What Black Lives Matter has to say about the Smollet case
I wonder how many people who say they support BLM are aware of the sort of position taken by one the organization’s LA founders.
And I wonder, if they are aware, whether they care [emphasis mine]:
“It’s not about a trial or a verdict decided in a white supremacist charade, it’s about how we treat our community when corrupt systems are working to devalue their lives,” the co-founder of BLM’s Los Angeles chapter said in a statement released Tuesday.
She said that Smollett should not be on trial, explaining: “We find ourselves, once again, being forced to put our lives and our value in the hands of judges and juries operating in a system that is designed to oppress us, while continuing to face a corrupt and violent police department, which has proven time and again to have no respect for our lives.”
“In our commitment to abolition [of the police], we can never believe police, especially the Chicago Police Department (CPD) over Jussie Smollett, a Black man who has been courageously present, visible, and vocal in the struggle for Black freedom.”
Taking a definitive stance, Abdullah said: “While policing at-large is an irredeemable institution, CPD is notorious for its long and deep history of corruption, racism, and brutality.”
“Chicago police consistently demonstrate that they are among the worst of the worst. Police lie and Chicago police lie especially.”
So there you have it. The police and the legal system are the enemy. Everything is stacked against black people. The facts and the trial and the evidence and the rule of law don’t matter. There is no rule of law. The individual cases don’t matter; the black person is by definition innocent and the police always lie.
One of many obvious results of this kind of rhetoric is the stoking of the anger of career criminals such as Darrell Brooks, the Waukesha murderer who apparently bought that sort of line. It’s simultaneously exculpatory and inflammatory – you, the criminal, aren’t guilty; you are the victim of racists who hate you.
And yet the PR of Black Lives Matter has been so good for so long, with incredible amounts of money being donated both by ordinary citizens and by virtue-signaling corporations, that the BLM line might just be one of the greatest and most dangerous con games in US history.
Which isn’t to say the Chicago police are angels. They are not. But what Abdullah describes is way over the top.
By the way, Abdullah has quite a personal background:
Melina Rachel Reimann [her birth name] was born on September 18, 1972 at East Oakland, Oakland, California, U.S. Her father, John Reimann, was “a union organizer and self-proclaimed Trotskyist.” Her mother is Linda Fowler Blackston and she was raised by Oji “Baba” Blackston. Her paternal grandfather was Günter Reimann (born Hans Steinicke), a German-Jewish Marxist economist and member of the Communist Party of Germany who opposed Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich.
She graduated from Howard University, where she earned a bachelor’s of arts (B.A.) degree in African American Studies. She subsequently earned a master’s degree (M.A.) and doctoral degree (PhD.) in political science from the University of Southern California. Reimann changed her surname to Abdullah due to her marriage to filmmaker Phaylen Abdullah and kept the name after their divorce.
“Abdullah” is certainly much better for her street creds than “Reimann.” And this is no surprise:
[Melina] Abdullah is a supporter of Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam.
Of course.
If Smollet is innocent, then those two Nigerians must be guilty, right?
BLM is, and has been from the beginning, a racket, quite possibly the most successful and “most dangerous con game” in our history. BLM rests on a foundation of falsehoods (first Trayvon, followed by Michael Brown in Ferguson, and then by countless other cases in which the victim brought about his own demise by acting stupidly through ingesting drugs or resisting arrest, etc). I can still recall, from almost ten years ago, reading the initial iteration of BLM’s unhinged “manifesto” (since scrubbed more than once, and altered numerous times) and realizing that it read as if cobbled together from an RCP tract of many decades ago and a revolutionary diatribe from the Black Panthers. How such an odious group of radicals managed such a lucrative shakedown of corporate America and of countless other organizations is indeed a curious question.
To the extent that BLM isn’t a grift, it expresses the notion that blacks are an aristocratic stratum and that police officers and ordinary jurors are getting above themselves passing judgment on them. People like Larry Krasner buy into this, differing in that they fancy the status of blacks is conferred by persons such as themselves, while black chauvinists fancy they have it from birth. Note the neuralgic objections to ‘all lives matter’ or ‘it’s OK to be white’.
White liberals and black chauvinists are bad actors. The question is how do our public institutions function with so many bad actors actively promoting injustice.
If black lives really mattered to these creeps, they would be tutoring them, teaching them basic life skills like cooking, repairing Goodwill furniture to furnish their first apartment, and managing money. They really don’t care about the lives black kids will live, but they sure like making money off them.
If black lives really mattered to these creeps, they would be tutoring them, teaching them basic life skills like cooking, repairing Goodwill furniture to furnish their first apartment, and managing money. They really don’t care about the lives black kids will live,
You can say that about rank-and-file partisan Democrats. They advocate flat nothing which is practically beneficial to blacks or addresses the disagreeable distinction in the state of that population v. the rest of the population. You cannot get them to think about it. Everything is about their attitudinizing and their emotional processing and their hostility to others. There is NO value whatsoever to the racial discourse in the Democratic Party, in the media, in the teachers colleges. None. Nada. Zippo. It is 100% poisonous and the people responsible have no shame and little self-understanding.
In this explosive political climate, I’m not convinced that it’s entirely wise for the current ascendancy to be vigorously making and mandating affirmations about anything they would wish to make permanent and accepted fact.
Even the most retarded MAGA Hat Barcalounger Let’s Go Brandoner is going to awaken one morning with a start and smell burning and utter (despite all his conditioning) “But do they?”
So my takeaway is that not everyone who opposed Hitler and the Nazis was a hero.
Heros are few and far between.
And he sure as shit has gotten his revenge upon us all.
Si monumentum requiris, circumspice.
BLM is, and has been from the beginning, a racket, quite possibly the most successful and “most dangerous con game” in our history.
j e:
I think it’s important to note that BLM is not a one-off black power group which happened to emerge in the past five years. I call it Mark 4 of the hard left’s long-term campaign to subvert America.
Mark 1: Straight socialist/communist parties [1900-early sixties]
Mark 2: The New Left/Black Power [early sixties-late nineties]
Mark 3: WTO/Occupy Wall Street [1999-2012]
Mark 4: BLM/Antifa [2016-present]
Dates aren’t bright lines. What’s to remember is that these are the same people, just different generations. They maintain a shared heritage and keep refining their strategy/tactics to fit the needs of the time. It doesn’t take much effort to trace BLM/Antifa back to Occupy Wall Street and the New Left.
You are correct that BLM really hit the bullseye.
A couple of us were joking and speculating about the verdicts.
Detective “Mohammed” and Officer “Kimberly” filed 5 of the charges and Smollet was found guilty on all of those. Detective “Robert Graves” authored the sixth charge, which was rejected by the jury.
We theorized that charges brought by Black (and female?) officers were sustained. Whereas Robert Graves might be a White guy (does anyone know?).
Many people assumed this would be an OJ style trial and the defendant would get off. So we needed a reason to explain the result.
@JimNorCal:
Sir… You’re possessed of Powerful Medicine.
You’ll thrive in this present world! 😛
*brandishes someone’s femur appreciatively*
This abdullah gal is the perfect example of those who should be deported.
Given she is a marxist, I just can’t imagine why she would not want to live in Cuba.
The contempt these frustrated, angry, bigots have for this nation is so deep seated and profound that there is absolutely nothing that could be done in this nation to satisfy these hateful scum.
Every step taken to assuage dog excrement like her just means she will move another two paces further to the left and make even more demands.
You see, folks like her – motivated by her hate of “whitey” – believe that equality of outcome is achievable, provided the correct policies are enacted.
But equality of outcome is a fantasy, a utopian dream and when abdullah see’s outcomes that differ, she will ultimately enact ever more brutal and murderous means to achieve the unachievable.
It would never end.
If I could check off a box for a voluntary donation to a Federal “deportation fund” on my tax returns I would gladly oblige; provided permanent loss of US citizenship is required and the deportees are never again allowed to step foot in the USA.
Correcting racial economic imbalance, by elevating certain Black lives to the ranks of the wealthy.
It’s working, you racist bastards!
John Tyler:
I don’t know if I agree about Abdullah. First of all, she’s bi-racial, so if she hates white people she hates her own Trotskyite dad, and yet she seems to have taken up his cause. I actually think she’s embraced being blacker-than-thou because it gets her fame and fortune.
Whether she’s a grifter and a true believer, or just a grifter, I’m not certain.
Huxley, nice summary of the stages.
The anarchists that attacked the WTO meeting in Seattle in 1999 were primarily students, student dropouts, and professors from Eugene OR. This was the beginning of Antifa. During the so-called Battle of Seattle, they instituted many of the tactics now common with Antifa. It was the first time I had seen rioters with hammers used exclusively for breaking store and car windows. They didn’t do any looting. It was destruction for destruction’s sake. It was the first time I saw rioters with knee pads and gloves to protect them. They simply identified themselves as anarchists then. They were anti-government, anti-free trade, and anti-business. They developed an organization that spread from Eugene, and they overlapped with Occupy Wall Street. When Trump was elected, the adopted anti-fascism as their cause. I sensed that they were Marxist at the beginning, but no one was calling them that. Nor are many right now.
They have made common cause with BLM because both share a hatred of democratic government and capitalism. Should they succeed in overthrowing our system, they will undoubtedly then turn on one another.
JImNorCal:
I don’t think that’s it. I was listening to Robert Barnes talk about the Smollet verdict. He’s as cynical and realistic as they come. He said the last charge was qualitatively different than the others. It was about something Smollett said to an officer two weeks after the initial report, and had to do with wearing masks. The other 5 charges came from the first interviews and were more substantive.
There is a thrill and anger that permeates the BLM/Antifa crowd. I might understand their goals if they changed how they lived (6 houses) and had an actual cause, for example the ‘French Resistance’. You cannot reach goals that have no end game. As we saw with ‘Chaz’ it didn’t last long and some supporters died.
Abdullah’s comments do make sense, especially when you consider that Jussie blamed the two Nigerians for his predicament.
Black Lives Matter — as stalking horses for power-mongering.
You can’t improve their lives. Then they would stop being good stalking horses.
Buy Large Mansions. Watch your back Abdulla; Marat’s last bath and all that. Or Trotsky in Mexico.
And now CNN’s Don Lemon is throwing Juicy under the bus. It’s a refrain I’ve heard elsewhere today: Juicy has hurt ALL gay people with his hoax. He must pay.
But…Juicy was inside! A friend of Obama, a protege of Kamala and countless other Progressive Insiders! Now he’s cast out by another gay brother.
Of course, Don has his problems too…..his case is going to be working its way through the courts, and there are rumors of big changes coming at CNN…
First the untouchable machine Democrat Coumo, then his younger, protected brother, now Juicy. All these red-carpet folks getting taken out like the trash. The rest are suddenly starting to squeak when they think it might help, and looking around warily for the crocodile, who’s getting hungry again.
Going back 13 years ago when I was trying to give back and being a retired old man substitute teacher in South Dallas i thought I knew all of the answers and wanted to make a little bit of difference, Holy shit, I didn’t have eat answers, I had not idea about what the questions should be. We have generations of feral kids, smart, bright kids raised by peer groups with limited expectations, a sense of being on the wrong side of the color spectrum and strong sense of equality when reality turns against them. I had a 15 year old young woman 8th grader who had two children and young 8th grader 16 year old men who had several children being raised by the grandmothers of their baby mommas. I did not last but a couple of months because I could not relate of reach out to any of these children and they were children making more lovely children who would be raised by their grandmothers.
Black Lives do Matter but those lives will not be mad better by the bull shit going on right now. I don’t have any idea how this stuff can be turned around and these are precious children being thrown into the pit of the fire of equity.
I missed the time limit on editing, sorry about that.
@OldTexan:
It’s a tragedy. What passes for kindness today is Cruelty.
tcrosse (4:34 pm) asks, plaintively (I conjecture), “If Smollett is innocent, then those two Nigerians must be guilty, right?”
Here’s the way it looks to this Caucasian dude [me]:
Smollett is asserting “p”, and the Nigerians are asserting “~p” [negation of p]. Invoking the law of excluded middle, most of us can confidently assert “p OR ~p”, i.e., one or the other must be correct.
But the law of excluded middle is Aristotelian logic — *white* logic. This b.l.m. dame Abdullah not only is not using white logic, she consciously and actively flouts it. She and her comrades use their own “logic”. When black people are involved, if necessary,
“p AND ~p” can (even “must”!) hold if the circumstance demands it — whatever is needed.
But really, I’m not going to get sucked (any farther) into their insanity. I’m going to segue into a trivial incident I witnessed at a local supermarket five days ago.
It was a funny incident, and there were three people in the aisle who saw it: I, my wife, and a good-natured black guy. All three of us enjoyed a hearty laugh. I know it’s very trite, but we all were jes’ *folks*, enjoying a good laugh. I have no idea how the black guy votes, he had no idea how I vote or how my wife votes. It could not matter less.
I have no idea whether he’s a b.l.m. supporter — ummm, hold that. I do have an idea. He has a sense of humor and a sense of the absurd, and therefore I am convinced he’s not a b.l.m. supporter.
Okay, time to exit the anecdote. But you-all get my drift . . .
John Tyler,
“This abdullah gal is the perfect example of those who should be deported.
Currently our choices are fourfold; 1) revocation of citizenship followed by mandatory deportation, 2) imprisonment for treason as they are declared enemies of the Constitution, 3) Civil War in order to enact the first two or 4) surrender to the imposition of 1984’s “thought crime” regime.
J.J.,
“They have made common cause with BLM because both share a hatred of democratic government and capitalism. “
Which makes them our mortal enemies.
JHCorcoran,
Oh, though they may not be able to articulate it, they do have an end game; to watch the world burn and rule over the ashes.
OldTexan,
“We have generations of feral kids…”
20 odd years ago I read a prescient article in the local newspaper’s “Parade Section” in which the sociologist author observed that we were raising generations of “moral savages”. Today’s daily and weekly attacks by gangs upon the elderly, wheelchair bound and bus drivers bears out that prediction in chilling detail.
In the 40s, my Dad then in the army reluctantly got into a fight at a bar with another guy who had three friends with him. They took the fight outside. Dad was a former amateur State boxing camp in his weight division. After he knocked the guy down a few times, his buddies stepped in and told their friend, “come on, this guys too good for you”. None of his buddies attacked or even threatened my Dad. As you well know, it was considered cowardly to gang up on someone. You fought your own battles.
Today it’s the rule of the pack, the law of the jungle. That’s what BLM and antifa engage in, justifying it as what the deplorables deserve.
Kinda long post here. This blog provides for me posters that offer: measured, sane, smart, often funny takes on current events and culture. I’ve read it for years but only recently jumped in a little.
There were two recent YouTubes that were of genuine comfort; but about our highly troubling times. One where the guest clearly states that we face serious collective psychosis. Yikes! How to Protect Yourself from Toxic Beliefs & Tech | Eckhart Tolle | SPIRITUALITY | Rubin Report https://youtu.be/drrLeWCOmCg
The other similar warning forecast was on Firing Line with Margaret Hoover (mixed feelings about her show) Her guest, artist Ai Weiwei states that in the U.S. we are most certainly facing a shift to fully totalitarian control, via our media. He also makes many other claims that might be triggering, but has a highly interesting perspective. At about 16:26
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/firing-line/video/ai-weiwei-1lcijj/
So my post doesn’t hit at BLM directly but these two disparate voices offered a type of solace and insight that is extremely helpful while looking at recent Antifa, BLM, and well just crazy agitprop Blue Check nonsense, scary lies “narrative “ rhetoric…. Hope this isn’t too wildly off topic. More directly on topic; BLM has actually helped any Black community? Barely, if at all. Jussie is in continuous sanctimonious cognitive dissonance, aka as a boorish kook.
@Copperdawg:
Thanks for the Ai Weiwei link.
Notice that at 16:26 he dares not actually give a concrete example of forbidden topics in the West and veers off into philosophising and generalising.
This is no criticism of him. He’s already persona non grata in China. Can’t blame him for not wanting it to happen to him again in the West.
Obviously I’m sympathetic to his view that the West lacks the internal strength to handle China at present.
Interesting guy. I wonder if he’ll end up like Solzhenitsyn, more ignored in exile than at home because the folks who welcomed him expecting him to say what they wanted to hear about their Enemy didn’t like what he had to say about *them*?
Mind you, when he says nice things about ‘Climate Change’ and ‘Refugees’, he can go @#$% himself 😛
@Zaphod. I was most intrigued by his stating The West is veering-or is in (!) totalitarian zone. He’s all over the place in his remarks
So, far from topic of BLM directly excepting that no one is allowed to be frank or objective…lately. Those two videos were on my mind a lot recently.
@Copperdawg:
“He’s all over the place in his remarks”
So am I… So am I!
You know what they say about A Foolish Consistency? 🙂
I don’t believe he’s right about everything he believes and says and doubtless nor am I myself ditto.
However when dealing with living history and massive forces and changes in motion, simple models won’t work for understanding evolving new realities. You can’t *see* the whole Elephant. All you can do is get everybody busy throwing excrement at it and see what sticks… or doesn’t hit the bits of the backdrop it’s blocking off. Carry on long enough and you might just limn (thanks from way back GvdL) the Beast (*).
* Probably Cthulu. Usually is.
“How such an odious group of radicals managed such a lucrative shakedown of corporate America and of countless other organizations is indeed a curious question.”
Same way Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton did before them. This is not a new phenomenon. Had it been resisted when it started, we wouldn’t be on the brink of civil war.
MJR wrote: Invoking the law of excluded middle, most of us can confidently assert “p OR ~p”, i.e., one or the other must be correct.
Thanks MJR. I thought about it, and I’ll be more circumspect since I read this:
https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1209852/systems-without-the-law-of-excluded-middle
There is both a use and a deeper implication. Let me start with the deeper implication. At the beginning of the 20th century, there was a so-called foundational crisis in mathematics. Out of this, several schools of philosophy of mathematics emerged, one of which was intuitionism, fronted by L. E. J. Brouwer. Brouwer’s idea was that mathematics is a creation of the humand mind and exists only in people’s minds. Hence, he only accepted those mathematical truths which could be constructed in some sense. Now, the problem with the law of excluded middle (LEM) from this point of view, is that it allows you to make use of the reductio ad absurdum (RAA) proof technique which in turn allows you to prove things without actually constructing the thing you are proving. Essentially, RAA argues that since it can not be the case that ¬P, using LEM it must be the case that P, but it does not actually give a way to construct P
This is a fairly esoteric and philosophical discussion, but it turns out to actually have some use. When we have a constructive proof, i.e. a proof that actually constructs what is to be proven, the proof also gives a procedure or an algorithm for doing this construction. Think of the Gram-Schmidt process, for example….
From the NY Post via Insty on Darcy on Smollet.
https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/490493/
Oliver Darcy opines…
“Propagandists,” Darcy continues, “know that their power increases substantially when they can convince their audiences not to trust other sources of information. And so, Smollett’s case is very valuable to them.”
[…]
“When you cannot argue on the facts, it is much easier to dismiss a story in its entirety and go after the credibility of the press for reporting on it. It’s the timeless play — one that played on repeat during the Trump administration . . .”
And he’s correct, but projects everything onto his political enemies.
Didn’t Tom Wolfe write a pretty good book about these clowns? I think it was “Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers” if I’m not mistaken–damn prophetic too. Just like in the movie “Network” where you have the marxist black lady (Mao Tse Tung Hour) negotiating with the TV network lawyers for “points”–just like Patrisse Cullors (BLM co-founder) signing a contract with Warner Brothers. You can’t make this sh*t up & I dare ya to try.
AppleBetty, that’s interesting. RAA seems essentially equivalent to the apophatic approach in theology.
Welcome, Copperdawg. Are you in copper country?
I wonder if Ms Abdullah has considered the idea that people who obey the law and behave themselves do not often find themselves at the mercy of judges an juries. It makes no difference to them if they are racist or whatever, except in the abstract.
Or maybe she has considered that the folk she wants to “help” cannot be taught something like this, and is taking the low road.
Another Mike: Good points!
(I do wish this blog had a way to be notified of replies. Not that mine is important, this time. Just saying!)
The war is over people. Stop howling at blm and choose. Your fate awaits.
The “law of the included middle”?
https://rabbipaulplotkin.medium.com/you-are-right-too-3fb868544e4d
Phillip Sells and Barry Meislin, Thank you very much. I will think about what you’ve written.
AppleBetty (9:48 am), yes, I have delved into Brouwer’s (and successors’) work for four decades now. However, I figured I wouldn’t indulge that delving in my comment on Dame Abdullah [smile]! — But I’m glad you went there, since now I know there are two of us who are “woke” to mathematical intuitionism/constructivism.
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