Cory1848

Well that’s pretty cynical -- the teachers I know are in their 40s, and they seem to be doing fine, and their girlfriends or wives are pretty happy. I know that the scoop at least in this forum is that most white people in Thailand are drunks and losers, but that’s actually not the case.

I know several foreign language teachers in Thailand, and they’re all decent people just trying to make a living; a few are in monogamous relationships with Thai women who are not bargirls. Unfortunately, foreign language teachers are also Homo sapiens, and as such some of them will be out of whack. You can say it as many times as you like, and the more you say it, the more you’ll come off as a paranoid with a fixation (did a foreign language teacher abuse you when you were a child?).

That’s pretty much how it’s always worked; parents don’t appreciate the music of their children. When I discussed this with my mother years ago, she confessed that as a teenager in Tartu, Estonia, in the 1930s, she would drift around in the streets, her head filled with decadent Viennese waltzes, while her parents fretted that she wasn’t paying enough attention to the classical German composers. When I was in high school and college, music for me pretty much began and ended with the Grateful Dead. Then sometime in the early 1980s a housemate played something by U2 (their song “Gloria”), which knocked me flat, especially the song’s opening guitar riff, and this opened whole new possibilities for music appreciation. So since then I’ve tried to keep listening to new music; a current favorite is Fontaines D.C. (another Irish band!), whose members are almost 40 years younger than me. (I think they have a lot of geezer fans.) It’s quite possible to break the pattern.

Cash also covered Nick Cave’s “The Mercy Seat,” but I think on that he fell short of the original.

When Trent Reznor first heard Cash’s version of his song, his first reaction apparently was, “It’s not my song anymore,” but I think he came to realize it was a great thing, and of course he was flattered that someone of Cash’s stature had chosen to cover his music. Both takes are amazing.

That was great, thanks so much! Funniest thing I’ve heard all week; almost made it through the whole seven minutes. I assume someone simply plugged some relevant prompts into Suno or some other AI song generator (country music video; Trump sycophant; guns; babes; ATVs), and voilà! Thanks for the laugh, seriously.

And once this budget bill passes, ICE will have ten times more money to spend on additional gulags and random deportations. With Stephen Miller’s quotas to fill, anyone who even looks like they might speak Spanish will be at risk of getting snatched off the street. What’s most disgusting is how Trump’s millions of fans -- including people posting here -- revel in this gratuitous cruelty; it’s bringing out the worst in human nature. And we’ve seen it all before, with really bad outcomes. If you’re of European heritage, there might be some way to capitalize on that? My parents were both born in Estonia, so a few years ago I was lucky enough to (re)establish my citizenship to that country.

On your first point, I was born in the US to immigrant parents. However, I pretty much look and talk like a white guy. With regard to the current assault on birthright citizenship, I think we pretty much know that white people are not those being targeted, and that if white people were still the majority of those benefiting from birthright citizenship, this constitutional right would not be under attack. On your second point, sure, TV and the internet can also have deleterious effects on society, but their use clearly falls under the umbrella “freedom … of the press.” Individual lunatics with assault rifles are not part of any “well-regulated militia.” On your third point, it seems pretty clear that growing numbers of Americans are coming to realize that the current executive branch of government is subverting the separation of powers (which is also spelled out in the constitution) by making demands of and threatening the legislative and now the judicial branches. So, “a free state, with citizenry capable of rising up against a tyrannical government,” as you suggest?

Fair enough with respect to Native Americans in the nineteenth century, who were at least to some extent considered to belong to sovereign nations and thus under separate jurisdictions. However, I don’t believe the constitutionality of birthright citizenship has ever been seriously questioned with respect to immigrants and their children; at least, as I understand it, the Supreme Court has routinely upheld this standard. The first person I was responding to pointed out the unassailability of Americans’ right to bear arms as per the 2nd Amendment, but the application of the phrase “a well-regulated militia,” and the fact that firearms have evolved considerably over the past 200 years, have certainly rendered that amendment debatable: whether the amendment should be interpreted to mean that everyone and their drunk uncle has the right to go out and purchase an assault rifle. I’m no legal scholar but would suggest that the phrase “well-regulated militia” has been debated far more vigorously than the phrase “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” especially as the 2nd Amendment has had a far more deleterious effect on US society than the 14th, but both have been pretty broadly interpreted, as far as I know.

Exactly! And what is the current issue all about? Trump’s executive order denying birthright citizenship. And what does the 14th Amendment say? <All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.> So where exactly does your confusion lie? Or, I suppose, some constitutional amendments carry more weight than others, depending on how deep down in the Trump rabbit hole your brain resides.

Oh, good! So you’re saying that, in January 2029 (if not sooner), when President Newsom or President Ocasio-Cortez takes office, they can immediately issue an executive order that likewise flies in the face of the Constitution, say sending the military into US neighborhoods to go door to door and collect everyone’s guns, and the order takes immediate effect even while the matter works its gradual way through the lower courts, a process that could take years. Even if the courts ultimately rule against the order, by then it will be a fait accompli as the guns will have already been confiscated. Something to look forward to!

Yes, some population groups are more prone to certain diseases than others; I have no argument with that. The following Wikipedia page (many people find Wikipedia suspect, but it’s a quick reference, and this article includes more than a hundred references to scientific research) makes for an interesting read. But none of this argues for the existence of human “races” in the way that most people interpret and use that word. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_genetics#Genetic_basis_for_race As for the verb “to other,” it’s in broad use with widespread applications in history and sociology and more real-life examples than I can count. If the word sounds too “woke” for you, then why aren’t you more woke? Snark will only get you so far. Good luck to you.

Muhammad certainly kept slaves, but they were largely from neighboring Arab tribes, not Africa (his conquests largely took place on the Arabian peninsula, so I’m not sure what contact he would have had with Black Africans). Likewise, many Black African tribes kept slaves, whom they routinely acquired during raids on neighboring tribes. Once European slave traders started appearing on their shores, African chiefs would supply them with slaves, whom they had likewise kidnapped from neighboring tribes. So the Arabs of Muhammad’s time, and West African chiefs of the 1600s–1700s, did not “see” race in the same way we do. Slaves were slaves; the “race” of the slave was immaterial. Race as a marker of social standing came later. Islamophobia, by the way, is as real as antisemitism or anti-Black hatred; in other words, as much as you might wish to deny it, it’s as real as the sun.

For starters, as I’m sure you know, there is no biological reality to “race”: it’s purely a social construct. So “racism” is a form of othering, which, sadly, is all too human a behavior, and easily exploited by demagogues and others seeking power (the easiest way to explain away problems is to blame someone else for them). One can “other” a Muslim just as one can “other” a Black person. Individuals belonging to either of these categories can be similarly lumped together, stereotyped, marginalized, and slaughtered, depending on the circumstances. Is antisemitism a form of racism? Of course it is. More to the point, it’s the same brain chemistry, the same “logic,” that leads, in the mind of the racist, to hatred of Black people (for instance) or hatred of Muslims (for instance). If you want to be a pedant, you can say “racists, Islamophobes, and antisemites,” but the simple word “racist” covers it all, at least in current sociological usage. On your comment that “a child of a black Muslim and a black Christian” is not mixed race, what on earth are you talking about; this is pure deflection. Don’t be absurd.

Sorry, your semantic pedantry doesn’t wash. You’re stereotyping an individual because of his belonging to a group. That’s racist. There’s tons online about just this topic -- you can search on <is Islamophobia racist> for instance. But only if you’re interested in learning, and something tells me that you’re not.