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Although I have been pessimistic about American race relations since President Obama held a press conference on national television to insert himself into an otherwise unnewsworthy local crime by informing the country that 'if [he] had a son, he would look at lot like Trayvon' - it seems to be a good bit worse than I had feared. There's a truly open and unabashed fervor behind the death of white people, which I had in some ways previously chalked up to still being just a bit of 'those kids on tumblr'.
Read some of the comments in the last few hours from Karmelo Anthony's givesendgo fundraiser. Karmelo is suspected of stabbing a young white boy to death. His family has already raised more than half a million dollars with no end in sight.
https://www.givesendgo.com/HelpKarmelo
And by "suspected" you mean he definitely did it, it is known he did it, he himself admitted he did it and there's absolutely no doubt possible that he did it. So the donors can't say "we thought he's innocent" - they know perfectly well he did it, and they donate explicitly because he did it.
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The fact that there are 50,000,000 black Americans and this guy raised $500k really isn’t convincing me that some kind of race war is imminent. If some white nationalist raised a million dollars I likewise wouldn’t believe that the turner diaries were about to be made reality.
I would add that the blacks who hate whites are, disproportionately, the poor ghetto trash that won't be donating because they don't have any money(just like white racism gets more common the farther you go down the social ladder). I suspect a bunch of these donors are white SJW's.
I would say you’re ignoring the upper crust of blacks — journalists, academics, high-ranking activists — who have built their lives and identities around an ostentatious anti-whiteness. I agree with you that there’s a large black middle class, among whom the percentage who’d be likely to donate to Karmelo Anthony is fairly small (though certainly non-zero), but I imagine there’s quite a bit of that money coming from affluent chattering-class blacks who’ve made that money spreading anti-white animus.
That's certainly possible- I don't interact with any professionally black activist blacks, but I do interact with middle class and below ones- I wouldn't be too surprised if Elie Mystal or Ibram X Kendi donated to this.
I would, however, dispute your characterization of these as 'the upper crust of blacks'. If the US went to Ottoman-style rum millet(oh there's a fun hypothetical) the AADOS community would elect rappers and athletes to lead them, not grifters. These people might not do a better job overall, but they would manage race relations in a more calm, reasonable, and antisemitic manner than Oprah and the boys. They're also generally much richer.
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I don’t think we have to be at “literal race war imminent” to recognize that race relations (specifically between blacks and non-blacks) in America are in a very bad state and show no signs of long-term improvement.
I would add to this that no one outside of the extremists have a credible plan for how to change this.
Breaking the paradigm of there being a collective black identity to have collective relations with. No one talks in terms of Asian-Arab or Asian-White American relations because there are no coherent groups to hold a collective positions.
One of the aspects of the 2024 election that helped Trump win so much was the margin of black voters who voted against the Democratic party. Trump had something of 20% of the black vote, which was historically unprecedented in modern US black election politics. It was 1/10th female and 3/10th male, but given that the historical norm for generations has been 90%, that is a crack from the normal political machines and social cohesion structures that could deliver 90% votes.
If that trend continues- and there's a good chance it is given the macro-fractures in the democratic coalition- then gradually you get a ethnic group no one speaks for.
Do you have any evidence that the relatively small portion of the American black electorate who voted for Trump do not otherwise see themselves as part of a (capital-B) Black community with shared cultural interests, a shared fraught relationship with greater white America, etc.? Couldn’t it just be that those people did not believe that in 2024 the Democratic Party was the optimal vehicle through which to express/protect those interests? I haven’t seen enough evidence to suggest that this represents a larger fracturing of black culture and identity. Kanye West presumably voted for Trump, after all, and he is still very recognizably culturally black, still has a very defiant attitude toward White America, etc.
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If this works, it'd be amazing. I have no idea what intentional actions could be taken to make it more likely; the best I can think of is to try to highlight what seems to me to be the incredibly, horrifyingly dysfunctional relationship between the Black community and Blue Tribe, where Blue Tribe gains political support from the Black community by blaming all of their problems on Red Tribe, including those problems that Blue Tribe seems to be explicitly causing.
It's worth noting that there's an analogue- the AFL-CIO used to be incredibly pro-democrat, this cycle the teamsters president spoke at the RNC, Trump has been winning the union vote, etc. Democrats kept the union vote long after the rest of the white working class abandoned them due to machine politics that may or may not have been corrupt deals with union leadership; a lot of what African-American community leaders are getting from the DNC for their support certainly doesn't look very aboveboard and unanimous support from black community leadership is what keeps the AADOS on the plantation.
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If you're an accelerationist, vote for AOC-aligned candidates in the coming Democratic power struggle. The progressive/PMC caucus is one of the current drivers of the wedge in the black-democrat coalition, and it's likely to make things worse the better the AOC-wing does in its struggle for the 'soul' of the party.
Progressives and the 'black community' are pretty far apart. Part of this is where they are on the cultural war, but part of this is literal- the progressive urban power centers are not the black political machines. The black political machines are mostly along the south-eastern and southern seaboards (because that's where state-influencing political machines exist in those port population centers). The progressive wings are more the pacific seaboards and interior cities. They've co-existed with the neoliberals who are more in the north-eastern coast and also interior. There are overlapping areas, of course, but typically their machines dominate their respective areas.
The black machines are very comfortable with playing Democratic coalition power politic, and they have had a multi-decade alliance with the neoliberal wing of the Democrats that align with Clinton/Obama/Biden. For the last generation, the black-machines have basically been democratic kingmakers in the neoliberal candidate primaries. African-americans don't win the total election, but they do swing the party.
Or at least, they did. The issue with the post-biden crackup of the Obama coalition is that the neoliberal-dominant party is now in question. It's no longer neoliberal vs neoliberal, black machine is decisive. Rather, the AOC/progressive/socialist wing is contesting the neoliberal democrats in the non-black-machine turfs. That is, the internal and northeastern city enclaves.
This is why David Hogg, the progressive DNC leader, indicating he's going to primary various democrats is so significant. We're in the opening phase of a contest for control of urban political machines where progressives could be competitive. That is, well, not where the black machines are. It is, however, a struggle between progressives and neoliberals over who dominates.
The issue is that if the progressives lose that, the generational alliance between black machines and neoliberal machines will be replaced. And what it's replaced with will probably crack the black machines more.
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We've tried the method of making whites take all the rancor and blame. It didn't work out too well. All the other solutions put a significant amount of burden of changing this on blacks, and that's anathema to progressives (especially white progressives).
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It's worth noting that in at least one place (https://old.reddit.com/r/AskALiberal/comments/1jzgmzs/please_explain_karmelo_anthony_support/), the response to this from self-professed liberals has been pretty uniformly, "stabbing people is wrong."
Even there there's a fair bit of listless whataboutism in those responses, even attempting to No True Scotsman the people donating to the GSG and saying it's ze Russians, the Kochs and secret false flag conservatives.
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that is worth noting, but it's also worth noting that their fundraiser was allowed to operate, in contrast to those of, for example, Gardner and Rittenhouse. This is a concrete way in which our society observably treats red-tribe lawful self-defense as strictly worse than blue-tribe lawless murder.
It's really not that concrete at all. In the rittenhouse case, rittenhouse claimed to be provoked into acting in self defense (credibly) but his opposition claims (also credibly) that he deliberately created a situation such that that provocation would happen and he would have an excuse to commit violence. In this case, the stabber also claims that he was acting in self-defense (unknown credibleness), but no one (so far) claims that he was looking for an excuse. Plus there's the additional matter of him using a knife, rather than a gun, and killing one person instead of many. The situations at hand are neither symmetric nor complementary.
Personally speaking, I do martial arts, and I would consider pulling a knife on someone who wants to throw hands a reasonable, proportionate act. There are far too many ways to get permanently injured or killed from blunt trauma. I would not consider it reasonable to then attack them with that knife if they backed off-- but maybe the football player saw the knife, assumed there was going to be some stabbing, grabbed for it-- and as a consequence, got Rittenhouse'd. Is that what happened? I don't know. But I'm content to say, "stabbing people is bad" and let the rest sort itself out through the legal system.
(I don't know anything about the gardener case. When I look up "gardener murder" I get a convict who committed a bunch of rapes and murders.)
There's a pretty big difference in the plausible threat between a random guy charging you in the middle of an active riot and/or protest versus 'I have sat down in the wrong team's section of an athletics carnival with a plethora of people around and somebody has laid hands on me whilst trying to move me away'.
Using this logic if say Nikola Jokic got confused during an NBA Playoffs Final game today and sat down on the Clippers Bench, prompting Kawhi Leonard to shove him whilst trying to get him to leave, it would be fine for Jokic to escalate to lethal force and shiv Kawhi in front of America? Your argument tracks if it's a one-on-one unprompted interaction in a dark alleyway with uncapped potential consequences for losing, but is pretty blatantly insane in this circumstance unless you think the local track meet participants were going to form a lynch mob.
The defendant is alleging a history of bullying from the person who got stabbed. I don't know if that's true, but if it is it would substantiate claims of self-defense.
It'd make them substantially weaker in terms of escalating to lethal force.
'Here is the guy who is mean to me occasionally and has not murdered me on previous iterations, TIME TO START SHIVVING' is not a defense.
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I'm on the record as saying that Rittenhouse shouldn't have been there but his acquittal was correct. That said, c'mon, while no two situations are exactly equivalent, they seem close enough to me. At least close enough that arguing that a fundraiser for Rittenhouse's legal defense was illegitimate while fundraising for Anthony is legitimate sure makes me raise my eyebrows, and I'm not an accelerationist.
I do martial arts also, and I predict you'd be facing an unsympathetic DA and a very tough jury if you did that. "People can be killed with bare hands!" Yes, but it's very uncommon, and pulling a lethal weapon is an obvious escalation and most courts will see it that way.
Talking about fundraisers is comparable but peripheral. Central to the rittenhouse controversy is a scissors statement about "is it reasonable to walk around with exposed guns." Central to this controversy are facts that are yet undisclosed-- that being, what exactly lead to the stabbing. It's possible that the two cases might start looking more alike, if during witness examination the prosecution makes a credible case that stabber was in some way looking for trouble (regardless of what the stabee what up to), but it also might start looking less alike, if the defense can establish a history of bullying and negative interpersonal interactions between the stabee and stabber. At this point, I think it's too early to tell, and people drawing connections are being pointlessly inflammatory.
Of course it's an escalation. But it's very rare that situations begin perfectly even. If I was having a heated argument with a five-nothing woman, by the very nature of my size, sex, and training I have already pre-escalated. If I even unconsciously clenched my fists, her bringing out a knife would be a reasonable response. Neither of us would necessarily want a fight here-- but then events might conspire to put us in conflict. I'd prefer to run, but if my back was against the wall, I might instead make a grab for the knife. Under those circumstances, it would be perfectly reasonable for her to try to stab me. Regardless of which of us comes out the victor, either of us could be plausibly at fault.
It's not peripheral to what we're actually talking about here. I really don't care to relitigate the Rittenhouse case. What @FCfromSSC pointed out was that the legal defense fund for Rittenhouse was shut down, whereas the legal defend fund for Karmelo Anthony was not.
No matter how wrong or guilty you think Rittenhouse was, would you not agree that he was entitled to a legal defense? And that people who sympathized with him had the right to donate to it? And that it would be wrong to decide whose legal defense funds people are or are not allowed to donate to?
Yes, of course the facts of the case are going to matter a lot, and we can construct hypotheticals where pulling a knife when being threatened by fists would be considered justifiable. But most of the time, it's not.
I am not rushing to judgment on the Karmelo Anthony case, because often some details emerge over time that change what everyone thinks they know, but based on what I've heard so far, if a teenager pulls a knife and stabs another teenager who was threatening, or even shoving him, I would expect him to have a hard time making a convincing case that it was justified.
To be fair, Anthony is fundraising on GiveSendGo, the same place Rittenhouse eventually got shoved to. To be less naive, I'll notice that GiveSendGo has not lost credit card processors for it (nor for the Luigi fandom), nor has a Harvard-backed organization hacked into GSG and doxxed contributors such that any have been fired.
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Seems to me that the rioters were the ones that "created a situation such that provocation would happen". It's fascinating to me how it always gets ignored by Rittenhouse haters that showing up from out of town to burn a community down is a far more sinister intent than showing up to defend it.
Characterizing them all as "rioters" who wanted to "burn a community down" is a credible, but not unimpeachably true claim. I suppose it maps onto the (again, credible, but not unimpeachably true) argument that the black kid in this case was being bullied, but I think the difference here is that assigning an intent to a group does not assign an intent to the individual people Rittenhouse shot, while at least an in principle a claim about bullying is a claim about a history of negative interactions between particular individuals that let them predict how the other will act.
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What? What martial arts do you do where it's acceptable or proportionate to pull a knife? Kali?
Martial arts are sports and he's obviously not pulling a real life in a sparring match.
He'd talking about pulling a knife in a real fight, one in which you have no guarantee that the attacker will stop kicking once you're unconscious - and in that case pulling a knife or a firearm is obviously completely proportional. The defender has no moral obligation to risk his life to increase the safety of the attacker. If you don't want to get stabbed, don't attack people. Simple as.
It's absolutely shocking to me how effeminate our culture has become, that anyone can consider use of a knife or gun to be proportional self defense to an offer of fisticuffs.
I wouldn't call it effeminate when most women seem to be absolutely averse to carrying a gun/knife, let alone ready to stab a motherfucker.
The statement: he threatened to punch me and I was scared for my life is effeminate.
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Except when the culture was more masculine they solved the problem by simply allowing the use of both.
...Sorry but what the fuck are you talking about? Your link described a gunfight that turned into a knife fight. No one is mentioned as punching anyone!
Bowie would have never drawn his knife to "protect" himself from a shove.
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Right, but every country stopped allowing duels because loads of healthy young men died.
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I think there's a difference between 'I would pull a knife in order to deter an attacker' which is excessive in the vast majority of interactions but may be the quickest way to defuse something and 'I would actively stab an attacker who's shown no overtures towards violence beyond wanting to remove me from a tent'.
Was Karmelo Anthony under any realistic lethal peril beyond 'yaddayadda he trips whilst being defenestrated from the tent and has a massive coronary heart attack'? Like if this was just 'a bouncer put his hand on a patron who then pulled a knife and then stabbed the bouncer to death' it would be the most open-shut murder case possible. Even trying to defend Karmelo is tiresome. It's essentially impossible to do in good faith.
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I think I could beat up the "average" person (inclusive of women, I'm not good enough that I can confidently claim I would beat up the average guy.) But if I got into a heated argument with someone weaker than me, it would be ridiculous to expect them to just concede to my physical prowess. Therefore, I would consider it a proportional act for them to pull a knife on me. Similarly, if I'm in a reversed situation, where I'm facing a black belt or prizefighter in their prime, I would rather pull a knife than let them give me brain damage. In full space of hypotheticals, I think the fight would de-escalate from there the vast majority of the time-- few martial artists are stupid enough to actually fight someone who'd afraid and has a knife, including myself, but I can't strictly exclude the chance of conflict.
I do not know of any place on Earth where a woman or a weaker guy pulling a knife in response to someone bigger "unconsciously clenching their fists" would be seen as anything but an unstable psycho as opposed to "acting proportionally". It is not in fact ridiculous to expect people to prefer being slightly intimidated rather than go for mortal threats.
It would be a context-dependent response, and I'm not convinced that it was the right context in this exact case, even if the defendant's claims of bullying were true. But it's really not that hard to imagine scenarios were even motivationally innocent behavior from a physically threatening individual can be reasonably perceived as a threat.
Human imagination is a wellspring that flows eternal. Can you point to actual cases of knife use against bullies, even non-fatally, where the knife-wielder was considered in the right?
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If it was one-on-one in a dark alleyway and prime Mike Tyson is coming at me, I may pull a knife to attempt to de-escalate. But Karmelo Anthony was the one trespassing to begin with, with no real threat of any meaningful physical harm beyond his removal from the premises, and he chose to massively escalate the situation by pulling a knife and then to actually use the knife.
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GBRK is saying that based on his martial arts experience, he's aware it would be all too easy to get killed or gravely injured in no-holds-barred hand-to-hand combat. Not that pulling out a knife in a formal martial-arts fight where both fighters follow the rules and no one is going in for a kill would ever be appropriate.
Well what he actually says is he does martial arts and if someone started shit he would consider pulling a knife proportionate. Either he does Kali or he is waiting for the bus on the way to school. Those are the only times anyone should say that and not expect to be ridiculed, because it is ridiculous. Knives are a shit ton more dangerous than any body part or fighting technique. That's their purpose.
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FC is presumably referring to Jake Gardner
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GiveSendGo hosted Rittenhouse's fundraiser; it was GoFundMe which banned it. They ended the ban after the acquittal, pretending the issue was that they never allowed money to be raised for defense of alleged violent crime.
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Honestly the Karmelo Anthony is insanely blackpilling to me. The whole thing should be so abundantly open-shut and it's being presented as an issue due to a combination of race issues and a childlike understanding of what happened with Rittenhouse.
Spontaneously stabbing somebody to death since they told you to move from a seat in an area that you obviously didn't belong in is something that prettymuch any society in human history would condemn you to immediate death for. Yet Karmelo's being compared to Rosa Parks of all people? Genuinely insane.
You see the difference is that Karmelo was actually trespassing while Rittenhouse was spiritually trespassing (on public ground in a local community that he has ties to). Obviously Rittenhouse's offense was much more egregious.
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To Rosa Parks’ discredit, perhaps.
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You know, I saw headlines about a Karmelo case, and assumed it was some annoying rapper. Because what parent would name their kid after a perpetually underachieving, inefficient, annoying failure of an NBA star?
Fundraising aside, this is why it’s notable? He’s a sports guy?
No, Carmelo Anthony was a star NBA player in the oughts, who was pretty famous and hyped but more or less the prototype of a sneaky-bad inefficient player. He was extremely talented and scored a lot of points, but he took too many shots and never got a lot of assists, was a notoriously bad teammate and ball hog, etc.
I'm just saying this never happens to a kid named Tim Duncan.
I had assumed the headlines were about some annoying rapper and never read the story, because I didn't really care much.
Dude's 17 which means he was born/name selected in 2008 when Carmelo Anthony was more exciting up-and-comer than his full legacy playing out.
God damn it I'm old.
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Loving Carmelo Anthony is itself mild evidence towards stupidity, like driving a Nissan or wearing a TAPOUT t shirt.
I get that but like I'd give more of a pass to a kid called Zion Williamson born the year he got drafted than I'd give to one born the year of Zion's retirement.
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Now that it’s news, raising money has become ‘pay five dollars to own the racists’. Distasteful though.
"Own the racist" is a funny way to say "Dunk on the poor victim's cuck father".
Allegedly there is some NGO that goes around coaching/bribing/threatening victims families into saying a bunch of "Let's not make this about race" bullshit. It's quite the contrast to when some black teen commits suicide by cop. But regardless of whether the father's calls for forgiveness, lenience and understanding are sincere or coerced, the degree to which the murderer's family is adding insult to injury should be unforgivable. Not a single ounce of contrition, reflection or humility. I get that people are framing this as the father being a "Good Christiantm", and I'm no Christian myself (yet), but I'm under the vague impression even God requires you to ask forgiveness with some sincerity. It's not just on tap for everyone all the time always regardless of how remorseless or sociopathic they continue to be.
Scott Adam's continues to be correct. It's a hate group, and it's not safe to be around them. If you had doubts before, they are literally putting their money where their poll results are.
I mean, how many of the people donating are white liberals who unironically believe this is a railroading because their brains fell out.
There’s definitely pure ingroup-outgroup blacks, but you ain’t raising money from them.
They're the only group with significant outgroup bias. And they outnumber black Americans. Naively I would expect most donaters to be them.
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I don’t disagree. I’m just saying that now when the whole thing has blown up, donating a little makes the big ‘fuck you whitey’ number go up and is therefore a cheap way of teabagging the outgroup (you and me).
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There's both a bunch of NGOs (the father hired one as his publicity agent), and the (edit)US DoJ Community Relations Service , who partner with the NGOs to either start riots or do the "killer is the real victim" number.
It’s the Department of Justice Community Relations Service. It’s rumored they use threats and intimidation to basically force cooperation from the family of the deceased.
Given the Trump administrations' rooting around for left-wing orgs to cut, I'm a bit suspicious that nothing has come out about this if it is the case. They've found much less notable forms of weird behavior.
Trump is not particularly worried about anti-white sentiment, to all appearances.
I mean, I didn't think he had strong opinions on LBJ-era affirmative action EOs either.
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It's part of the DOJ, and DOGE clearly went after "independent" agencies first.
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You mean the Community Relation Service of the Department of Justice? Paging DOGE, Elon Musk to the whitey courtesy phone...
Thanks, I hadn't finished my coffee and got DoJ and CRS combined trying to write the sentence
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