blacks are better off now than fifty years ago. The question posed and answered by Bundy was whether or not Blacks were better off as slaves. Even a mildly cursory study of the history of slavery proved the inanity of what Bundy had to say.
You know, I take issue with your misuse of the word "Racist". Which part of Bundy's remarks indicated hate or prejudice against black people? If looking at the poor, predominantly minority, inner city ghettos and observing that they have no incentive to engage in constructive behavior and plenty of incentives not to makes one a racist, then sign me on up. I'll take my Klansman robe in 2XL please. Especially given his remarks about hispanics (that somehow didn't make their way into your first video), I'm inclined to convict Bundy on the charges of being coarse-spoken and absolve him of the deadly sin of *dramatic pause* RAAAAAACISSSSSMMM!
Now, I do understand that this is all character assassination build up to lay the background justification for the inevitable "police" raid on his "compound" prior to the "unfortunate" death of his entire family when "tear gas" canisters "unexpectedly" burn his house down. The Weavers were tarred with white supremacist labels, the Branch Davidians were child molesters. You can't just go in and kill a fellow for daring to cross Harry Reid...yet.
Uhm, dude. When your answer to a question "were the blacks better off under slavery" can be boiled down to the word "yes"... that's racist.
Just sayin'. If you think that's not racist, well... all together now, that's racist, too.
- Badtux the Multicolored Penguin
You know, I've been living in Oakland for 30 years, and the only people I know who get government money of any kind are people who are on Social Security; either disability (like myself, because of a stroke)or SSI which can be somewhat scammy, depending on how you look at it (and upon the individual case),and are white. I'm not saying there aren't black people getting government assistance in the "inner city" of Oakland, but it seems to me that if there were some overwhelming majority of them, or enough to dictate what the culture is, I would have met at least one of them in thirty years...
-Doug in Oakland
Doug, you can't convince flyover country people that all their cherished bigotries are false. It just doesn't happen. It's like a relative from flyover country who visited me here in the Bay Area and I took him to San Francisco. So after we took in the Fisherman's Wharf area, we started walking down to the Marina area to catch a bus to the next sights we wanted to see. He kept saying to me, "why are we walking? This is a dangerous neighborhood? Why are we walking?!"
Uhm, no. It's a neighborhood of million-dollar townhouses. But because most of the people walking by us were dark-skinned, he assumed it was a "bad neighborhood". Even though most of those people made more money in a week at their dot-com jobs than he made in an entire year. Because that's what his cherished bigotries told him to believe, and all attempts to reassure him failed, because he "knew" that row houses plus dark-skinned people was the ghetto and meant you were about to get mugged and murdered in broad daylight.
Sigh. Ignorance can be fixed. Stupid, on the other hand...
Bax Tux,
Your friend wasn't entirely wrong. People who can afford million dollar townhouses can be a whole lot more dangerous than poor people. For openers, I give you the Koch brothers. Oh wait...the Koch Brothers wouldn't live in some dinky little million dollar house. Sorry.
Very Crankily yours,
The New York Crank
You're right, Bad Tux, and the effect is even more pronounced in Oakland. Lots of people don't know anything at all about Oakland except that they're scared to death of it.
I was just trying to point out the fact that those "government subsidies" they were so critical of the effects of on "the negro" in "the inner city" for the most part don't exist. The waiting list to be considered for section 8 housing in the East Bay is longer than a year. Since they "reformed" General Assistance, there are no more long-term recipients. I know one guy who gets SSI, and there's no way you could live off of it. I don't know much about SNAP, but I do know that if you had it, that wouldn't mean that you could sit around on your porch all day with nothing to do because you were taken care of.
That leaves disability. And people do cheat to get it. But having gone through the process of getting it myself after my stroke, and 30 seconds worth of checking,and I know that there are just under 9 million of us getting it and IT IS NOT KEEPING US FROM WORKING we get it because we can't work.
So what kind of "subsidies" do they give out in Las Vegas? And if they do, in fact, give them out, how does he know for sure that they are more harmful to those that get them than the considerably larger ones he receives are to him?
-Doug in Oakland
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/racism
Do either of those conditions apply to Mr. Bundy? Words have meanings. "Racism" doesn't mean "I don't like that guy and he mentioned race."
How about we let an actual black man speak for himself on the issue? http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2014/04/25/black_bundy_bodyguard_hes_not_a_racist_id_take_a_bullet_for_that_man.html
http://i62.tinypic.com/auzb76.jpg
That's the face of modern racism right there folks.
I apologize for the multiple comments, but I found this video after my previous post. CNN interview with a black patriot defending Bundy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoRkmCQJewU#t=15
Again: If a white man says that blacks were better off under slavery... that's racist.
And if you're making apologies for a racist, what does that make you?
'Nuff said.
When you ascribe a certain set of characteristics to "the Negro" or Hispanics, or Jews, Asians, Arabs, or, for that matter, any other racial or ethnic group, guess what? You're a racist.
Or at the very least, a bigot.
I'm just waiting for Andrew S. to start in with the argument that we're only 99% sure he's racist, so it's not proven. Wait, that's the argument he uses on Tux's turf.
I sort of expected some posters on this site to defend Mr. Bundy's comments.
Here's one major hole in the whole "welfare slavery" meme: unemployment for blacks nationwide is considerably higher than for whites: about 15%.
Guess what? That means that even with the reality of systemic racist hiring practices, 85% of those would-be-cotton-pickers are employed. That's only 8% fewer than whites.
OK, here's another hole in that racist dribble: only 4% of the U.S. population gets any form of Welfare, though almost 40% of them are "black." But blacks make up about 12% of our population.
Which means that about 15% of blacks get any form of welfare. Again, that means about 85% of those "welfare slaves" AREN'T.
"The blacks" are predominantly hard-working people who don't take any gubment handouts.
The problem with that, Danny J, lies in how the unemployment statistics are calculated. Those who aren't actively seeking work are not counted as unemployed. A far better measure of "who's on welfare" would be an analysis of who receives means-tested aid : http://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-2/spending-patterns-of-families-receiving-means-tested-government-assistance.htm
We can see that blacks, 13.7% of the population, represent 27.6% of means-tested aid recipients. Hispanics, 16.8% of the population, represent 28.8% of aid recipients. This is a clear indicator that minorities are receiving (and have need for!) aid at a far higher RATE than whites. It should also be noted for the racist crowd that about 70% of means-tested aid goes to whites, and that the majority of blacks (I can't find a hard number) are indeed hard-working and self sufficient people. The ghettos of poor minorities in large cities (such as those in Los Vegas as per the video) are a high concentration of the idle and destitute.
Comrade Misfit, If I were to say "Those of Germanic ethnicity tend to be hard-working, hard-drinking, and extremely orderly" would that make me racist? I just ascribed characteristics to an ethnic group. How about "Asians tend to be very traditional, with a strong focus on obedience to family elders or superiors in a multitude of social hierarchies"? Should I just go ahead and turn myself in to the SPLC as a hate organization?
I attended a high school that was 50% black. After graduation, I took public transportation through the projects of Cleveland to my local community college for my machinist certificate. I took that same bus route to the public library where I worked as a page. When I started working as a machinist I lived in an apartment in a building that was primarily section 8 housing. When I went back to school for my engineering degree, I went to a Cleveland State - a public school in the heart of urban Cleveland with a high percentage of minority students. I'm no buck-toothed trailer park redneck spouting off about "dem neeegros" - I've had boots on the ground for the vast majority of my life. Bundy, for all his coarseness, is accurately observing that the systematic pressures on low-income blacks in the US have produced a terrible outcome. Poor minorities are steered away from academic success by school personnel, discouraged from academic studies by the ghetto culture, are penalized economically for getting married, penalized for trying to find work, penalized for working shitty minimum wage jobs, and sustained by government aid that does a mediocre job making poverty more comfortable but does absolutely nothing to actually treat the base conditions that lead to such widespread poverty in the first place. And yes, the abortion rate among blacks is staggeringly high.
Again, you're dogpiling Bundy for being coarse and non media-savvy. Those who earn the ire of the Left would do well to simply shut the fuck up when lefty rags troll for soundbites to smear their targets. If Bundy hadn't gotten in the way of Harry Reid's wheeling and dealing, you'd never have heard of him and this video would never have been taken. If hundreds of armed supporters hadn't rallied to his side to contest the issue, he'd never have popped up on the radar.
I'm not sure what deep-seated urge to genuflect before authority you're all scratching by participating in the Two Minute Hate against Bundy, but you should be aware that you're being played.
Andrew,
I acknowledged in my post that blacks have both much higher unemployment and welfare benefits rates.
My point was that even at that, the percentage of blacks either unemployed or receiving welfare is still small. The "vast majority" of blacks are hardworking people who take no "gubmint handouts." And you seem to agree.
Stereotyping "the blacks" as Bundy did is not just inaccurate, but also racist.
Wondering if "the blacks" were better off as slaves is beyond simple racism and deep into hate-crime territory.
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