Look, overt racism is tough to stomach but the institutionalized racism like the laws against shining shoes on the street corner are still with us and are keeping people from having their own businesses. It's not just shining shoes, that's just a good example. Another would be requiring a taxi medallion that costs $100K, when all it takes to run a taxi is a car and a map. Another would be regulation against certain hair care products that black people like to use on their hair. It's insidious and hidden and awful.
http://blackhair.about.com/b/2010/05/05/will-illinoisd-hair-braiding-bill-affect-you.htm http://www.ij.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=830&Itemid=165
Weird. Seems very counterproductive. I could understand a license fee, because you know home based businesses aren't real big on paying income tax or collecting sales tax, but the educational requirement seems pretty silly. barfo
Truancy laws are especially egregious. Black families have to send their kids to shitty schools and don't have much say about picking a better one. Tell me why those schools are shitty.
I don't want to get more worked up, but I will say this thread aggravates me. Keep fighting the good fight Barfo.
Just came across this opinion piece. He makes many of the same arguments about Rand Paul that I've made in this thread. He also takes it a step or three further than I have. barfo
1. Paul is a racist moron. Only a racist moron would waste his breath argueing that he is not. 2. BP willfully caused the oil spill by deliberately violating numerous regulations enacted to prevent just this kind of global disaster. It was certainly not an accident anymore than a drunk driver plowing through a parking lot full of children is an accident. Choices were available, arrogant decisions were made, chaos followed. 3. Exxon also said they'd pay to clean up their spill, and 21 years later they are still manuevering to escape financial responsibility, and roughly 85% of the oil is still actively slaughtering wildlife and plants across the northern Pacific. You can't "clean up" an oil spill anymore than you could "clean up" Hiroshima the day after the blast. Offshore drilling is absolute insanity.
It might be because the students are shitty kids "raised" by shitty parents. In a libertarian society they wouldn't even have schools for black kids because no schools would receive tax funding and only the uber-wealthy would go to school. Black kids would be too busy mowing Denny Crane's lawn. That said, ALL schools are shitty. I grew up in LO, and the schools there were so shitty I was frequently correcting my teachers in basic subjects such as US History, English Lit and Social Studies. Libraries + personal desire to learn > school.
Sounds like something a racist moron might say. There is nothing shitty about these people, other than the inferior circumstances that society has forced upon them. I brought up black wall street. I've talked about Shorebank. The people of black wall street had the wealth to run their own schools as they saw fit - and did. The neighborhood boasted some of the top surgeons in the world (example of education?) at a time when there was no civil rights legislation (other than the 14th), and Jim Crow was going strong. Shorebank was started in a black community by the people there. When the white own banks redlined the neighborhood, the people pooled their money together and made a bank that did give out loans to the people living there. The results were remarkable, and the neighborhood became quite awesome. The common theme among these two stories, and many others, is that people thrive without the intrusion of government, and the converse is true where some outsiders claim to know what's best for people and intervene using government. But thank goodness for big government. It's saved us from oil spills and stock market crashes and kept people from losing their homes to foreclosure and kept our banks from needing massive bailouts, etc., etc. If only we had more of it, we'd be better off!
Your NYTimes "piece" (of ... you know) misstates Paul's position as well. Did he conspicuously avoid saying that he would have voted for the bill?
Yes, he did. Maddow asked him about the lunch counter portion of the bill about a half-dozen times, and he was evasive and refused to answer the question, much as you refused to answer the question the half-dozen or so times I asked you. It's not hard to figure out what the two of you are hiding, and why. Is he now telling the truth that he would have voted for it? If so why didn't he say that in the first place? He had ample opportunity to do so. barfo
fwiw, here's the actual Maddow transcript: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/right-now/2010/05/rand_paul_telling_the_truth.html
Basically, Rand says, "I'd have supported 9 of the 10 titles of the civil rights act. Not the 10th one that allows the federal government to control what happens in a private business. That's because once you allow that, the feds can dictate things like that same private business owner has to allow firearms in, even if it's dangerous and bad for his business. I might have signed it anyway, though, because sometimes you have to live with bad aspects of good legislation. All this doesn't really matter anyway, because it's all ancient history." Personally, I think his view is well outside mainstream thought. I think most Americans like the idea of banning discrimination, even in private businesses. And it's not ancient history and never will be, as long as bigoted Americans run businesses that provide services to minorities. Also, just reading the transcript, he seems pretty lousy at communicating his point. It's a pretty cut-and-dry perspective communicated in a pretty convoluted way.
I can't decide which type of Libertarian politician Paul is. Type one has knee-jerk hostility to government, combined with blind faith in other powers. (eg "free markets", or "human decency") They hold government action to an absurd standard - anything that is not 100% successful, is a 100% failure. (eg civil rights laws are a failure because racism still exists) Type two are the one who take Paul's namesake seriously. They raise selfishness and social Darwinism to a religion. They consider concepts like "community" and "responsiblity" to be dirty words. His stand on civil rights makes me think he is the former. His stand on corporate responsibility makes me fear he is the latter.
