Random General Headlines

[allegro]

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/...id=ansnewsap11

i don't know if you guys are catching this in your neck of the gloom, but 9 people were killed in a shootout between the Bandidos and the Cossacks (who are rumored to be a subsidiary of the Hell's Angels) at a Twin Peaks restaurant in waco texas

170 "motorcycle enthusiasts" have been arrested and charged with organized crime (i think)

Yeah that shit was like the old west with a bunch of meth-dealing rival biker gang members shooting it out in broad daylight!! Crazy shit!

I guess that Twin Peaks "will never be open again" LOL.

Motorcycle enthusiasts hahaha.

@Dra508 , the Bandidos are not Mexican heh

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandidos_Motorcycle_Club

@elevenism , I think she meant the Ferguson thread although I'm not sure I see NPR's overstretched reach. It was a shootout between rival biker gangs, a bunch were arrested, and of course drug-dealing biker gang members are thugs. They have t-shirts that say that.

[Dra508]

Yeah that shit was like the old west with a bunch of meth-dealing rival biker gang members shooting it out in broad daylight!! Crazy shit!

I guess that Twin Peaks "will never be open again" LOL.

Motorcycle enthusiasts hahaha.

@Dra508 , the Bandidos are not Mexican heh

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandidos_Motorcycle_Club

@elevenism , I think she meant the Ferguson thread although I'm not sure I see NPR's overstretched reach. It was a shootout between rival biker gangs, a bunch were arrested, and of course drug-dealing biker gang members are thugs. They have t-shirts that say that.

I'm not big on Twitter, but i know how impactful it was with Ferguson, for this, lit up with a lot of folks pointing out the differences of how this police action was handled with white folks.

I was pleased to see The NY Times putting up mug shots. If they hadn't, I wonder if they would have been called out. Just reading the online comments there, folks were calling them 'thugs', feeling good about the use of the word when we all know it's become a euphemism.

I know zero about bike gangs so yeah. Honestly, I think thinking it was Mexican came from a really early report on the shooting (prior to national news coverage) so maybe I should call out Texas media

[allegro]

I'm not big on Twitter, but i know how impactful it was with Ferguson, for this, lit up with a lot of folks pointing out the differences of how this police action was handled with white folks.

These were about 350 huge fucking armed bikers. People really need to go study up on biker gangs and how fucking scary and dangerous they are. This ain't no "Sons of Anarchy" bullshit. A lot of these guys used to be in the U.S. Military.

A lot of these guys have multiple arrests under their belts, there are murder records within each outlaw biker gang involving rival gang activity, and some of them are on "most wanted" lists so mug shots ain't a big deal. Here's the level of guys we're talking about.

See this, too.

Department of Justice

The Outlaws are big around the Great Lakes area.

The Waco police had kept a consistent and obvious presence at the Twin Peaks restaurant for a while and the bikers didn't care. When the fight broke out, the bikers were SHOOTING AT THE COPS and the cops SHOT BACK AT THE BIKERS.

Did you watch that movie "The Lincoln Lawyer" where he gets his biker gang clients to help him? That was actually awesome, heh.


Have you ever seen this movie "Gimme Shelter" (1970) about Altamont, where the idiot concert promoters made the idiot decision to hire the Hell's Angels as security? (Never mind that the stage was about 2' off the ground, LOL)

[elevenism]

@Dra508 maybe people thought they were mexican because the mc was the bandidos?

to which specific thread are you referring?

[Baphomette]

Los Angeles Lifts Its Minimum Wage to $15 Per Hour

About fucking time. I'm kinda a little bit in love with my city again.

[elevenism]

should we make a thread for this one? there will probably be retaliation.

[elevenism]

also, this http://www.salon.com/2015/05/19/welc...s_only_it_can/

this breaks my fucking heart. i saw that obama had started a twitter account and thought it was really cool.

and what he gets is a bunch of assholes calling him a nigger. That shit would really, really hurt my feelings.

Sigh.

[DigitalChaos]

Leaked report profiles military and police members of the motorcycle gang of the Waco shootout.

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2...orcycle-gangs/

[Baphomette]

Joseph R. Biden III, Vice President’s Son, Dies at 46

[allegro]

Leaked report profiles military and police members of the motorcycle gang of the Waco shootout.

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2...orcycle-gangs/

That whole thing is starting to look like a setup.

[DigitalChaos]

This is wonderful

[Deepvoid]

That's freaking hilarious!

[DigitalChaos]

In 1994, SCOTUS denied an appeal by a man sentenced to die. Scalia used that man an an example of the perfect justification for the death penalty. Turns out... that man was innocent.
http://fee.org/anythingpeaceful/deta...se-falls-apart

[binaryhermit]

*facepalm*
http://www.salon.com/2015/06/10/chri...becomes_legal/

[thevoid99]

*facepalm*
http://www.salon.com/2015/06/10/chri...becomes_legal/

Really? Is this person Kirk Cameron?

[mfte]

This is bizarre and kind of funny. The leader of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP has been revealed to be a white woman who has been pretending to be a black woman this whole time. Feels like an Onion article. I guess if a rich white dude from Malibu can identify as a woman then this isn't that off the wall.


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...ack-years.html

[Dra508]

This is bizarre and kind of funny. The leader of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP has been revealed to be a white woman who has been pretending to be a black woman this whole time. Feels like an Onion article. I guess if a rich white dude from Malibu can identify as a woman then this isn't that off the wall.


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...ack-years.html

I don't know what to think of this one, I gather the story is still evolving. I heard that mom outed her (why would she do that?) and she also grew up with several adopted siblings that were black. In typical pop culture fashion, the term, one I hadn't heard of has been trending: transracial?

[orestes]

Trans-racial is an adoption term. Why it's being used in online dialogue about Rachel Dolezal is beyond me, you know, other than being from racist trolls.

Also, comparing this story to Caitlyn Jenner is just dumb logic.

[DigitalChaos]

Also, comparing this story to Caitlyn Jenner is just dumb logic.

I've only seen it compared in the sense that people want to debate whether identity is something you can change and/or something you can deviate from what you were physically born with. I don't see why transgender would be any more "allowable" than transrace. But, it sounds like there are a lot of people who are more agreeable with one than the other. (Most notably are the cisrace blacks). Not like hypocrisy is something new in "national conversations" but I'm always fascinated in the underlying reasons for it. Sometimes you find new perspectives that you hadn't considered or just weren't aware of.

Calling difference in skin color "race" is dumb, but I'm just using the terminology of the conversation.



Edit: and there are certainly people trying to use this to take a stab at transgender people, but I don't think anything about that warrants discussion.

[DigitalChaos]

I'll never understand why society is so fixated on shit like this. Someone's personal decisions really don't matter, especially when it comes to their identity. I dream of the day things like post-gender, post-race, post-sexual orientation, or post-<identity> are actually possible.

[botley]

I'll never understand why society is so fixated on shit like this. Someone's personal decisions really don't matter, especially when it comes to their identity. I dream of the day things like post-gender, post-race, post-sexual orientation, or post-<identity> are actually possible.

You mean the day when we forget all about historical inequalities, and pretend none of it ever happened, so that white people can fantasize about not having benefited directly from hundreds of years of racism?

You do realize that "cisracial" is an utterly ridiculous made-up term, right? You don't just get to decide you're black, that's a slap in the face to an entire culture, besides being just plain motherfucking stupid.

[DigitalChaos]

You mean the day when we forget all about historical inequalities, and pretend none of it ever happened, so that white people can fantasize about not having benefited directly from hundreds of years of racism?

No, that's not what I mean. Nothing about what I said had anything to do with forgetting the past any more than when MLK talked about the future he wanted.

You do realize that "cisracial" is an utterly ridiculous made-up term, right? You don't just get to decide you're black, that's a slap in the face to an entire culture, besides being just plain motherfucking stupid.

That's basically word for word what many bigots said about "cisgender." It's just empty assertions. Cisgender was also "made up" in the 90's. That doesn't lessen the idea behind the word, despite the insistence of bigots. I've even heard the whole "men deciding they are women is a slap in the face to all the women who have suffered under the oppression of men" angle.

Just because some people DISLIKE something doesn't make it stop existing. I mean, fuck... are we still decades in the past where homosexuality "isn't real" too? I know you've strongly shown how much you don't want us moving beyond the past but... cmon.

[botley]

No, that's not what I mean. Nothing about what I said had anything to do with forgetting the past any more than when MLK talked about the future he wanted.

Wrong. MLK had relatives who survived slavery. He was born into a culture that denied his personhood on the understanding that black people had no place in white society. People today are still born into black and white categories in a prejudiced society, which still grants privileges to white families who have benefited from access to these privileges for generation after generation. Is that clear enough? Good, because in order for a white person to use their privileged position granted by this system and pretend they're black and move in a culture that is not theirs, it is a prerequisite that they pretend all that history is irrelevant to their performance of a black person.

That's basically word for word what many bigots said about "cisgender." It's just empty assertions. Cisgender was also "made up" in the 90's. That doesn't lessen the idea behind the word, despite the insistence of bigots. I've even heard the whole "men deciding they are women is a slap in the face to all the women who have suffered under the oppression of men" angle.

Just because some people DISLIKE something doesn't make it stop existing. I mean, fuck... are we still decades in the past where homosexuality "isn't real" too? I know you've strongly shown how much you don't want us moving beyond the past but... cmon.

This is a deeply tragic denial of historical realities. The white person's desire to "move on" is at heart a wish to forget their deeply rooted advantages, granted by their family's privileged place in a racist society. To forget all that and deny that anyone else around them has a different experience of racism would be truly "colourblind". We don't have that society; we are not starting from zero.

Comparing the homosexual community, who lived through and continue to experience the denial of equal rights, to one white person who blacked up and got called out for it is insane. You have to stop arguing from soundbites.

Cisgender as a term was coined to describe a real phenomenon — people who experience the privilege of normative gender roles assigned to them at birth. Many people don't understand this because their socialized understanding of gender roles is confused with a biological understanding of sex characteristics. Whereas "cisrace" is just a nutty post-hoc justification for inappropriate behaviour. A trans person doesn’t have the option to stop performing gender. A white person in blackface gets to take off the makeup and go home to their white privilege.

[DigitalChaos]

Wrong. MLK had relatives who survived slavery.

No shit. That's the point. History didn't magically vanish when he wished for a future either. Your only angle is "only black people can say that" and it's just ridiculous.

A white person in blackface gets to take off the makeup and go home to their white privilege.

She's the head of Spokane's NAACP.

You are making the exact same justification that people made about the patriarchy to attack transgender. It's very much like people using religious history to attack homosexuality. Hell, you are even using the "that person's individual choice of identity hurts mine." It doesn't matter how much history exists. It doesn't make something vanish.

Also, transrace and cisrace aren't inventions for a single person. It existed long before this story. Your entire rant comes tumbling down even more when it involves any other cisrace.

[telee.kom]

While gender identity or sexual orientation is based (or at least it is believed) on hormones in vulva and other stuff that is happening during pregnancy, when person is born white and identify herself as black person, that's just psychological problem. It's like when people are pretending to be dragons and cats. Yeah it's all fun and games, but no, you are not dragon and you probably need some help. You can't choose your race, you are born into one, end of story.

[Dra508]

, when person is born white and identify herself as black person, that's just psychological problem. It's like when people are pretending to be dragons and cats. Yeah it's all fun and games, but no, you are not dragon and you probably need some help. You can't choose your race, you are born into one, end of story.

Seems you've been reading up on this theory: http://thinkprogress.org/health/2015...ption-science/

[DigitalChaos]

While gender identity or sexual orientation is based (or at least it is believed) on hormones in vulva and other stuff that is happening during pregnancy, when person is born white and identify herself as black person, that's just psychological problem. It's like when people are pretending to be dragons and cats. Yeah it's all fun and games, but no, you are not dragon and you probably need some help. You can't choose your race, you are born into one, end of story.

Different "races" of humans are simply genetic variances. I wouldn't be surprised if science, in the future, allowed some of those genes to be altered. For now, people have to rely on superficial mechanisms. The ability to alter your gender beyond just superficial means is a fairly recent invention. It in no way lessens the "realness" of transgender people who lived before that time.

[DigitalChaos]

Here let me just swap something out in what you just said: "A man in drag gets to take off his makeup and go home to the patriarchy"


Now do one of those bigoted rants about white people being evil with a black person who identifies as white. Perhaps you could tell us how they don't REALLY identifiy as white and it's really just some lie they use due to an underlying problem. That would be such a new and refreshing claim. /s

[botley]

I don't need to... in order for a black person to "identify as white" they would need to pass for white in prejudiced society. Which is all but impossible, not because white people are evil, but because our society systematically favours people born to white families. If you have the ability to pass for the dominant race in a racist society you do it only to survive, not because you FEEL like that race.

No shit. That's the point. History didn't magically vanish when he wished for a future either. Your only angle is "only black people can say that" and it's just ridiculous.

Incorrect, he was demanding a space for his family, and families that looked like his, so they would be regarded as persons in a racist culture that denied this. He wasn't wishing for people to be able to traipse back and forth between cultures as if the very real distinctions society drew between them didn't matter. No white person could possibly have occupied his position of leadership in the black community. Your comparison here is just plain false.

You are making the exact same justification that people made about the patriarchy to attack transgender. It's very much like people using religious history to attack homosexuality. Hell, you are even using the "that person's individual choice of identity hurts mine."

What? Where did I say that? I am not defending history, I am pointing out how it still has an impact on us today. Here's where you are most tragically mistaken:

It doesn't matter how much history exists. It doesn't make something vanish.

What you seem to have misunderstood or are confused by is that pointing to historical inequity isn't the same as perpetuating one in the present day. You don't get to pick and choose what parts of history you benefit from. You either benefit from it, or not. If you benefit from racial prejudice, and pretend to belong to a group that does not, you are lying and misrepresenting your background.

Here let me just swap something out in what you just said: "A man in drag gets to take off his makeup and go home to the patriarchy"

Yes, that's right, he does. Putting on clothes doesn't remove patriarchal privilege, any more than makeup removes racial privilege. When a trans person identifies with a gender role which differs from what they were raised in, it is to express a gender that reflects who they are. This distinction completely falls apart with race, because racial background is historically motivated entirely by birthright; you can't pick and choose what part of history you occupy, it's something established by the family you were born in. You don't get to identify with a race of your choosing.

Also, transrace and cisrace aren't inventions for a single person. It existed long before this story. Your entire rant comes tumbling down even more when it involves any other cisrace.

We're talking about a behaviour, here. Transrace applies specifically to people who are adopted into a family of a different racial background, not to people who attempt to perform a racial profile different from their birth family's. To put someone like Rachel Dolezal in a separate category from "cisrace" is just racial prejudice under a new guise. Again, a black person can't possibly wake up one day and start calling themselves white to get the same treatment as white people. "Cis" is a prefix pointing to the performative nature of gender, because it's based on the theory that all gender roles are performed. Race is something that society performs, not individuals.

[DigitalChaos]

I don't need to... in order for a black person to "identify as white" they would need to pass for white in prejudiced society. Which is all but impossible, not because white people are evil, but because our society systematically favours people born to white families.

your identity does NOT have to be dependent on your outward ability to pass. Also, it's definitely not "impossible" to pass as white when you are black. It's also somewhat common in mixed race individuals (which is exactly what Dolezal is claiming).


Dolezal also grew up with black siblings, who were astranged from their shitty over religious parents. Sounds like Dolezal was too.

If you have the ability to pass for the dominant race in a racist society you do it only to survive, not because you FEEL like that race.

Ah there it is. The "they dont really IDENTIFY as something other than how they were born, there is an alterior motive!" angle. We can file that right next to Huckabee's "so I can shower with girls" comment.

Yes, that's right, he does. Putting on clothes doesn't remove patriarchal privilege, any more than makeup removes racial privilege. When a trans person identifies with a gender role which differs from what they were raised in, it is to express a gender that reflects who they are. This distinction completely falls apart with race, because racial background is historically motivated entirely by birthright; you can't pick and choose what part of history you occupy, it's something established by the family you were born in. You don't get to identify with a race of your choosing.

Actually, they are BOTH a combination of genetics. This is quite obvious in the situation of mixed genetics.


"You can't pick and choose which gender you occupy, it's something established by how you were born. You don't get to identify with a gender of your choosing"

Again, a black person can't possibly wake up one day and start calling themselves white to get the same treatment as white people.

ah, back to the alterior motive angle again. "Transsexuals are clearly only doing it to gain the same societal treatment as their chosen gender" ...and that shit is working sooo well! /s

"Cis" is a prefix pointing to the performative nature of gender, because it's based on the theory that all gender roles are performed. Race is something that society performs, not individuals.

Just like gender norms are separate from gender identity, so too is race norms and race identity.

"Gender is something that society performs, not individuals. This is why feminism fighting against societal gender norms are fundamentally at odds with transsexuals."