racist

WDP — The Electoral College

Fandango6 Comments
Daily writing prompt
If you could un-invent something, what would it be?
View all responses

As I said in response to this prompt one year ago today and also on this date in 2024:

Among the many thorny questions debated by the delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention, one of the hardest to resolve was how to elect the president. The Founding Fathers debated for months, with some arguing that Congress should pick the president and others insisting on a more democratic direct popular vote, as is done for every other elected office in the land except for the POTUS.

Out of those drawn-out debates came a compromise based on the idea of electoral intermediaries. These intermediaries wouldn’t be picked by Congress nor elected by the people. Instead, the states would each appoint independent “electors” who would cast the actual ballots for the presidency. Their compromise is known as the Electoral College.

The Electoral College calls for the creation, every four years, of a temporary group of electors equal to the total number of representatives in Congress. Technically, it is these electors, and not the American people, who vote for the president. In modern elections, the first candidate to get 270 of the 538 total electoral votes wins the White House.

One important aspect of the Electoral College compromise was that it served as a political workaround for the persistence of slavery in the United States. In 1787, roughly 40 percent of people living in the Southern states were slaves who couldn’t vote. This created a divide between slave-owning and non-slave-owning states. It was the same issue that plagued the distribution of seats in the House of Representatives: should or shouldn’t the Founding Fathers include slaves in counting a state’s population? 

James Madison from Virginia, where slaves accounted for 60 percent of the population, knew that either a direct presidential election or one with electors divvied up according to free white residents only, wouldn’t fly in the South. 

The result was the controversial “three-fifths compromise,” in which three-fifths of the enslaved black population would be counted toward allocating representatives and electors and calculating federal taxes. The compromise ensured that the Southern slave states would ratify the Constitution.

Due to the Electoral College, two “modern times” candidates who received fewer popular votes but won the Electoral College votes, became president: George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald Fucking Trump in 2016.

Incidentally, the three-fifths compromise was explicitly repealed in Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment (1868), which provided that “representatives shall be apportioned…counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians.”

It’s time to “un-invent” (repeal) the Electoral College.

WDP — Still the Electoral College

Fandango9 Comments
Daily writing prompt
If you could un-invent something, what would it be?
View all responses

As I said in response to this prompt one year ago today:

Among the many thorny questions debated by the delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention, one of the hardest to resolve was how to elect the president. The Founding Fathers debated for months, with some arguing that Congress should pick the president and others insisting on a more democratic direct popular vote.

Out of those drawn-out debates came a compromise based on the idea of electoral intermediaries. These intermediaries wouldn’t be picked by Congress nor elected by the people. Instead, the states would each appoint independent “electors” who would cast the actual ballots for the presidency. Their compromise is known as the Electoral College.

The Electoral College calls for the creation, every four years, of a temporary group of electors equal to the total number of representatives in Congress. Technically, it is these electors, and not the American people, who vote for the president. In modern elections, the first candidate to get 270 of the 538 total electoral votes wins the White House.

One important aspect of the Electoral College compromise was that it served as a political workaround for the persistence of slavery in the United States. In 1787, roughly 40 percent of people living in the Southern states were slaves who couldn’t vote. This created a divide between slave-owning and non-slave-owning states. It was the same issue that plagued the distribution of seats in the House of Representatives: should or shouldn’t the Founding Fathers include slaves in counting a state’s population?

James Madison from Virginia, where slaves accounted for 60 percent of the population, knew that either a direct presidential election or one with electors divvied up according to free white residents only, wouldn’t fly in the South. 

The result was the controversial “three-fifths compromise,” in which three-fifths of the enslaved black population would be counted toward allocating representatives and electors and calculating federal taxes. The compromise ensured that the Southern slave states would ratify the Constitution.

Incidentally, the three-fifths compromise was explicitly repealed in Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment (1868), which provided that “representatives shall be apportioned…counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians.”

Due to the Electoral College, two “modern times” candidates who received fewer popular votes but won the Electoral College votes, became president: George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald Fucking Trump in 2016.

It’s time to “un-invent” (repeal) the Electoral College.

Fandango’s Provocative Question #183

Fandango39 Comments
FPQ

Welcome once again to Fandango’s Provocative Question. Each week I will pose what I think is a provocative question for your consideration.

By provocative, I don’t mean a question that will cause annoyance or anger. Nor do I mean a question intended to arouse sexual desire or interest.

What I do mean is a question that is likely to get you to think, to be creative, and to provoke a response. Hopefully a positive response.

This week’s provocative question stems from some articles I’ve recently read about two new adaptations, one of The Lord of the Rings and the other of The Little Mermaid, which seem to be prompting deep outrage and indignation among fans who are arguing that the projects’ increased diversity has weakened their faithfulness to the original stories.

Amazon Prime’s new The Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power series first drew widespread anger from some fans because it casts black and Asian actors as characters across the spectrum of fictional Middle Earth races. Their chief complaint was that the decision to include non-white characters had ruined the authenticity of Tolkien’s world.

When Disney released the first trailer for its live-action remake of The Little Mermaid, featuring Halle Bailey as Ariel (above), thousands of YouTube users went nuts, leaving more than 2 million dislikes and countless derogatory comments on the trailer, and creating memes ridiculing the film for casting Bailey and mocking all of its supporters.

But wait. Hobbits, elves, orcs, and mermaids aren’t real, so should it matter what race they are? Is casting non-white actors in movies made from books or stories where the characters were presumed to be white disrespectful to the source material? Or is this backlash transparently racist.

So, with that as the background, here’s today’s provocative question for you.

Does diversity casting in TV shows or movies, where fictional characters who were presumed to be white in the source material are portrayed by non-white actors, concern or bother you? Why do you feel that way?

If you choose to participate, write a post with your response to the question. Once you are done, tag your post with #FPQ and create a pingback to this post if you are on WordPress. Or you can simply include a link to your post in the comments. But remember to check to confirm that your pingback or your link shows up in the comments.

Fandango’s Flashback Friday — January 7th

Fandango15 Comments

Wouldn’t you like to expose your newer readers to some of your earlier posts that they might never have seen? Or remind your long term followers of posts that they might not remember? Each Friday I will publish a post I wrote on this exact date in a previous year.

How about you? Why don’t you reach back into your own archives and highlight a post that you wrote on this very date in a previous year? You can repost your Friday Flashback post on your blog and pingback to this post. Or you can just write a comment below with a link to the post you selected.

If you’ve been blogging for less than a year, go ahead and choose a post that you previously published on this day (the 7th) of any month within the past year and link to that post in a comment.

This was originally posted on January 7, 2010 on my old blog.

Liberal Bias

James Cameron’s blockbuster movie, Avatar, is receiving all kinds of criticism from the right. According to ABC News, “From its portrayal of the corporation that wants to take over the natural resources on the planet Pandora — a not-so-subtle allusion to the likes of Halliburton and defense contractor Blackwater — to its distinct religious, anti-war, and pro-environment themes, the film’s political messaging has rubbed many conservatives the wrong way.”

Conservative movie critic John Nolte wrote, “Avatar is a thinly disguised, heavy-handed and simplistic sci-fi fantasy/allegory critical of America from our founding straight through to the Iraq War. It looks like a big-budget animated film with a garish color palette right off a hippie’s tie dye shirt.”

Really, John? Hippies and tie-dyed shirts? OMG, this guy Nolte is so 20th century.

Christian watchdog site Movieguide warns that the film “contains strong environmentalist content and…a strong Marxist overtone.” Quick, hide the impressionable children!

Weekly Standard movie critic John Podhoretz complained about the clearly, in his opinion, anti-American message of the film. “The conclusion asks the audience to root for the defeat of American soldiers at the hands of an insurgency. So it is a deep expression of anti-Americanism.”

Yeah, that’s exactly what I was doing at the end of the movie…rooting for the Taliban and al-Qaida to crush our American military machine. Metaphorically speaking, of course.

Some conservative writers say they are outraged by strong religious undertones in the movie. “Like the holiday season itself, the science fiction epic is a crass embodiment of capitalistic excess wrapped around a deeply felt religious message,” wrote conservative writer and blogger Ross Douthat in an op-ed in the New York Times. “Avatar is Cameron’s long apologia for pantheism — a faith that equates God with Nature, and calls humanity into religious communion with the natural world.”

Can you imagine how awful it would be if humanity and the natural world were in harmony?

Of course, there are those who believe that the overarching “message” of Avatar is racist. The movie is being criticized by a small but vocal group of people (isn’t that always the way…some “small but vocal” group) who allege it contains racist themes — the white hero once again saving the primitive, non-white (and in this case, blue) natives.

Okay, so this time it’s not those with black skins, brown skins, yellow skins, or red skins (not the NFL football team) who are being exploited and abused by those arrogant, white, round-eyed bastards. This time it’s those with blue skins (who also happen to be nine feet tall and have tails that plug into horses, birds, and trees) who are the victims of this racist, white sense of supremacy.

The truth is that Avatar, as spectacular as its graphic effects are, is a rather tired retelling of an oft-told story. Like the narratives behind The Last of the Mohicans, Dances with Wolves, or The Last Samurai, for example, Avatar is merely a futuristic variation on those same, previously historical, themes.

Sure, there is a clear analogy in the movie to the 18th and even 19th century U.S. cavalry and its white soldiers and how they invaded the lands of the Native Americans and almost wiped them out as part of the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, but to call the movie racist or anti-American, or to suggest that it’s promoting a liberal political agenda is just silly. It’s a movie. It’s entertainment.

But given how fractured the politics of our society are today, it’s not at all surprising.

Who Won The Week? 07/05/2020

Fandango23 Comments

10CC3057-4EEA-4C80-B8C1-700C0FC6C906It’s time for another Who Won the Week prompt. The idea behind Who Won the Week is for you to select who (or what) you think “won” this past week. Your selection can be anyone or anything — politicians, celebrities, athletes, authors, bloggers, your friends or family members, books, movies, TV shows, businesses, organizations, whatever.

I will be posting this prompt on Sunday mornings (my time). If you want to participate, write your own post designating who you think won the week and why you think they deserve your nod. Then link back to this post and tag you post with FWWTW.

Before I announce my selection for Who Won the Week, I need to provide a little background. I was raised in the suburbs of Washington, DC. As a boy, I was a big fan of Washington’s Major League Baseball team, the Washington Senators, and the National Football League’s Washington Redskins.6F611124-B8A9-4A00-8EEF-674E9A164917To be honest, I never really gave much thought to the football team’s name. As a white kid living in the suburbs, I naively looked at the team’s name as a way of paying tribute to Native Americans, not really thinking about its racist connotations.

But for the the past decade or so years, there has been mounting pressure for the Washington football team to change its name, which many consider to be a racist trope.

Yet, even in the face of governmental and activist pressure to change it, Dan Snyder, the team’s owner, has been steadfast in his insistence to keep the name. “We’ll never change the name,” Snyder said in 2013. “It’s that simple. Never — you can use caps.”

But the day could soon be coming when the team will, indeed, change its name. In the last month, since the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, a widespread movement has led to a reconsideration of statues, flags, symbols, and mascots considered to be racist or celebrating America’s racist history.

A few days ago, signs emerged that a change to Snyder’s intractable stance may be in the works. One day after two prominent corporate sponsors, FedEx and Nike, began backing away from the team’s name, and which prompted other sponsors to follow suit, the team published this announcement on Friday:

“In light of recent events around our country and feedback from our community, the Washington Redskins are announcing the team will undergo a thorough review of the team’s name.”

So, I am proclaiming that Native Americans won the week with the probably fall of the “Redskins” nickname for the Washington NFL team.

Cleveland Indians and Atlanta Braves, you’re next.

Now it’s your turn, folks. Who (or what) do you think won the week?

Thoughts and Prayers My Ass

Fandango135 Comments

64157FDE-D25E-4EC1-84A0-088AE79282A1I’ve been pretty angry and upset over this whole Tygpress.com thing over the past three or four days. But in the scheme of things, it’s small potatoes compared with what’s going on in the United States.

At least 53 people were shot dead and many more were wounded by separate mass shooting incidents in just this past week.

Within 13 hours of the El Paso shooting, where 20 people were shot and killed yesterday, another 10 people were shot and killed in Dayton, Ohio last night. In both cases, high capacity, military-style, semiautomatic assault rifles were used to inflict maximum casualties.

A mass shooting is “an incident where four or more people are shot in a single shooting spree. This may include the gunman himself, or police shootings of civilians around the gunman.”

As of August 4th, 2019, 251 mass shootings that fit that definition have occurred just this year.  As a result, more than 1,000 people have been shot, and more than 280 have died.

When is enough enough? When will our elected representatives in Congress and our elected officials around the country stop sending out their thoughts and prayers, which do no good whatsoever, and take meaningful action to address this epidemic?

Republicans keep repeating the NRA mantra, “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” But guns do kill people, and when you have more guns in this country than you have men, women, and children, and a divisive President who sows the seeds of racist and nationalistic hatred, what the fuck do you expect?

Republicans continue to blame anything but guns. One former Republican senator, expressing the NRA screed that “the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” blamed the El Paso massacre on not enough gun-carrying shoppers at the Walmart. Another current Republican congressman blamed violent video games. Are you kidding me?

Wake the fuck up, America. It’s time to do more than to send useless thoughts and prayers. It’s time to take definitive action to pass common sense gun control legislation on the federal level. Otherwise, mass shootings in America will be an everyday occurrence and we risk becoming numb to this deadly assault against our fellow citizens.

Photo credit: Andres Leighton / AP.9D556121-5A3F-4C86-9803-C16CFD8FDEDF

Stand Up and Be Counted

Fandango7 Comments

095367B1-7B2B-48F9-A71A-CC25BB07E032“It doesn’t take having a college education to see the danger that this brood of naive and gullible Trump supporters is having on our society,” Edward lamented.

“You’re a highly educated, sapient man,” Carla said. “There must be a way to get them to see what a con man Trump is.”

“You know,” Edward said, “I don’t think there’s a snowball’s chance in hell of getting his rabid fans to change their almost fanatical support for him. They think he’s the second coming of Jesus, for crissake.”

“But don’t you feel,” Carla said, “that the racist things he’s been saying over the past month are starting to snip away some of his support?”

“Well,” Edward said, “we are seeing a few random Republican Congresspersons making a tentative transition away from blind, unequivocal support for him. But we’re going to need more than a handful of Republicans to be willing to stand up and be counted.”

“And were going to need the Democrats to start a formal impeachment inquiry,” Carla added.

Written for these daily prompts: The Daily Spur (education), Word of the Day Challenge (brood), Nova’s Daily Random Word (sapient), Daily Addictions (chance), Your Daily Word Prompt (snip), Fandango’s One-Word Challenge (random), and Ragtag Daily Prompt (transition).

X is for Xenophobe

Fandango34 Comments

4F6BB380-E9BD-4736-9808-50345B95CBA7Let’s see. There’s xylophone. Nah. There’s Xerox. Nope, I did that last year. How about xfinity? No, that’s a made up word that serves as the brand name for Comcast’s cable and internet service.

Oh wait. I know. Donald Trump.

I know what you’re thinking. Donald Trump doesn’t start with the letter X. Actually, though, Donald Trump is America’s Xenophobe-in-Chief.

A xenophobe is a person who fears or hates foreigners, people from different cultures, or strangers. And based upon what Donald Trump says and does, he is definitely a xenophobe.

He wants to spend billions of dollars to build a wall on the border between the United States and Mexico because, according to Trump, Mexicans “have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems to us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. They’re killing us at the border and they’re killing us on jobs and trade.”

And it’s not just Mexicans that Donald Trump hates. He hates people from what he calls “shithole” countries. “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” he wants to know.

Shithole countries in Africa, like Nigeria, or island nations like Haiti. Trump said that Nigerian immigrants would never “go back to their huts,” and that Haitians “all have aids.” “Why do we need more Haitians?” Trump asked. “Take them out.”

Instead of people from Central America with brown skins or from Africa with black skins, Trump spoke of taking in immigrants from “great European countries like Norway.” Could skin color have anything to do with that. Well, that would be racist, wouldn’t it? And for the purpose of this post, I don’t want to talk about Trump the racist, even though he is one.

Nope. This post is exclusively about Trump the xenophobe.

Previous A to Z Challenge 2019 posts:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

The Wrong Solution for the Wrong Problem

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75F050AF-1AAF-4D3A-9907-9228BEC6B74DThe following is taken word-for-word from a blurb I saw in today’s morning newspaper.

The Trump administration is planning to roll back Obama-era policies aimed at ensuring that minority children are not unfairly disciplined, arguing that the efforts have eased up on punishment and contributed to rising violence in the nation’s schools.

The decision culminates a nearly year-long effort begun by the Trump administration after the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. The deaths of 17 students and staff members last February prompted lawmakers in both parties to demand tougher gun laws.

But President Trump abandoned that focus and instead empowered a school safety commission, led by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. Almost immediately, the commission turned away from guns, and instead scrutinized the Obama administration’s school discipline policies, though none of the most high-profile school shootings were perpetrated by black students.

Talk about implementing the wrong solution for the wrong problem. This article is just another example of the racist nature of the entire Trump administration. In my humble opinion, of course.

Further proof that we have the wrong president. A very, very wrong president.

Brainwashed or Brain Dead

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9F17921C-82C7-4887-89F6-79847C3656F0“Did you read that a cheerleader took a knee at the 49ers football game on Sunday?” Jimmy said. “First it was that quarterback and now it’s a cheerleader.”

“That’s so un-American,” Charlie said. “It puts a taint on the whole NFL. They should fire that cheerleader.”

“I actually support her right to conduct a peaceful protest over the treatment of black people by police,” Sally chimed in. “Just last Friday two more black men were injured by the police.”

“Football games ain’t the place to do that,” Jimmy said. “These people need to honor our flag by standing for our national anthem. What they’re doing is unpatriotic.”

“These people?” Sally screamed. “Are you kidding me? You’re such a fucking racist, Jimmy. What they’re doing is the epitome of patriotism. Your statement is excruciatingly inappropriate.”

Charlie looked at Sally and said, “Dry your eyes, snowflake.”

“That’s it. I’m outta here,” Sally said. As she was leaving she added, “I’d say that you two have been brainwashed by alt-right propaganda, but that’s not possible since both of you are clearly brain dead.”

Written for these one-word prompts: Scotts Daily Prompt (knee), Word of the Day Challenge (taint), Your Daily Word Prompt (support), Ragtag Daily Prompt (Friday), Daily Addictions (excruciating), and Fandango’s One-Word Challenge (dry).