Category Archives: Sociology

Every One Deserves To Go Home

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‘ America’s Killing Fields’ by Kathleen Parker

Horror. Shock. Disbelief. Numbness. Grief. Anger. And terrible sadness.

These fractured thoughts were all I could muster upon waking Friday to news of the ambush on Dallas police. They were still fresh in my mind from the night before when I’d turned in early, exhausted by the images of 32-year-old Philando Castile dying in Minnesota after a police officer shot him.

As we all know by now, Castile was African American and the officer was not. It started as a routine stop for a broken taillight and ended in what has become a routine shooting followed by a routine headline.

Black man shot by police officer. How many times must we read those words?

Just 24 hours earlier, another black man, Alton Sterling, 37, was shot to death by police while being restrained in Baton Rouge.

Like Sterling, Castile did have a gun. Castile also had a concealed-carry permit, which he apparently told the officer as soon as he was stopped. Why would someone tell a police officer he had a gun if he intended to use it?

Castile was reaching for his driver’s license and registration when the officer opened fire, says his girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds.

Reynolds used her cellphone to film the aftermath of the shooting, careful to address the officer as “sir” and follow his instructions. Over and over I watched the video, trying to imagine being in that car, while at the same time feeling shame about watching a stranger who is mortally wounded.

Nothing is more intimate than death, which we all hope to face with dignity in the comforting presence of loved ones. Castile had no such luck. Instead, he was surrounded by millions of onlookers, most of whom, I feel certain, suffered with and for him.

“[Expletive]!” “[Expletive]!” “[Expletive]!” On the video, we hear the officer repeating the F-word as he realizes what has happened. Reynolds is saying, “Please don’t tell me this, Lord. Please, Jesus, don’t tell me that he’s gone. . . . Please, officer, don’t tell me that you just did this to him.”

My God.

Friday morning, Castile’s mother bore into the television camera. She said people can look into her eyes, at that point 48 hours without sleep, and know that she’s not going away until justice is served. Across the country, protesters had gathered peacefully Thursday evening to demonstrate against the shootings. Click here for full article.

‘The Uncomfortable Reason Why It Came To This In Dallas’ by Leon Wolf

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(This has been a summer of blood shed, from bloodiest month of Rmadan to bloody racial discord, and it is hard to wraparound shell shocked mind and arms around these soul piercing events which have taken a life of their own.This blunt article by Leon Wolf deals with bloody racial discord and removes the scab from a wound which all of us are aware of its smoldering painful presence, but do nothing to heal it.f.sheikh)

“As the child of white parents who grew up in the rural panhandle of Texas, I was taught that police were there to help, any time I had a problem I should go to them. I should always follow their orders and show them the utmost respect. No one is more important and helpful to your community than the police.

Now imagine, for a minute, that your parents instead grew up as black people in the 50s or 60s in one of the many areas where police were often the agents of – let’s call it what it was – white oppression. How might that have changed, for understandable reasons, the way not only those people but also their children and their children’s children interact with the police? More importantly, how might it impact the belief that police will ever be held accountable for abuses of their power?”

I think the evidence would show that the vast majority of police do their jobs with the greatest professionalism possible. I don’t think that’s a sufficient answer to the reality of lingering mistrust between police and minority communities, especially in certain areas of the country. And the proliferation of cell phone video recording has really confirmed (in their minds) something they have long anecdotally believed or been taught – that police often interact with minority communities in different ways than they do with the white community.

And here’s the most important part: when they do so, they never or almost never face punishment.

Look, I don’t know. I don’t want to rush to judgment on either the Baton Rouge shooting or the Falcon Heights shooting, but based upon what we have seen, they look bad. Very bad. They look, at least at first glance, to confirm a lot of biases that people have. They look like a scenario that has played out all too often that the white community either doesn’t believe ever happens (or at least believes is at most a freak occurrence) and minority communities believe is a systemic occurrence. And they look, most importantly, like many other scenarios in which officers have skated either scot free or with a slap on their wrist.

And here is the important point and the point I have been trying to make with this excessively wordy post. The most important safety valve to prevent violence like we saw in Dallas last night is the belief that when officers do go off the rails, the legal system will punish them accordingly. If minority communities (and everyone else, for that matter) believed that, resort to reprisal killings would be either non existent or far less frequent.

click here for full article

posted by f.sheikh

Is Gender A Spectrum? By Rebecca Reilly-Cooper

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What is gender? This is a question that cuts to the very heart of feminist theory and practice, and is pivotal to current debates in social justice activism about class, identity and privilege. In everyday conversation, the word ‘gender’ is a synonym for what would more accurately be referred to as ‘sex’. Perhaps due to a vague squeamishness about uttering a word that also describes sexual intercourse, the word ‘gender’ is now euphemistically used to refer to the biological fact of whether a person is female or male, saving us all the mild embarrassment of having to invoke, however indirectly, the bodily organs and processes that this bifurcation entails.Header essay painted people 540954348

The word ‘gender’ originally had a purely grammatical meaning in languages that classify their nouns as masculine, feminine or neuter. But since at least the 1960s, the word has taken on another meaning, allowing us to make a distinction between sex and gender. For feminists, this distinction has been important, because it enables us to acknowledge that some of the differences between women and men are traceable to biology, while others have their roots in environment, culture, upbringing and education – what feminists call ‘gendered socialisation’. Click below for full article.

https://aeon.co/essays/the-idea-that-gender-is-a-spectrum-is-a-new-gender-prison

posted by f. Sheikh

 

IMF & WB vis-a-vis the underdeveloped countries.

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Imtiaz Bokhari Sahib has written to me again that he wants to continue discussion about the topic in the title. Some of the initial exchanges between some members were done via email but most TF subscribers should have received those exchanges. So Bokhari Sahib, this is in some more detail the point I have been making.

Some of you have seen recent discussion going on the TF mailing list re. the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank vis a vis Third World countries. The original article’s premise was that the above two institutions were essentially blood suckers making poor countries poorer while those poor countries were faultless victims. I did not challenge the premise that those institutions (IMF &WB and their investors) care only for their profit and not for the well being of the citizens of those poor countries. The only thing I challenged is the fact that the underdeveloped countries were made out to be faultless victims.
As a result I was asked by some to read some articles that would enlighten me. At the time I refused to read those articles because I didn’t think you could acquire commonsense by reading an article and I feel commonsense is all you need to come to the conclusion I came to. Fayyaz,Nasik and Babar Sahibs actually did – and put it in writing. But over the long weekend I had a few hours to kill and to satisfy my own curiosity I decided to do my own research on the subject. I have attached links to a few articles and to be objective I have purposely chosen articles that are highly critical of the IMF and the WB but read carefully and you’ll see that those countries were not faultless. I’ll make it easier by giving you the exact location of the lines that will prove my point.
As you can see this article is highly critical of IMF & WB but scroll down to section “How do countries get into financial trouble, the Debt Crisis” and read the third line down in the second paragraph. Corrupt and inept leaders is why the countries are poor in the first place; getting loans to fill their own pockets makes things worse. And what is a bank supposed to do when a country fails to pay back? you certainly don’t expect them to say “please consider that loan as charity, we have enough money”.
This article is even more critical of IMF & WB but go to paragraph nine and read some of the lines.
Both these authors  seem to write pages and pages about how evil the banks are (and I am not even denying that) but  very casually glide over the ineptness of the poor countries’ leaders as if it was a very, very minor cause of poor countries getting poorer. I  think the leaders of those countries are AT LEAST half the problem
Shoeb