It's just a word (no it isn't)

So I went for an impromptu drink tonight with a couple of people from
work. One girl is leaving to go back to england after a few months
here on a project, and another guy who I met a few years back is
over for a week to go on a stag-do for a guy who I used to study
Spanish with in the UK.




Anyway a good time was had by all and after 4 beers I decided to call it an evening and head back
and me and the leaving girl left at the same time. So anyway we were having a nice little chat about
nothing much on the way to the train station and I hear a voice:

" I really hate niggers though, I just can't stand black people."

So I'm a mild mannered enough person, and I decided to let it go but then I hear this voice following
us down the street. Well you can piss me off once and I might let it go, but this drunk pathetic
motherfucker piece of shit kept saying it. So I turned around, walked up to him and looked him in the
eyes. "Listen you piece of shit. If I wasn't with this girl you'd be lying on the floor right now. Turn
around and walk away before I kick the shit out of you"

It's amazing how quickly this bastard changed his tune, but he still wasn't playing anything I wanted
to hear. "Oh I didn't mean anything, personal. It's nothing against you, I just don't like black people."

Me: "it's everything to to with me you fucking arsehole." So I pushed him - it was the most I could do
not to punch and keep punching until he would be bleeding and crying so much that he wouldn't be
able to say another word for months.

There's no point to this, other than I need to vent, and it's amazing to me how just one word, that I
can hear in a rap song or in passing from 2 brothers on the street and not think twice about can
conjure up so many playground fights where me and my brother would unite and fight against stupid
kids repeating what their parents had said the night before; can send me into a blind rage, where I
just want to kill someone, but that's the way it is.

I calmed down pretty quickly, and the girl said "The funny thing is, my middle name's nigger (sic)"

Haha, every cloud.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7wiuG7uego

Guns

So apparently there was a shooting in my hood tonight. I've been working way too many late nights recently and I decided to go out and blow off some steam with some workmates in SoHo. Then when I got back to my road I saw that there was a cop car parked around the corner from my house, and some flourescent tape blocking off the end of the block.

I assumed there'd been a car accident or something and I stopped off to get a soda from the deli on the corner. From what I could tell from the upset girl in the shop, it seemed that someone had done a drive-by and had hit a fast-food delivery driver and another guy in the arm.
So anyway, while this is pretty freaky and definitely doesn't occur very often back at home, at the end of the day it doesn't make me scared. It was definitely a score-settling. Why would you do a drive-by unless the guy owed you money? I feel really bad for the delivery driver though - I hope he wasn't from my local!

Anyway I digress - what's with this x amendment right to own a gun? Wasn't that written during the times of the Minutemen, when there was the need to defend the newly born Republic from remonarchisation by the oppresive British? Not to mention the Native Americans, or the imported African and Chinese plantation and railroad workers. There's really no need for civilian guns anymore.

Okay so I'm not anti-hunting or anything. I don't get buzzed by the idea of hunting for the sake of killing an animal, but it's not something I've ever done either so I'm pretty laissez-faire about it. So let all the hunters in states where you can go out shooting animals keep their shotguns. But seriously, who really needs a handgun to defend themselves unless it's from someone else with another handgun? And don't even get me started on assault rifles.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkuOAY-S6OY

Ignorance is Bliss (aka what you don't know can't hurt you)

So I was in the bar a couple of Fridays ago, and talking with 2 of my colleagues, who shall remain nameless. We were discussing current events and one of them said "I don't really watch the news". I kind of didn't believe him - thought he was trying to give off an air of cynicism ("maybe he only reads blogs, or maybe he is addicted to NPR"). But no, I found out today he was being absolutely truthful, as he asked me what was going on in Iran that he'd seen something about while passing by a news stand.

I proceeded to give him a 5-minute summary of the events of the last weeks events, skilfully (or so I thought, smugly) relating them to US foreign policy and the overthrow of the government by the CIA in the 1950s, and pointing out that because of Twitter and YouTube, both American inventions, that the revolution was not televised, but digitised. He seemed to appreciate that I was so keen to share my knowledge of the situation with him, but I also got the impression that he really didn't care, that he couldn't even see the dots that could be joined between this distant land and his own life working as a consulting engineer in the big city.

For him, hailing from the MidWest and working in the Big Apple, life is probably daunting enough without worrying about some innocent protestors being murdered on the street by their own police for protesting at an obviously rigged election in a pseudo-democratic dictatorship, with legitimate grievances against his nation. This is the same guy who didn't vote for Obama, not because he didn't think he was the better candidate, but because Obama was a shoo-in in both NY and Michigan, and he didn't think that adding his vote to the many others to bestow as great a mandate as possible was worth taking 4 hours out of his day.

But I'm not here to condemn, only to diagnose. We Europeans have a sterotypical view of the US as insular self-obsessed people, who too often fail to see or care about the consequences of their actions on others, or come to terms with the possibility that American exceptionalism is not just born of entrepreneurial initiative and their blessed constitution (written by rich, slave-holding male land owners, and so perfect it has been amended umpteen times), but due to the fact this resource rich land was stolen from its native population, and worked by unpaid slaves for hundreds of years to gain its wealth.

So of course, the truth is somewhere inbetween what we think of them, and what they think of themselves. This is a country where a mixed-race man can become president, but also a country where a supreme court justice nominee with more judicial experience than anyone else can be labelled a racist for expressing the opinion that her poor upbringing and experience as a Latina woman could give her a different (better?) perspective than an old white male born into money.

I don't think you can blame people for not wanting to know about other countries if their upbringing and education has never related their own nation's history to other places on the globe. This is simultaneously a strength and a weakness.

So what is my point here? If you don't bother to investigate someone else's motives for doing something, then you will never understand why they act the way they do, or why they think what they do about you. If this works for you then cool, carry on your own way, my dear cousins. But you'll be missing out on something special.

Ah that was cheesy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6IQxhkVIEw

What's with all the torture?

Okay this really gets my goat, or however the expression goes.

We know it happened, we know it was authorised. So prosecute someone already. I can't believe people aren't more pissed off about this.

Look it's like this - Obama's not gonna do anything cos he's got so much more shit to push through in this administration, and he wants some Republicans to support it. In my view he's wasting his time since they have opposed every major piece of legislation he's proposed so far, but I get it - spirit of bipartisanship and all that malarkey.

The only way to guarantee things get done in government, is for people to get so pissed off about something that it will cost votes to oppose it. So the American people need to get angry about this. Ok I get that it's a shameful thing, and people in this country (and the West in general) don't like talking about shameful things (re: slavery, annihilating indigenous populations, exploiting the third world), but this is not something that you can brush under the carpet - it's not going away. People died.

It's like the whole Iraq war thing. People were all gung ho about it when it kicked off, like "USA USA" shit, and then when it was costing thousands of lives, and $10B a month, people started getting all antsy. Even Obama opposed it only as a strategic blunder. That's not the point! No-one has a right to invade a sovereign nation except in self-defence.

Empires rise and fall and I think this one's falling right now. You just have to look at the facts, all the indications that are being indicated by the indicator, or whatever that Bush guy used to say. But there's an opportunity to strengthen the framework that makes sure the next empire (China) doesn't completely fuck you over when they snatch the baton. These are embodied in the UN and the Geneva convention, so start playing by the rules and you'll be able to call someone out if they break them too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4E0UtxI7b0