"E pluribus unum": There is only one national anthem for America!
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the Black National Anthem respectfully preceded it...and so long as there are constant examples of racism here in this country, as well as leaders who try to sweep any learning of it under the rug, this anthem needs to be sung.
Make no mistake...Black Americans love this country...just not the racists...the closing lines to that anthem are..
."May we forever stand.
True to our GOD,
True to our native land"
Black Americans are loyal and committed to "America".
Link: https://sos.sdes.ucf.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/62/2019/01/Lift20Every20Voice20and20Sing1.pdf
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Like when you advocated to exclude people from entry into a play because they had the wrong skin color?
Maybe stop being racist and we could just all share one anthem.
Why do people put up with this?
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Aside from being extremely weird that we have a song that is specifically for one race, isn't it another line of division?
How many opportunities do we have to come together and all be on the same team? Despite all our differences, the National Anthem was that opportunity. Even that has been taken away.
themselves brings us together. Remember how black and white both prayed for Dimar Hamlin?
national anthem.
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We're deciding that it's reasonable to have to bribe groups of people into unity? Where does that end?
And Tyrone sings it in falsetto at the super bowl.
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nerds.
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Also, it's better than kneeling.
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Why not surprise us by positing a coherent argument for your position instead...maybe even your own argument rather than posting a link to someone else's loosely related argument?
Why is separating people by color something that is acceptable?
And most players in the NFL are black, I wouldn't die on this hill.
If you are going justify discrimination and/or special treatment based on skin color, to what extent will you justify it? Where do you draw the line?
And do you have any concerns that this sows the seeds of continued division along racial lines? If not this, how do you determine when those seeds are being scattered?
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I am asking philosophical questions. Ideas are worth more that these individual subjects. I'm asking about ideas.
I was raised to believe that people should not be discriminated against, nor receive special treatment based on the color of their skin. I've seen no evidence that suggests that is the wrong philosophy to adopt. In this circumstance, having a separate anthem is special treatment. But I'm not even asking about that, am I?
If this is acceptable, what isn't? How do you determine what isn't? In my view, if you are justifying any of it, things get real blurry when you are trying to determine where that line should be drawn. How do we make the distinction between justifiable disparate treatment of race and treatment that is not justified?
And I'm okay with a degree of disparate treatment in the other direction as a leveling mechanism. In fact if you don't overshoot a little, you may never find a level, which is the goal, equality.
1) Bad behavior in the past justified bad behavior in the present
2) We have to somehow balance out the disparate treatment.
My first reaction is "how the fuck do we balance out slavery?" And second, "what is it that you and I and millions of others did that needs balancing out?"
And of course you know that neither of those things answer my question. How do you know when you have balanced out the disparate treatment properly? How do you avoid overshooting it more than a little? What prevents anyone from overshooting it more than a little when you can find a way to justify any of it? Who decides all this?
I am really not sure why this bothers you so much. Also not sure why a pregnant looking Rihanna bothers you so much. Or why people are mad at the woke NFL.
My advice, save your angst for shit that matters, this really doesn't in the grand scheme of things.
I don't know who this Perry dude is that had the commercial making all the Dems fat, I thought it was kind of funny. But I'm sure he'll be accused of fat shaming or something. But most of this stuff doesn't affect regular folks. Any more than the loons on the right affect regular folks.
But if I was to sit down and come up with a list of the top 100 problems with America today, the black national anthem wouldn't make the list.
I made it very clear why I'm bothered by the black national anthem, although I would argue against the idea that I consider it a big deal.
I would say that I'm bothered "so much" by the fact that I can't ever seem to get answers to what I believe are fair questions. People state opinions that seem to be riddled with problems, but they also don't want to be accountable for explaining themselves well enough to clear up those problems.
I'm bothered "so much" that you can introduce the idea that bad behavior in the past justifies bad behavior in the present and then make a random, false claim about my opinion of Rihanna. To be clear, I'm not bothered at all about the false claim. I'm bothered because it seems like a distraction technique to steer the conversation in another direction. (It worked. Well done.)
And mostly, I would prefer if people would just respond with " I don't know, man" rather than lead me down a rabbit hole where I learn literally nothing. You don't have to care about thos topic. You responded, I thought you might have a unique perspective. Instead, you just leave me with even more questions and another example that people are mostly just acting by reacting.
Again, doesn't make the top 100. And I don't think this is "bad behavior" it's an attempt to unify after riots and social unrest following murders of black people by the police. At it's worst it's harmless, it's not "bad behavior".
The riots and violence and social unrest make the top 100, this does not. And I'm not arguing the legitimacy of the BLM movement or whether it may have gone too far.
Players were kneeling for the national anthem, this is the compromise and I am completely fine with it.
I thought the suspended platforms were cool and I appreciated that pregnant Rihanna didn't shake her ass all over the screen while I watched with my teenage daughters. Those shows have been known to turn into stripper shows. I liked that this show didn't do that. I assumed you misinterpreted it which is why I specified that I didn't care about it.
I'd argue that there is a big difference about not caring about something and calling something fine. The black national anthem may not rank all that high on your list of priorities, but it's also not fine.
Do you ever wonder if thoughts and ideas can be senescent? Like, if I can justify one corrupt idea, what else can I justify? And how does my acceptance of that idea affect my processing of other ideas?
A Google search indicates it has something to do with cellular biology and cancer.
I think or perhaps hope that society is self-correcting I think of it like a PID loop that is not properly tuned. There will be overshoots and undershoots, but progress is made over time. Race relations are better now than they were in the 1960s, which were a whole lot better than the 1860s. I see the playing of the black national anthem before the national anthem at a sporting event dominated by black athletes as progress over athletes kneeling for the national anthem. I think it promotes unity and I don't think it is necessarily a slippery slope.
They excrete toxins that damage the cells around them. I have been thinking of corrupt ideas as being senscent, but it's not a great analogy because it's more about processing than the idea itself.
The term I am using "senescent idea," works for brevity, but I think the better analogy would be something like misunderstanding spelling rules.
Example: "I before E except after C." If I use that rule, I end up writing the word 'wierd.' That's not right. Rather than going back and understanding why I've made the mistake I have, I instead add to the rule to make my answer work. 'I before E except after C and W." Liesure. Fuck. "I before E except after C and W and L." Now I've got this new rule to justify my misspelling of the word weird, and because of this rule, I'm not only spelling it as 'wierd' but I'm misspelling a ton of other words as well.
I don't know, I'm grasping to explain the idea. Maybe it's like I see the world one way and then I put on blue tinted glasses. At some point, I don't know what red is anymore. If you ask me what color a thing is, I'm getting it wrong constantly because the way I'm processing colors has become corrupted.
This isn't a fully formed idea so I'm sure it seems like incoherent rambling. I'm thinking about it from multiple angles. I posted the related quote from Gandhi yesterday. I think about it in terms of Romans 12...the verse about the renewing of the mind. In this case, I'm obviously concerned with the idea that if we are justifying any racial divide, that we are capable of justifying it on a much larger scale. Does a minor flaw in our thought process impact our processing of multiple ideas in the long term?
The problem with the PID loop analogy is that humans aren't nearly as predictable as a software process. We see that thoughts can turn into pretty extreme behaviors, which I think we'd like to avoid. And we also see that we are reversing course. Black Americans polled in the late 90s by and large felt race was not an issue in their daily lives. That has drastically shifted over the past few years. It's gotten worse for those people that are polled now.
That analogy also doesnt reduce down to each individual all that well. Societal thinking is just part of the larger question.
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Link: https://youtu.be/FZ4q-wQ-w7I
MUCH better. Gallup shows this. The NYT showed it. You can find 100 of these polls. We have been pushing racial division over the last several years and it's reflected in how Americans feel about race relations today vs 25 years ago. I'm not making this stuff up.
We haven't gotten more racist since the late 90s so what is actually happening?
Link: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1687/race-relations.aspx
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