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Honor, shame, Zimmerman, and Martin — 56 Comments

  1. There is a tradition that has only become more extreme in recent years . . . to consider insults to some idea of one’s ‘honor’ to be fighting offenses.

    But, Neo, in truth, this doesn’t seem much different to me than the same kind of attitude which prompted 18th century duels to the death. The Monty Python insults (“Your father was a hamster and your mother smelled of elderberries”) are parodies of precisely this same kind of slur. Extreme, perhaps, but maybe its a return to previous tribal state based more upon a personal sense of honor than a rule of law.

    (I also wonder if the Western emphasis on “diversity,” i.e. non-Western cultures has anything to do with such a reversion. Think insulting Allah or Mohammed here. )

    But if you combine the first principle (“the oppressed are allowed to be aggressive and violent, and it’s all the white oppressors’ fault . . . with a second principle–the semi-glorification of violence . . . then you have the toxic combination.”

    I do not disagree, but don’t forget about the sanctimony of moral superiority here. If one believes one’s self to be truly superior, then one can justify the worst kind of behavior and violence for the good of the cause. This, again, seems no different than the Dominicans justifying the torture of the inquisition (better to suffer pain and death of the mortal body than to lose one’s immortal soul). Then again, as many others before me have noted, Progressivism is much like a religious belief, isn’t it?

  2. The former blogger ‘Dr. Sanity’ had some insights into shame in a post entitled, “SHAME, THE ARAB PSYCHE, AND ISLAM”

    In it she discusses the psychological and sociological differences between a ‘shame’ culture and a ‘guilt’ culture.

    “In thinking about how the concepts of guilt and shame apply in a culture, it is helpful to refer to a seminal work that was originally published by Benedict in 1946, where she discussed the collectivist culture of Japan during WWII and distinguished it from American culture. Japan had a “shame culture”, while the U.S. and most of the West subscribe to a “guilt culture”. Each type of culture has its own set of rules with regard to wrong-doing and they are determined by the beliefs of the individual and other people regarding guilt and summarized in these two matrix tables

    “Trial by media” is very much a feature of political life at the moment, and it works largely because it seems that the public has different standards of proof for misdemeanours among those in public life from those it maintains for private citizens.

    In public life it is enough to be “tainted” with suspicion for one’s future to be blighted. In practice, the same is probably true of people accused of offences in their own small social world, and yet we maintain formally that justice operates on much more rigorous principles.

    In other words, the rules about responsibility and blame are not the same across cultures or even across different sectors of the same culture. [my emphasis]

    The positive aspect of guilt-culture at its best is its concern for truth and justice and the preservation of individual rights. The sense of guilt might also preserve us from engaging in wrong-doing which no-one would ever discover: but it can also be misplaced and potentially neurotic.

    In a shame-culture (sometimes referred to as “honour-shame culture), what other people believe is much more powerful. Indeed, my principles may be derived from the desire to preserve my honour or avoid shame to the exclusion of all else.”

    [In a shame culture] “suspicion becomes sufficient to convict in judicial terms. Moreover, in a pluralist society, culpability (I’m trying to avoid saying “guilt”) may be determined by one powerful sector of society and in ignorance of the facts of the case, since there is less incentive to prove them.

    The sources cited have located shame-culture principally in the more collectivist societies of the East, but of course the two cultures co-exist (perhaps with different relative influences) everywhere.”

    Indeed, I suspect that black urban culture is primarily shame driven, while white traditional culture is primarily guilt driven.

  3. They start with the desired outcome, and then work backwards. Martin had a right to self-defense because of profiling and he was “scared.” But there is no right to self-defense because Zimmerman had a gun. Or something.

  4. The justification of thug violence is just another form of nostalgie de la boue. It’s an old Norman Mailer idea — the authenticity and inherent virtue of people one considers more primitive than oneself.

  5. T:

    Yes, there have been books written (I forget the titles; don’t have time to look it up now) making that comparison. One difference, though, is in the concept of what sort of behavior constitutes “honor,” and what is a slur on it.

    I wrote a post about dueling, in which I dealt with the subject at great length, including its relevance to the shame/honor question and to black violence, among other things.

    You know, I’ve been doing this for so long, it’s often the case that I’ve already dealt with a topic that comes up again. That dueling post was written over seven years ago.

  6. Just as some background, it caught my eye because it’s been my observation that a pro-gun control stance typically comes with an unrealistic expectation of goodness in others and therefore no need for violence on one’s own part. I was taught that violence, especially of the lethal variety, is only potentially appropriate when it’s a response to action that intentionally puts a life in danger. The difference between me and the traditional gun control mindset I have known is that I accept that there are people out there without such standards of behavior as mine, and should I have a run-in with one, the only thing standing between not-very-physically-imposing me and horrible injury or death might be a gun: the great equalizer.

    While one can debate and disagree with a typical gun-control advocate about the justification of guns as a means of self-defense, this was all new to me. I have not had one justify – in the same breath – the use of violence in response to an action that causes no physical harm.

    Legally, looking at someone, or asking them what their business is, or even following them for a few minutes is not illegal. Assault and battery is. How does one make the leap that an action which cannot cause physical harm justifies a violent response which actually can be lethal (people do die as a result of injuries inflicted by hands and feet); yet a physical attack that could seriously injure or kill that was launched by someone else, does not entitle someone the right of self-defense with a weapon.

    I wondered whether this was a logical twist required to keep Zimmerman as the bad guy; the idea of “following” somehow had to be treated as a legitimate threat of life and limb, to excuse the beatdown by Martin that the facts of the case pointed to. I’ve certainly more egregious misrepresentation in my days of online debate.

    But I kept running into a fully evolved mindset of matter-of-fact “Oh yeah, I’d beat up someone who did this, that, or the other” accompanied with outrage that they might get shot while doing so – and the shooter would go free. There is actually a body of people who think it’s OK to beat people for what Neo interestingly and reasonably terms “honor” offenses but that it’s not OK for people being beat for these offenses to defend themselves if they are unable to do so with the attacker’s choice of weaponry.

  7. Thomas Sowell wrote a book” Black Rednecks And White Liberals”, the theme being that “black culture”is derived from the whites amongst whom they lived-people from the Scottish-English borderlands. The perfect exemplar of this is Andrew Jackson.

    A friend of mine once said if you don’t fancy living among low class blacks,try living with “white trash”. It can be extremely unpleasant.

  8. Mizpants makes an interesting point. There is also the closely allied element involving (did I read a long comment on it here?) the privileging of violence perpetrated by so-called minorities.

    This curious lack of inhibition, elevated as Mizpants points out to the status of a moral value, is one which left elites and their underclass clients obviously share. The elites may not practice individual violence as often, but I don’t think killing other humans per se disturbs them particularly. They certainly don’t mind working to undermine and destroy the lives of others who are seen as insufficiently cooperative or “community minded”.

    In fact I would surmise – on the basis of their self-reporting – that many on the left actually feel a little shiver of virtual sexual excitement when they see some member of a designated oppressor class receiving a “well deserved” physical beat down.

    I have become almost completely convinced that lefties, because of their radically different view of reality, are in effect an operationally different moral species.

  9. Mizpants said:
    The justification of thug violence is just another form of nostalgie de la boue. It’s an old Norman Mailer idea – the authenticity and inherent virtue of people one considers more primitive than oneself.

    And, of course, it’s related to the idea of the noble savage, which has been around for quite a long while. Interesting Interesting entry in Wikipedia on it, in which we learn that Charles Dickens wasn’t enamored of the idea:

    “To come to the point at once, I beg to say that I have not the least belief in the Noble Savage. I consider him a prodigious nuisance and an enormous superstition. … I don’t care what he calls me. I call him a savage, and I call a savage a something highly desirable to be civilized off the face of the earth….”

    I wonder if the Dickens-loving folks at PBS know about that Dickens?

  10. Men who are not honorable, violently fighting to defend their complete lack of honor and morals because being dishonorable is honorable in their bizarro world.

    And to them, Martin was an honorable person and their mean spirited, divisive president, Obama, agrees with them and wants to honor him. Obama must be in his glory with all this rabid community organizing going on.

    It might be honor to them but it is lowlife to me. How many rocks did they have to turn over to find all these people?

  11. Fact 1: over 90% of black victims of homicide die at the hands of other blacks. Can anyone reading this letter name one of these black victims?

    Fact 2: interracial crimes of violence are overwhelmingly black on white (google the DOJ document Criminal Victimization in the United States, 2008 Statistical Tables [pdf] and go to Table 42). Can anyone reading this letter name one of these victims (the O. J. Simpson case excepted)?

    But everyone reading this letter has heard of George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin. Why is that? Why has the shooting of a black male by a white/hispanic/white hispanic dominated the news for the last few weeks while thousands of other deaths have gone down the memory hole?

    In the old racist South, white-on-black and black-on-black crimes were frequently ignored or not taken seriously, while black-on-white crimes were taken very seriously indeed. Today, the reverse seems to hold true. Who in his right mind would call this progress?

    Bob Kantor

  12. ” neo-neocon Says:
    July 15th, 2013 at 4:23 pm

    T:

    Yes, there have been books written (I forget the titles; don’t have time to look it up now) making that comparison. One difference, though, is in the concept of what sort of behavior constitutes “honor,” and what is a slur on it.

    I wrote a post about dueling, in which I dealt with the subject at great length, including its relevance to the shame/honor question and to black violence, among other things.

    You know, I’ve been doing this for so long, it’s often the case that I’ve already dealt with a topic that comes up again. That dueling post was written over seven years ago.”

    There have been numerous attempts to derive the habit of urban violence from lessons learned in associating with Southern honor cultures.

    Some offer plausible parallels and potential connections, others are not much more than attempts to tar the entire notion of personal honor or virtue as remnants of the patriarchal oppression and torture of women, akin to what might be seen among some modern Islamists.

    Scotch-Irish cattle herders and dog trot cabins, then equals sexual slavery in the Sudan, or drug salesmen killing anyone who annoys them.

    Presumably urban African Americans at some point lived on Appalachian mountain sides and in remote hollers, and there, salted among the Hatfields and McCoys, and finding their folk-ways so congenial, adopted their behavior from them and perpetuated it for generations. (Which kind of works against the genetic angle sometimes insinuated as obtaining in the case of the Scots borderers.)

    And how, say, Dee Dee Jeantel, the daughter of a Haitian living in Miami managed to get her attitude, will have to remain a mystery for a moment.

    My guess is that the portion of the left [in the instances to which I am referring] that takes this line most strongly is really concerned above all else with subverting the notion of the individual as a moral locus. A person’s claim to an inviolable and sacred honor (Where have I seen that terminology before?), is merely one manifestation of a greater phenomenon they naturally see in need of being destroyed.

    After all, what need can you have to defend your property with self-help, when the state as dispenser of all justice, the arbitrator of all claims, the intermediary of all human transactions, and the distributor of all really necessary things in life, will give you what you deserve to have, as long as it sees fit?

  13. Shame and a lack of self-respect may cause a false sense of honor and a propensity to revert to violence at slight or imaginary offenses. However, for some a sense of personal honor may be all they have that makes them feel emotionally strong. This does not necessarily mean these individuals are thin skinned and prone to violence.

    “black culture”is derived from the whites amongst whom they lived-people from the Scottish-English borderlands.

    A sense of personal honor is strong in southern culture. But again, it does not necessarily lead to violence. A belief that personal honor is important can lead to forthright and honest behavior. It can make someone want to overcome hardships and strive for a better life.

  14. I haven’t read the comments yet, but I will note: even in the pro-gun forums there are those arguing that the shooting was done because “Zimmerman was losing a fight”, and that it was because he was lacking with respect to his manhood.

  15. I think a lot of this is simply the Left’s incessant need to see people as members of groups, with their bizarre hierarchy of historical injustices/personal victimhood outweighing any facts about the individual event or people involved. You can count on them to side against the white, male, Christian, heterosexual, wealthy, non-criminal and/or American person in any given situation. Any crime committed by a member of an officially aggrieved group is either ignored or minimized (such as Catholic priests vs. young female teachers who abuse boys), and justified regardless of how this can clash with other deeply held beliefs (such as sexual harassment is terrible unless it’s same-sex harassment).

  16. Neo,

    Thanks for the link. I was unaware of that post; I believe it was before I began visiting this blog.

    Geoffrey Britain,

    Thanks for the reminder re: the Dr. Sanity post. I actually read that some time ago and was impressed. Then it slipped my mind completely. See what one comes to!

  17. I just posted this in a previous thread, but it works better here.

    Thought experiment:

    What if all the facts were the same except Zimmerman was black?

    There are, after all, black working middle class home owners who share Zimmerman’s worries and wariness of people like Martin.

  18. Didn’t Obama once say “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun” ?

    How does that fit with the idea that it was less honorable or less manly of Zimmerman to have used his gun?

  19. I think I can recognize insanity when I see it.

    And I’m sure I recognize idiocy when I see it.

    Saying it’s okay to beat the crap out of someone who’s doing something that offended you, but it’s not okay to defend yourself by utilizing whatever means are at your disposal while you are restrained (or if you’re not fast enough to escape), is both stupid AND insane.

    And for the nano-brains to try to argue the point, is to twist common sense into an utterly hopeless mess of pointless contradictions. That only they are oblivious to.

    They are exhibiting obvious signs of socio-pathological AND irrational behavior …and ignoring it makes them idiots. QED.

    And I just don’t argue with irrational people. Or sociopaths. Or idiots.

    What can there be that is worth understanding about the loudly expressed “opinions” of such people who declaim the jury’s decision was simply further proof of wickedly twisted injustice towards …I dunno, thugdom?

    It’s a fool’s task.

    You just gotta shake your head …(to be continued)

    4 young black men beat a white guy, and caused his death just a couple of weeks ago. If he would’ve had a gun and used it, he would be alive.

    But according to the logic of the sociopathic idiots proudly proclaimed beliefs, Joshua Heath Chellew did the right thing …by dying, I s’pose. And the four young thugs are justified. “Just because”.

    …it’s just no longer a shock to me that major segments of the population are sociopathic irrational idiots to some varying degree.

    …though I do tend to still find it amazing that they seem so proudly willing to shout it out from the rooftops …but …what can you expect from idiots?

    The West is dying.

    (continued) …and apply for a concealed carry permit.

    Because Teddy had it right, even on a personal level: speak softly and carry a big stick.

    ———–
    …off course of the post’s topic:

    With his black grandmother, Zimmerman would be accepted as black under any federal and state affirmative action program in any institution of higher learning out there. So why wasn’t this another unremarkable (and unremarked upon) faceless black-on-black tragedy, like the hundreds of others in a typical month in the big Democrat party urban enclaves? Or …how was this not a contrived media-instigated spectacle?**

    …the most witty comment on the state of the prosecutions dismay was “…Zimmerman should have never sent that telegram”. [1.]

    **Yes, I have an answer. It was the names …and the perception of those names by utterly and journalistically incompetent and grossly ignorant, J-listers …probably proud graduates of Columbia University. Oh my, is my sarcasm showing? Dear me; so judgmental. Tut, effin’ tut.

  20. While I have certainly seen instances of people doing exactly what Kyndall describes, I have seen far, far more instances of people simply ignoring the physical altercation altogether. Were it not for the photograph taken of Zimmerman at the scene, he would be sitting in prison right now.

  21. For renminbi at 4:33 pm and the other Scots-Irish deriders (you know who you are):

    Hey, watch it with the slurs against the Scots-Irish. I’m Scots Irish and take umbrage to these kinds of generalizations. My ancestors would probably have already slapped you with the piss-soaked glove, given you a copy of the Twenty-six Commandments and demanded the name or your seconds.

    Just kidding. Sort of….. 😕

  22. Thus Mitsu’s insistence that Zimmerman must have done something – ‘fighting words’ or a ‘whatcha gonna do about it’ shove to the chest, perhaps – that must have ‘provoked’ Martin to attack him.

  23. “I just don’t argue with irrational people. Or sociopaths. Or idiots. What can there be that is worth understanding about the loudly expressed “opinions” of such people” davisbr

    Just two things; many of them vote and the left purposely manipulates their idiocy into political support.

    As for the Georgia case you cite; the perps are homicidal racist thugs and perhaps homophobes as well.

  24. That 6:35 PM should have read “of your seconds”. of course (can’t type while my hillybilly/redneck/ cracker blood’s a-boiling….).

  25. I, too, have read comments to the effect that “Zimmerman should have taken his beating like a man”. WTF?

    People expressing that attitude evidently wish to return to the time, not so long ago, when societies were largely ruled and controlled by strong, physically fit young men, trained warriors, skilled swordsmen, etc. Or the caveman with the biggest club. (Even kings usually had to prove themselves in combat.)

    There’s a reason why the gun was called “the equalizer”. It allowed older men, and all women, to not be intimidated and cowed by muscular young men. It allowed people of all kinds who did not spend their lives in martial arts training to have a more or less equal footing with those who did.

    (This should not be interpreted as a slight against those who are warriors or practice the martial arts. I’m thinking of Eric and Ymarsakar. There is, of course, absolutely nothing wrong with that. But not everybody is willing or able to devote their lives to that sort of training.)

    ***

    I’m reminded of the old Who song, “Young Man Blues” (written by Mose Allison, but The Who’s cover is the most famous version):

    Oh well a young man ain’t got nothin’ in the world these days
    I said a young man ain’t got nothin’ in the world these days

    You know in the old days
    When a young man was a strong man
    All the people they’d step back
    When a young man walked by

    Young Man Blues

  26. Lincoln freed all men, but Sam Colt made them equal.

    An armed society is a polite society.

  27. rickl:

    Makes me think of Achilles and Hector, and also Samson. They had to be big and strong back then to be fighters.

    Then there’s David and Goliath. Because he didn’t have the brawn, David got the advantage with a weapon—a slingshot. And yet David is the celebrated underdog.

  28. Most of America has, until quite recently, been a guilt/conscience culture, as distinct from a Shame/honor culture, like Islam, the Far East, Latin America, and a segment of the South, most notably the Black South. Jane Jacobs uses a parallel and more comprehensive system of division in Systems of Survival. The general deterioration of American life can be tracked as the drift of our Guilt/conscience culture into shame and show (“honor”)values.

    Virtually everything fits in here. When you see people buy a flashier car than they can afford, or spend beyond their means, saving or investing comparatively little, people getting into fights over “disrespect.” when the movie gossip magazines outsell any news or commentary, this is the decline in microcosm. Individual examples are perfectly innocuous, of course, but when they are part of a huge trend, and opponents of the drift are held up as bigots, there we have the beginning of the end.

  29. Maybe the Zimmerman trial travesty will be the beginning of the end of the “thug” culture. Now that word is getting out about knockdowns and other thuggery, more people will be willing to fight back.

    The Chicago gangster (Rahm Emanuel) government has tried to keep the knockdowns secret, but word has gotten out. As I mentioned at the end of an earlier thread, everybody in my neighborhood knows what a thug looks like. No one has any guilt about calling the police on them. There’s no “white liberal guilt” where the Trayvon-type slouchy hoody thugs are concerned.

    If I personally thought I could handle a gun responsibly, I would. I bet there are plenty of concealed carries in my neighborhood.

  30. }}} The former blogger ‘Dr. Sanity’ had some insights into shame in a post entitled, “SHAME, THE ARAB PSYCHE, AND ISLAM”

    Geoffrey, I also noted an association to that piece which seems substantially pertinent to the current discussion:

    THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY AS A ‘SHAME’ CULTURE ?

    One thing I’ve noted is an awful lot of denial on the part of Martin’s defenders — almost every one of them takes it as though it were GZ who backed TM into a corner, and initiated the fight. Any forensic evidence to the contrary is ignored. The attitude that TM displayed during his phone call with his Gf just prior to the altercation is deemed irrelevant.

    They’re so busy demonizing GZ that they can’t see at all how it really appears — that GZ was backing off and TM confronted him as he retraced his steps into an area TM really had no reason to be in unless he was seeking a confrontation, then attacked GZ overtly, quickly gaining the upper hand thanks to reach and surprise.

    That he failed to sufficiently subdue GZ can only be attributed to overconfidence in his skills and his slighter musculature — a grown man — even a “thin” one, as TM was, would have incapacitated GZ within about two strikes in the “ground and pound” scenario — if you put your weight behind your punches at all, you can disable someone very quickly from a standing position, to say nothing of when the face/head has no place to recoil at all, and takes the full force of the blow.

    If it hadn’t been for shooting him, it is quite possible that TM would have been able to kill him — probably inadvertently — through repeated strikes of his head with fist and concrete.

  31. This Zimmerman/Martin spectacle is what you can expect from the Progressives and their push for social justice. They never point out that what that really means is horribly unequal justice based solely on who your ancestors happened to have been.

    Just think of it as affirmative action applied to rid the world of those pesky individuals and their refusal to accept modern Progressivism and its collective narrative.

  32. This “honor beating” thing is very old, but the difference is that in the past there was no Youtube to showcase their stupidity. In my area, the locals still shake their heads because a drop-out had his friends film his “beat-down” of another drop-out in a parking lot. Six years later, the video is still available, but neither of those young men is. It should be a cautionary tale, but it isn’t: each generation of teenaged boys watches it and thinks it’s cool.

    I think the other reason for the high tolerance of beat-downs and violence for perceived disrespect is a bizarre notion about “judging” others. The point of the Biblical admonition was to not be a hypocrite or overly harsh with your neighbor. But the modern version says that you can’t set up boundaries.

    Call it de-segregation for thugs.

    I recently had an unpleasant discussion with one of my godchildren about her lying, stealing, thug-lite friends. Her reaction to the old adage that you are the company you keep? Shock, annoyance, and almost outrage.

    Her responses came down to three refrains:
    “They do it to other people. (Not her.)”
    “It’s their choice. (I can’t stop them.)”
    “It’s what they do. (They can’t stop themselves.)”

    I’ve had this conversation with other teenagers, but the difference is that they never got to Number 3. They were perfectly aware that the thug-lite did only as much as people let him do. He was admired or seen as “lucky” at school because when he suspended for fighting at school, he spent his “vacation” playing X-Box with his dad. When the cops picked him up for another incident, his mother put on a show that he was a martyr to corrupt cops/officials/etc.

    Compare that to the one godchild who attempted to live a thug’s life: His parents gave him

  33. an option of growing up or getting out. He struck one of his younger siblings and that wiped out all the good things he had done, from graduating to getting a job. He had to move in with his no-account friends.

  34. With the foregoing references to shame and honor, I feel obliged to point out in the Declaration, the Founders all pledged their “Lives, Fortunes and Sacred Honor.”

    Works for me.

  35. funny how we make up answers when we are too lazy to find them, read them, or understand them…

    why not relate it to machismo and other such things?

    …Do these people live in a dystopian movie? Where is this anti-gun/pro-beat the snot out of someone who looks at you sideways mindset come from?

    because its not machismo, its dialectical reasoning from Normans… ie… keeping it real… ie. violence is honesty

    its normans theme that runs through the rap music and other things, and if you dont read all that, and where he is from (frnkfurt germany) and where he ended up (hollywood and music), and who is friends were (adorno and marcuse), and whose ideas they were playing with (gramsci, et al).

    when you punch someone in the face, you dont do it as a lie, its the truth… so violence is honesty, and thanks to rap and such, thats what they were taught.

    nice fantasy explanation though…

    but the problem is that this is mostly followed by the acultured who have no culture and take up made up things, and not possible to be derivative in a population denuded of men and tradition!!!!!!!

  36. its following oppressed oppressor dialectical rules..

    the oppressed have a right to class hatred against their oppressors… Robin Morgan (feminist)

    under this, the oppressor has no rights but to die. if they marry outside their race, they are seen as doing so to save themselves. if they fight for race parity, they are only doing it to save themselves. and on it goes.

    if you want to see this in full view, you can go to a recent cannes film festival winner…

    ie. the germans..

    the jews were oppressing the german people… so under this, the oppressed had a right to take out their anger on the jews… after all, they were in control of 40% of the businesses and such, and must have cheated to do that, and so the germans were convinced the same way blacks and others are convinced of the same.

    ergo, slow krystallnacht where many stores over time are rushed and property taken. if all at once, you see it, stretched out over years, you dont. (same thing with democide and eugenics)

    the jewish white zimmerman has no right to defense against an oppressor…

    in the movie, there is a dialogue in which the german military man tells the victim what it is about him that makes them not like him. its the way he deals, the way everything is for sale, the way he will try to bargain for his life, even if he saves himself and no one else… and on and on he goes.

    all this is very old..

    its called blood and soil

    the united states is reserved for the volk…

    and so, out of that attitude comes the ideas of oppressed oppressor dalectical reasoning in which anything the oppressed does, is really a plot to scheme to save themselves.

    and if any save themselves, then the plague will spread again around the world..

    good thing you guys have been reading these guys.
    then i would not need to repeat and explain when the events of the day are derived from those pedegree of thinking..

    over and over and over..

    PAULO FREIRE: CHAPTER 1 OF PEDAGOGY OF THE OPPRESSED

    This, then, is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well. The oppressors who oppress, exploit and rape by virtue of their power, cannot find in this power the strength to liberate either the oppressed or themselves. Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both. Any attempt to “soften” the power of the oppressor in deference to the weakness of the oppressed almost always manifests itself in the form of false generosity; indeed, the attempt never goes beyond this. In order to have the continued opportunity to express their “generosity,” the oppressors must perpetuate injustice as well. An unjust social order is the permanent fount of this “generosity,” which is nourished by death, despair, and poverty. That is why the dispensers of false generosity become desperate at the slightest threat to its source.

    True generosity consists precisely in fighting to destroy the causes which nourish false charity. False charity constrains the fearful and subdued, the “rejects of life,” to extend their trembling hands. True generosity lies in striving so that these hands — whether of individuals or entire peoples — need be extended less and less in supplication, so that more and more they become human hands which work and, working, transform the world.

    and

    But almost always, during the initial stage of the struggle, the oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors, or “sub-oppressors.” The very structure of their thought has been conditioned by the contradictions of the concrete, existential situation by which they were shaped. Their ideal is to be men; but for them, to be men is to be oppressors. This is their model of humanity. This phenomenon derives from the fact that the oppressed, at a certain moment of their existential experience, adopt an attitude of “adhesion” to the oppressor. Under these circumstances they cannot “consider” him sufficiently clearly to objectivize him — to discover him “outside” themselves. This does not necessarily mean that the oppressed are unaware that they are downtrodden. But their perception of themselves as oppressed is impaired by their submersion in the reality of oppression.

    i have rtead the original lines that go back to before i was born…

    too bad others didnt grow up in a ghetto like i did, and so grew up hearing the choir of bricks whispering…

  37. Submerged in reality, the oppressed cannot perceive clearly the “order” which serves the interests of the oppressors whose image they have internalized. Chafing under the restrictions of this order, they often manifest a type of horizontal violence, striking out at their own comrades for the pettiest reasons.

    The colonized man will first manifest this aggressiveness which has been deposited in his bones against his own people. This is the period when the niggers beat each other up, and the police and magistrates do not know which way to turn when faced with the astonishing waves of crime in North Africa…. While the settler or the policeman has the right the livelong day to strike the native, to insult him and to make him crawl to them, you will see the native reaching for his knife at the slightest hostile or aggressive glance cast on him by another native; for the last resort of the native is to defend his personality vis-a-vis his brother. (16)

    now they are according to this, angry and tired of hurting themselves, and so they are now going to remove the oppressors who have oppressed mankind since before societies..

    Because the oppressor exists within their oppressed comrades, when they attack those comrades they are indirectly attacking the oppressor as well.

    none of your explanations will invent such EDUCATION that is passed on in basements on pamphlets in church after services, and so on… (in music too)

    At all stages of their liberation, the oppressed must see themselves as women and men engaged in the ontological and historical vocation of becoming more fully human. Reflection and action become imperative when one does not erroneously attempt to dichotomize the content of humanity from its historical forms.

    and

    The insistence that the oppressed engage in reflection on their concrete situation is not a call to armchair revolution. On the contrary, reflection — true reflection — leads to action.

  38. First the black slaves in the cities must learn courage before they can understand what honor is.

  39. In inner city gangsta life, black people really fear (hate) gays. Because homosexual relationships are built around domination and destruction of the weaker party’s ability to refuse.

    Thus Martin couldn’t let a situation go where he was being chased by a gay rapist and all he did was run away. He had to prove to himself, and to anyone watching, that he had the balls to get it done.

    White people don’t get why they think like this because white people don’t live in prison jungles 24 hours a day. If you have ever lived in a prison jungle, concrete or otherwise, you will immediately understand why Martin felt he had to “step it up” against creepy rapists following him around in cars.

    You “know” why. It was because if word got out to the hood that Martin was someone so afraid of being raped he’d run for miles on end, he really would be hunted down and raped by the male gangs of his neighborhood. Really. Or if not that, he’d be harassed, his stuff stolen, and he would get beat down, or even killed, depending on the whims of the “kings” of the jungle. Which Martin knew he was definitely not: a king.

    And the reason why he thinks the “hood” would know, is because of that friend of his on the phone. He knew immediately seconds after that, that “she would talk” about it to her friends and it would spread. So unless Martin came back and said “well, I beat that white cracka up that was following me, and taught him a good lesson on who the real dominant male is”, Martin was, in his eyes, facing perpetual fear in his life in the “hood”.

    This probably sounds very strange or wild to people, but that’s what happens when you encounter denizens of the jungle.

  40. It allowed people of all kinds who did not spend their lives in martial arts training to have a more or less equal footing with those who did.

    I think Rick here is absolutely correct. My original goal had always been to fight evil, in the form of terrorists or serial killers. Criminals seemed to me to be very broken people that were too dangerous to be allowed to run around with all 4 limbs. Thus I was very harsh on them and favored execution above all things. It was the only thing I could consider at the time that untrained people could be protected from such. Guns were the other path, but not everyone was armed in this nation (what foreigners call the country of the gun).

    No matter how long I train or how much knowledge i obtain, it will do others no good whatsoever. Thus I was frustrated that even if I could guarantee my own life and survival, I could not do the same for others, mainly because evil would strike them when I wasn’t around. When the occupation helicopters come to the village, the insurgents had already left and the villagers had already been executed and tortured to death. Fat lot of good that firepower did.

    I was taught by my trainers that even a child could kill me, with the right combination of forces. Thus letting people beat on me would be tantamount to assisting in my own suicide. The more I learned about lethal H2H methods, the more justified I became in fearing for my life (and the more self defense reasons I could come up for using lethal force). Fear thus became my weapon and ally, and was no longer my antagonist. Fear was the weapon I needed to drop the limiters placed on me and what I could do. It worked far faster than hate, anger, or rage. Far faster.

    But for those who are at a disadvantage physically or mentally, training them up to use lethal force, no matter what people call the “tool”, is a good way to train a militia to defend the village while the warriors are out warring.

    Firearms overcome human muscle through the contained power of firepower, the ability to rotate and penetrate better than human muscles can propel a sharp object. My original instructors took that thinking to H2H methods and started me on the road to be capable of doing with my hands, what a bullet does to a human body.

    The Left will never allow their slaves to be armed with the power to fight back against rapes, torture, and being worked to death for the pleasure of the Leftist aristos. They will never give up. They will never allow you to live, except at their pleasure. Such is the foe that exists, but even now we have yet to see the Left’s true power and nature. But we will, soon.

  41. renminbi Says:
    July 15th, 2013 at 4:33 pm

    Thomas Sowell wrote a book” Black Rednecks And White Liberals”, the theme being that “black culture”is derived from the whites amongst whom they lived-people from the Scottish-English borderlands.

    I spoke with Thomas Sowell about this topic before he wrote Black Rednecks and White Liberals. At that time Dr. Sowell recommended a historical work that I will also recommend: Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South, by Dr. Grady McWhiney, a historian then at the University of Alabama.

    I’ll quote from the book description:

    American colonists who settled south and west of Pennsylvania during the 17th and 18th centuries were mainly from the “Celtic fringe” of the British Isles. The culture that these people retained in the New World accounts in considerable measure for the difference between them and the Yankees of New England, most of whom originated in the lowlands of the southeastern half of the island of Britain. From their solid base in the southern backcountry, Celts and their “Cracker” descendants swept westward throughout the antebellum period until they had established themselves and their practices across the Old South. Basic among those practices that determined their traditional folkways, values, norms, and attitudes was the herding of livestock on the open range, in contrast to the mixed agriculture that was the norm both in southeastern Britain and in New England. The Celts brought to the Old South leisurely ways that fostered idleness and gaiety. Like their Celtic ancestors, Southerners were characteristically violent; they scorned pacifism; they considered fights and duels honorable and consistently ignored laws designed to control their actions. In addition, family and kinship were much more important in Celtic Britain and the antebellum South than in England and the Northern United States. Fundamental differences between Southerners and Northerners shaped the course of antebellum American history

    Dr. McWhiney argued that African slaves imported into the antebellum South came from similar herding cultures in West Africa and therefore intuitively understood and then adopted those Celtic (Cracker) ways.

  42. Mike.
    Mostly Celtic, here. Breton, Irish, Scottish, Welsh.
    We hid in bushes, knifed sentries, stole each other’s cattle, hired out to fight. Our version of The Iliad is The Cattle Raid of Cooley.
    When I was in Infantry OCS–1969–it appeared that blue-eyed guys were about 50% more common than the general non-Hispanic population.
    Blue eyes being Celtic, of course.
    Little practical anthro there.
    I believe–proportions are the issue here–that East Africa had the herders. Masai, Zulu, etc. West Africa had a higher proportion of bush farmers.

  43. They were later called “Jacksonians”. Although that didn’t mean they shared Andrew Jackson’s personal beliefs and behavior.

    Celtics were responsible for a lot of magical witches, warlocks, and druids back in the day. Somehow, following a leader, war leader, or a spiritual guide, they made it all the way to Turkey, one such tribe.

  44. Y.
    Yeah. The Galatians got a letter, long time ago. I think they have some kind of bagpipes.

    Read something about the Painted People. Guy made the case that the British Army’s shock troops were mostly Celtic, either by regimental recruiting, or with many in the supposedly English regiments. While continental Europe had some great castles in defensible terrain–makes for fabulous travel posters–it was on the Celtic borders that massive fortifications had to be built without terrain to help. Welsh border, Hadrian’s Wall.

  45. I’ve heard many of the Roman auxiliaries were Celtic skirmishers or berserkers. Lightly armored, but very stamina trained. The Romans themselves recruited from the civilized portion of Briton, but they were more than a match for the disorganized barbarians up north like the Picts.

    On an individual level, though, civilization made individuals soft and less effective as warriors.

    In the modern era, we supplement training time with more efficient training methodology, safety and lack of injuries, and scientific reproduction of theories.

  46. I heard once that regiments were based entirely on a single province, in order to solidify esprit de corps. Also an easy way to suppress rebellions by taking a provincial force miles away to do the job.

    But the British Empire’s military was not something I studied in depth so I don’t know if they followed that custom.

  47. I’ve run into this mentality here and there as well.

    One man told me that he’d do it because it was somehow “self-defense” to beat someone for following him, and he further argued that he was able to “defend” himself with his fists, and, “…not defend myself the way a complete coward would, which is with a gun.”

    The guy who posted the above claimed to have a bachelor’s degree and a good job.

    It’s the worship of “might makes right” as a method of organizing a culture.

    Buckle up for safety, folks, it’s going to be a very rough ride.

  48. Not sure if someone already brought this up, but the same people who are (at least by implication) making the argument that a black person (unlike a privileged white) is justified in using violence against someone if he perceived from him a lack of respect and/or some measure of prejudice, are the same people who decry as bigoted neanderthals anyone who suggests that being wary of young black males is not unreasonable given the statistical propensity for violence and criminality of that cohort.

    Anyway, none of this “logic” makes sense, since Zimmerman wasn’t white, wasn’t rich, wasn’t privileged, and had no more political influence than Trayvon did, yet the Left happily ignores facts and continues their class warfare meme regardless. It seems to just be a knee-jerk reaction against anything that smells like individual empowerment, self-sufficiency, and bourgeois values — all the rest is just their public justification for being outrageously outraged.

  49. These people are only a couple of centuries removed from the tribalism – and the violent and barbaric environments – of the African jungles they once called home. Western civilization has cast off most vestiges of it’s clannish origins and barbarism but it took many many centuries.

  50. Honestly, I am not sure where this has come from. I’ve seen people lambaste Zimmerman as a weakling (not the word they used) and not a “man” because he was losing the fight.

    I call it the language of bullies. Frankly, I think people are “anti-gun” because they are bullies, and are terrified that someday they may bully a target capable of fighting back.

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