discrimination

Say what you will about corporate human-resources departments, but the one thing they effectively do is keep low-grade morons with a propensity for power trips in line. Though managers and owners with inherent tendencies to be upright prick machines will always invent ways to be walking fingernails against a chalkboard, at least the specter of employees reporting them to the HR Manager looms over them like the ultimate check and balance, preventing their asshole propensities from going fully hemorrhoidal at any given time.

It is hard to ignore the striking parallels between the recent scenes of police brutality in cities across the United States and decades of violence from Israel’s security forces against Palestinians.
A video that went viral late last month of a Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin, killing a black man, George Floyd, by pressing a knee into his neck for nearly nine minutes has triggered a fortnight of mass protests across the US – and beyond.

Muslims in Canada deserve to feel what non-Muslims feel when they hear of a vicious crime or a foiled plot committed by someone who looks like them: abhorred by the crime but knowing the crime reflects the perpetrator alone. Any other thought process should never occur.
— Graeme Truelove, Un-Canadian: Islamophobia in the True North (Nightwood Editions, 2020): location 35%

While I am following closely various discussions on Western mass media and social media, simultaneously engaging in several direct exchanges, one overwhelming leitmotif that I see is clearly emerging: “What is happening in the United States (and the UK, France and other parts of Western Empire) is not really about the race. Let us protest peacefully, let us not allow ‘rioting’ to continue, and above all, please let us not single out the white race, Western culture as a sole villain.

European Left-wing political scientists find difficult to understand that the colonial contradiction is at the heart of our present, they think it’s a conceptual error, something anachronistic, that the joyful postmodernity – the one that delivers their Macs to them at home – has gone beyond all that, and that Trump or Bolsonaro are racist accidents of History, or of the “free world”. It’s just the opposite. Under the advertising varnish of capitalist globalization, the deep History of our world has never disappeared, it has even come back to the surface, even stronger.

Caught with their proverbial pants down? The blustery conversations tied to corona virus, lockdown, Trump LLC, Pelosi and Comp., and the failed state that is the USA are to be expected.
It is a country of nanosecond attention spans.
A country with amnesia in vitro.
A country that has sacrificed future and future-future generations for the all mighty dollar.
Dog-eat-dog?
Survival of the fittest (or in the reverse Darwinism, survival of the least fit, the least smart, the least humane, the least human).

George Hughes front-rightThe “good,” gun-toting white goons who recently protested safety measures necessitated by COVID 19 at the Michigan state Capitol had nothing on “good” white folks in Sherman, Texas ninety years ago today. They burned down their own courthouse to get at a black suspect, and then burned him as well.
On May 9, 1930, a 41-year-old African American man named George Hughes was asphyxiated and then burned to a crisp in Sherman, Texas.

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Palestinian workers’ dependence on Israel is now placing them in harm’s way. Although many are likely to catch the coronavirus in Israel while working, Israel is refusing to take responsibility for their welfare.

Spitting at someone is a universal insult. In Israel, however, spitting at Palestinians is an entirely different story.
Now that we know that the deadly coronavirus can be transmitted through saliva droplets, Israeli soldiers and illegal Jewish settlers are working extra hard to spit at as many Palestinians, their cars, doorknobs, and so on, as possible.