Ideas I like: Crowdfunding

Crowdfunding, inspired by crowdsourcing, describes the collective cooperation, attention and trust by people who network and pool their money together, usually via the Internet, in order to support efforts initiated by other people or organizations. Crowdfunding occurs for any variety of purposes, from disaster relief to citizen journalism to artists seeking support from fans, to political campaigns.  As with many other good ideas, government stands in the way.

 

Gingrich Insulting Blacks for Votes Too: If its Good Enough for Santorum, I'll Double Down

Gingrich doubles down on insulting black people to curry favor with white voters.

I want to say they just don't get it, but its not true.  The difference between Newt and Santorum on this is that as the The Root cogently points out, Santorum is basically a coward when it comes to talking about race.  He just claims he didn't say what he said and wants to run from the issue.  Newt on the other hand, is not one to throw a stone and then hide his hand.  Oh no, Newt is going to insult you, and then tell you why its okay, you know, the old pee in your face and tell you its rain approach.

“I went back and pulled up the exact language of the text,” Mr. Gingrich told reporters on Friday. “I think you’d have to be nuts’’ to interpret the words as critical of blacks.

You have to be nuts to take Newt's stupid denials seriously. You're speaking to an audience of white people at a senior center in NH. You describe Obama as the biggest food stamp president of all time and then declare based on that analysis, that you will go to the NAACP and tell them to start demanding paychecks.  Because when you are talking to a white audience, nothing makes the point better about welfare and dependency and not working than references to black folks and food stamps.

There is no natural relationship or nexus between his food stamp hit on the President and exhorting the NAACP to demand paychecks intstead of food stamps. The common factor of shared ethnicity is what makes it work.  Newt knows that the comment is incendiary, offensive and plays to a stereotype.  Nonetheless he declares to his white audience that he has the courage to go to the NAACP and say this offensive thing to their faces (an NAACP he's presumably talking to try to persuade them to his point of view).

The comment is clearly designed to curry favor with white voters by playing to a stereotype of blacks as lazy, welfare scamming people.  It's certainly not intended to be persuasive to black people.  You don't insult people you're trying to persuade.  Santorum was working on reflex.  Newt however is delivering his line very deliberately to stoke his white audience, feeding the stereotype to his audience to garner their approval and get their vote.  Thats evil.  Assholish.  A real conservative would see the problem immediately, and further, would call it out.

If you're a republican/conservative who thought his comments were cool, who can't fathom what the problem with them is, then you're a lame ass conservative.

Republicans Have Become Incapable of Discussing Race (UPDATED)

The day before the Iowa Caucus, Rick Santorum uses blacks to illustrate a point about government creating dependency in order to win votes.  The statement is on video and its pretty clear at least to me that its what he said. Here is the "cleaned up" version of the CBS video posted at HotAir.com which Ed Morrissey reviews and declares Santorum didn't say black peoples lives:

Santorum has now also said that he didn't actually say that. I think he's lying to the public and I think he's lying to himself.

When people like me reacted to Santorum's statement, conservatives rushed to his defense with the wildest of arguments: He didn't say it.  Its right there on the tape, but no, you didn't hear what you thought.  Its become the Rodney King video of presidential campaign politics. The denial is unreal. Here's how a commenter at NPR on the story explained it all away:

I worked on developing speech synthesis and speech recognition technology for a number of years and learned a lot about speech articulation and human perception. I am a Romney supporter but it is clear to me that Senator Santorum stumbled when attempting to say the phrase "peoples lives" so he paused after the first attempt and repeated the phrase "peoples lives". If you read his lips you can see that he mangled the first attempt to say the word 'people; and only the second half of the word people came out with part of the word 'lives' which is why he corrected himself. Since both the b sound and the p sound are made on the lips (the only difference is that the vocal cords "hum" with a b sound) the 'pl' sound when mangled sounded like a 'bl' sound. However if you listen to the recording and watch his lips he was not attempting to make an 'ack' sound but lots of listeners heard "black" because mentally they associate "black people" with public assistance. It was not Senator Santorum that was prejudicial, it was the listeners.

 Got that?  Its basically just in our minds.  Our brains, all of our brains, are just playing mental auditory tricks on us, making us hear our own prejudiced thoughts. Look at the extraordinary mental gymnastics going on in the above statement to negate what you clearly see and hear in the video.

As an aside, and a tip for others who need to defend themselves against a charge of prejudicial speech,  using as a defense all the great things you've done for black people is the wrong response.  If you have to tell all the great things you've done, you've already lost.  If Santorum were smart AND he truly had done some things in the black community that were beneficial, there would be a black person willing to say so.  You let them say all the good stuff you've done.  Just a little PR tip for free.

That Santorum would make a statement that suggests that blacks are largely on welfare and that welfare comes to us via money taken out of the pockets of white voters by government is not surprising, shocking or unusual.  That is a persistent meme on the right.  If I sat down with a Tea Party member or your average poster at Hot Air, they would would largely agree with that supposition.

What this episode really illustrates is how completely incapable of a principled discussion about race the GOP has become. Where does this denial come from? This refusal to face the issue and discuss it? Part of it is black folks fault. For years, we cried racism for so many things, sometimes deserved, sometimes not and we won the war.  White people think being a racist is evil and they are horrified to even have it suggested about them. Herein lies the problem now.  If you even suggest a critique of a policy or statement which alludes to a racial element, you are assumed to be making a charge of racism.  But because the terminology has been used so indiscriminately, we no longer have any shared understanding of what that means.  So now if you call someone a racist, or something milder such as suggesting that their behavior, words or opinion is motivated by race in some way, it is interpreted as an accusation that they are essentially akin to a Klansman and bear an irrational hatred to blacks.  Its like calling someone an evil caricature or cartoon.  And since most people are NOT Klansman, the accusation or critique is dismissed as though that's what you suggested.

Take Santorum.  He's obviously NOT a racist. But what he said in Iowa is clearly influenced by racially stereotypical ideas that are not grounded in the facts.  That is something that should be called out and discussed.  The issue isn't whether Santorum is a racist.  The issue is that his thinking has been shaped by faulty racial stereotypes and we should talk about that so that its surfaced and he can correct his thinking.

Conservatives however can never reach a discussion of the merits, because they are too busy defending themselves and saying that they are not evil Klansman.  They simply deny the charge, whatever it is, rather than engage the issue.  Now, it is simply become routine to adopt a posture that says any charge that suggests I'm influenced by racial stereotypes is defacto an accusation that I'm an evil racist and since that's obviously not true, I don't even have to make a principled response to your charge, I can just dismiss it. Its become an easy way to avoid having a real discussion about the memes regarding black people that are commonplace in the minds of conservatives.  That avoidance has rendered the GOP incapable of discussing the issue in any self critical way, to its detriment.

Rick Santorum Surges in Iowa with Stereotypes of Lazy Blacks Taking Welfare Out of White People's Pockets

How you think the brother "working" the camera behind him liked that?

Rick Santorum has been riding a real surge in Iowa over the last few days, moving into striking distance of being in the top three finishers out there in the caucuses.  He's been putting in work the old fashioned way, visiting every single county in the state, doing small group meetings one after the other and talking to the voters.

Campaigning isn't the only thing Santorum is apparently doing the old fashioned way. Using stereotypes of blacks as a convenient shorthand to illustrate the ills of America as white voters see it is another way that Rick is demonstrating his old school campaign chops. At a campaign stop in Sioux City Iowa, a voter asks Santorum: "how do we get off this crazy train? We've got so much foreign influence in this country now," adding "where do we go from here?"

Santorum's answer perhaps started with foreign influence but rambled over to the subject of government creating dependency and he apparently reached into his campaign communication bag of tricks for the most easily relatable and easy to understand illustration of that issue he could think of on the fly: black people:

Notice how he basically defaulted to this stereotyped racially based meme in trying to communicate with a room full of white folks?  Check the pause as he was trying to find an illustration of his point about dependency.  He needed that illustration right then, something that would resonate with a room full of white people and where did his brain go in that moment? Black people.

With his numbers surging in Iowa, Santorum is perhaps poised to be the next of the Not Romney's to rise in the polls and get a more serious look.  I was certainly willing to pay him some more attention, as I've got real respect for a guy who hits the ground and pounds the pavement like he's been doing in Iowa.  But unless Santorum gives a far more insightful, honest answer to the question of why he defaulted to "blacks" as the best illustration for his point regarding dependency on government, he's effectively blown any serious future look from me irregardless of what he says.  When asked directly about why he talked about blacks, he ducked and dodged.




I'm sorry, but his response is not gonna cut it with me.  We'll see if any other media ask him to speak to the issue.  I think it would be an interesting exercise to ask the other candidates to assess those remarks as well.  No one is gonna do it, but I'm already certain that one or more of them would likely double down on it if they were asked.

Here's what he said:

"It just keeps expanding - I was in Indianola a few months ago and I was talking to someone who works in the department of public welfare here, and she told me that the state of Iowa is going to get fined if they don't sign up more people under the Medicaid program. They're just pushing harder and harder to get more and more of you dependent upon them so they can get your vote. That's what the bottom line is. I don't want to make black people's lives better by giving them somebody else's money; I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money and provide for themselves and their families. The best way to do that is to get the manufacturing sector of the economy rolling again." 

There is a lot to object to in Santorum's statement;

Context: he's in Iowa, in a room full of white people, in a state in which about 3% of the population is black, using "blacks" to illustrate the problem of government dependency.
 

Implicit assumptions: To illustrate his point about government dependency, he plays to a stereotype that the majority of blacks are dependent on government welfare.  He just says "blacks".  He doesn't qualify it or limit it in anyway, presumably because he doesn't have to.  Everyone in the room will immediately understand and agree with his implicit assumption that most blacks are on welfare.

This is a guy who's response to Howard Dean saying diversity was a strength of America was that talking about our diversity is divisive.  Yet, here, he plays to racial resentment by implicitly suggesting that "blacks" are being given white people's money, money which the government took from hard working white people to give to lazy blacks. He wants to give us "blacks" the opportunity to go out and earn the money and provide for ourselves, I guess because all us shiftless lazy Negroes don't work to take care of ourselves. Those are the implicit assumptions behind his statement.  Its offensive.  Its untrue.  We've been called lazy for hundreds of years.   When we were forced to work for free as slaves in the fields on pain of death, they called us lazy. It was not true then.  Its not true now.

His statements and the assumptions behind them are pretty offensive.  "Blacks" are on welfare.  All of us.  Now of course, the out he and others will use to justify labeling blacks as welfare parasites, if he's even asked, is to say "what I was really referring to is that a larger percentage of blacks are on welfare relative to their share of the population compared to whites".  Right?   Wrong. What is welfare?  I say welfare is any government financial assistance that is received but not earned, that taxes one group to support another group, meaning it's pay-as-you-go and not a contributory scheme where people's own savings pay their  benefits and lastly Congress can alter benefits to reflect changing needs, economic conditions and politics.  That being the case, welfare comes in many forms besides public assistance that goes to poor black people, like for example the subsidies we pay farmers NOT to farm or even better, Social Security, which is definitely welfare.  Those programs are breaking the bank and even more interesting, the majority of those benefits go to people who are not the same color as me. But Santorum doesn't have a problem with welfare payments where the benefits go primarily to white people. If welfare and government dependence are really the big issues, lets talk about all of it; why do you get in a room with other white people, start talking about welfare and single out black recipients? How do you justify such divisive talk on the campaign trail, even as you claim to be all about our equality and our common citizenship? Its racebaiting, and what makes it really insidious and repugnant in this instance is the routine nature of it.  That particular meme of black dependency on government is a standard staple of political discourse on the right, certainly within its more conservative wings, even though its not supported by the facts. Its a racial lie that has been perpetuated in just the way Santorum spreads it here.

Nobody in that room of good Iowa voters in there challenged that.  Indeed, Santorum got applause for those remarks, so clearly there were a significant number of the voters in that room who completely agreed with those comments.  Rick Santorum is a darling of the Tea Party, regarded as a consistent conservative after their own hearts.  He's the darling of aTea Party that vehemently denies any allegation that it is racially biased in any way whatsoever. Well,  here is an opportunity for the Tea Party to actually demonstrate its regard for African Americans as equal citizens worthy of the basic consideration of not being blanketly described as lazy, welfare parasites leeching the money of hard working white folks.  Repudiate these statements of Santorum's.  Publicly state that they are wrong and divisive. Demand that he apologize for them.  I'm not gonna hold my breath.  And if you're a Tea Party member and think these statements are okay, then I'm gonna tell you that you and the Tea Party do have racial bias when it comes to race if you buy into the stereotypes and assumptions implicit in Santorum's statements.

I'm betting that no one in the Tea Party movement will decry these statements or even criticize them in any but the most namby pamby of ways.  I'm betting none of his fellow candidates will say squat about these comments or take the opportunity to hammer him with them in political attack ads (though well they should).  On the contrary, to the extent anyone else in the party speaks to the comments, I'm betting they will either soft pedal their critique or more likely and worse, they will try to explain, using statistics, how blacks are heavily dependent on government welfare and that Santorum's comments are really accurate. But the facts are quite the opposite.  Whites receive far more welfare benefits than blacks.  Saying anything else is simply a divisive racially biased lie.  Unless of course you're Rick Santorum on the campaign trail in Iowa looking to get nice white conservative voters on your team. 

Happy New Year!

Yes, its January 3rd and I'm wishing you, dear reader, a happy new year.  I'm late, my apologies. You may have noticed I didn't do blog Christmas greetings at all either.  Truth is, I'm just not that motivated around the niceties of the holidays.  Simply not one of my strong suits.  But having just gotten off the road and being still a little wired from the trip, I figured I would fire something off.

I've been absent from the blogosphere for a real spell.  My last post was in November and I hadn't even really noticed its been that long.  I'm shocked at the length of my hiatus.  I've not been totally out of pocket, I was tweeting right on through that period pretty tough, but that's an indication of my malaise that I was really only up for 140 word bursts at a time for a very long stretch. 

The truth is that I'm not a particularly great blog writer in the sense that I work to push out some new content on a very regular schedule.  Truth is that I typically blog about stuff that is drawing a response from me.  While there has been a whole lot to respond to of late, I just have not been able to muster the energy for it, and well, I was busy with life stuff, cuz, I got one of those, fa real.

So its 2012 and I'm going to try to get back up on my horse.  Hope you had an awesome holidays and that 2012 is filled with promise and possibility for you.  Now lets get back to it.

Occupy Wall Street: Whatcha Gonna Do?

So, I've been watching this OWS thing and I think they've got a point about inequality, corporate overreach and corruption in the financial sector that is wrecking democracy. I'm down with protests and what not, but thats NOT ENOUGH.  Changing these issues for the better means opposing powerful, entrenched interests that fight back.  So whats needed are strategies and action items to create the outcomes desired by the movement.  I've got some ideas about what that is, but I don't have all the ideas.  So, I invite you dear reader to join me in crowdsourcing experiment to generate those strategies and action pieces.  I've got it started. Use this link to add your input to the Prezi below. Lets see where we end up.


The Occupy Wall Street movement has come to a cross roads.  If they are going to mature as a real movement that actually creates change effects in the real world, they have to articulate principles, derive strategies based on them and engage in tactics to implement those strategies.  This requires becoming more concrete, more specific, and prioritizing your issues.  The OWS movement folks in New York are resisting this.  They don't want to accept the constraints that come with making choices about whats important.  I consider this basically a natural maturation point for the movement and the turning point thats going to decide whether this movement becomes a true political/cultural/social force for change or devolves into not much more than a temporary spasm, a civic tantrum.

What the OWS folks are confronting is the need to put their beliefs into action in the real world beyond the parks and the state house lawns.  You can't stay in those places mentally or physically and change the world.  Its analogous to Christian faith in the church.  The great commission is to go out and reach the lost with the love of God.  You can't do that sitting in church alone. You gotta get out on your mission field, whatever that is, and take action. So too with OWS.

Boy Scouts Need Your Help to Support our Troops

Buy Popcorn at Noah's link  Buy Popcorn at Andrew's link

            Scout ID: 7057642               Scout ID:8919418

Noah and Andrew still need your support. Thank you to all who have supported them to date. They stand at about 40% of goal and still have some distance to cover.  They have until Friday to reach their goal. They ask everyone to buy popcorn for our men and women serving overseas in Iraq, Afghanistan and Africa especially. 

Noah's total: $131       Goal: $325  40%
Andrew's total: $139   Goal: $325  43%

  Help them get over the top.  Just follow the links above and make your purchase by Friday, Nov. 5th.    70% of your purchase supports Noah and Andrew and military donations go to the troops (No shipping charges to you!)  Please give them your support!

 

~ Message from Andrew and Noah ~

Hi.  My name is Noah and my brother is Andrew.  My brother and I are  proud Cub Scouts.  We are members of Pack 108 here in Fishers, Indiana.  We love scouting. We hike, go camping and learn how to be men of good character.  The cost of our scouting  is covered by popcorn sales.  Girl Scouts do cookies, Boy Scouts do popcorn!  Andrew and I have a sale's goal of $325 each.  This year, we are focusing on supporting our men and women in uniform who are serving in Afghanistan, Iraq and Africa.


You can help us support the troops and earn our way in Scouting. Just click Noah's link or Andrew's link below and place your order with Trail's End on our behalf.  70% of your purchase goes to support scouting and our soldiers serving far away from their families.  Thanks a lot for your support.  We love you and God bless you for helping us!