Last night I was listening to a friend bitching about taxes.
She has a good job but much of the pay is commissioned based (she’s an IT recruiter for a contracting agency). When she did her taxes for last year it turned out she owed the government $1.2K.
I don’t know a huge amount about the tax system but I am told by her fiance that this is because her fluctuating income makes it hard to calculate how much she owes on a pay check by pay check basis and in theory she paid less than she should have during the year so now has to make it up. Makes sense to me.
The girl in question on the other hand started to rant that she was being penalized for being a “single white female”.
I told her that she might want to take “white” out of that phrase since skin colour has nothing to do with it, and I was surprised at her reply: “Yes it does, I wouldn’t be paying this much tax if I was a minority”
It took a few more exchanges to explain that this really wasn’t the case. I’m not sure I convinced her.
I know this girl very well and I’m very sure she is not a racist, but she obviously harbours some odd ideas of race, and perhaps a little bitterness / anger at this perceived tax break she thinks that nonwhites get.
Just thought it was an interesting side note to the anger Obama was talking about on all sides of the divide.
I should say, she was 3 sheets to the wind when we had this discussion (I was sober) and she then went on to complain about how much better a knocked up 19 year old single mother has it compared to her (ignoring her 2008 car, nice clothes, etc.) And then declare that she doesn’t want to turn into a Republican.
Interesting how some people get when they’ve had a few drinks.
Even though I was 99.99% sure she was wrong on the minority tax break thing, I still asked my brown co-worker about it this morning. Now she thinks I’m an idiot :p
I must have missed the ‘check here for a lower tax bracket if your something other than white’ on the 1099.
Is it possible since she was sloshed that she was actually bitching about illegal aliens not paying taxes in some sort of drunken confusion?
I reckon there is some kind of drunk confusion there. I know that sometimes I can make an illogical leap from a fact to something daft when somewhat intoxicated.
I.E. the average income of African Americans is lower than the average income of whites, ergo, whites pay more tax per person, and then convert that in a drunk mind to equal “African Americans get a tax break”
That’s an example, I don’t think I’ve ever made that specific leap, but I could understand if that’s what went on in her mind. Or it might have been a drunk version of that tired old “single white males are the new minority” idea, tweaked to her situation.
She also fell over on the way out of the bar and I am told she didn’t feel so good this morning.
She could also have not a lot of knowledge of the tax system. And have quite a bit of knowledge on the government programs that have been implemented to favoring minorities. “Hell there’s preferential treatment for hiring minorities, why not give preference on taxes to.” Sad thing is that as absurd as it is, I could see some politicians pushing for lower taxes/tax deductions for minorities.
So which Bible is THE ‘Word of God’? And using that definition, which religions qualify as “Christians”? Obviously not Muslims or Jews, but what about Catholics? Evangelists? Baptists? Lutherans? Mormons? Jehova’s Witnesses? It seems they all fit, because they all believe the Bible to be the Word of God.
Right off, you can throw out the Mormons and the Jehovah’s Witnesses. They both distort what the Bible says to an extreme degree. The Jehovah’s Witnesses had twentysix editions of their bible the last I knew, and probably several more by now. When they come across things they don’t like or that are in contradiction to one of their previous revisions, they simply print a new edition, changing what they don’t like. To the best of my knowledge, neither of them claim to be Christians.
The Word of God is the original. All the Bibles listed in your link are translations. They are all imperfect to some degree, because translating from one language to another isn’t an exact science. They all have many points where the translation is weak and nuance is lost. Probably all have some outright errors in translation, some many more than others. That really isn’t the point though. Its not that hard to get and use Greek/Hebrew/English interlinear Bibles and Greek/Hebrew/English dictionaries to clarify questionable passages. Its not the weaknesses in translation that cause the majority of problems. Its the willful distortions of what the Word says in order to get around things you (universal ‘you’) don’t like. None of the various versions that I’m aware of are the slightest bit ambiguous in their condemnation of homosexuality, yet a few denominations say its not sinful. To say that, you have to ignore what the Word says. If you’re gonna ignore what the Word says when you don’t like it, your religion isn’t really based on the Word, it’s just based on what you want the truth to be. If you’re gonna ignore the parts of the Bible you don’t like, you can’t legitimately claim it as the authoritative basis of your religion.
As for the rest, all denominations are wrong to some degree, yet there are some saved, true Christians in all of them. Some of them have split over obvious perversions such as homosexual priests (what an absurdity) and homosexual marriages. Others are destined to eventually split over the issue.
There is a distinct difference between being confused by an ambiguity and outright perversion of what the Word says. When perversions of the Word come into play, you’re not in the realm of true Christians.
I understand why someone like Wright, who was born in 1941, might think that the government would give blacks a disease. The fact is that the government basically experimented on blacks with the Tuskegee horror until 1972. If that had been done to my people I bet I might have some other strange beliefs.
All it shows is old paranoia spawns new paranoia (which is half the problem with Wright’s hate, he just keeps it playing forward)… the government didn’t give them syphilis… and the study started before there was a cure… they just didn’t provide it once it was… which was their moral failing.... but a common attitude towards research, in general, of the era (the research was more imporatant than individuals).
When he said he was the son of God and savior he didn’t mean he was the son of God and savior. eh?
:)
To be honest I wouldn’t be surprised if you were being serious.
Anyway, I completely agree with Dio on this. If you’re in, you’re in. If not, then you’re not.
Which is possibly why there is a massive stumbling block for me when it comes to ‘seeing the light’ - it wouldn’t be just a matter of adding God to my beliefs, I’d have to fundamentally change everything.
I’d feel like a fraud unless I did it properly. I’m somewhat in awe of Dio in that respect.
Rev. Jeremiah Wright isn’t the problem
The hysteria over Obama’s former pastor’s attacks on America shows we’re still in thrall to knee-jerk patriotism.
By Gary Kamiya
March 25, 2008 | Maybe we really are doomed to elect John McCain, remain in Iraq forever and nuke Iran. Nations that forget history may not be doomed to repeat it, but those that never even recognize reality in the first place definitely are. Last week’s ridiculous uproar over Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s sermons proves yet again that America has still not come to terms with the most rudimentary facts about race, 9/11—or itself.
The great shock so many people claim to be feeling over Wright’s sermons is preposterous. Anyone who is surprised and horrified that some black people feel anger at white people, and America, is living in a racial never-never land. Wright has called the U.S. “the United States of White America,” talks about the “oppression” of black people and says, “White America got their wake-up call after 9/11.” Gosh, who could have dreamed that angry racial grievances and left-wing political views are sometimes expressed in black churches?
It’s not surprising that the right is using Wright to paint Barack Obama as a closet Farrakhan, trying to let the air out of his trans-racial balloon by insinuating that he’s a dogmatic race man. But beyond the fake shock and the all-too-familiar racial politics, what the whole episode reveals is how narrow the range of acceptable discourse remains in this country. This is especially true of anything having to do with patriotism or 9/11—which have become virtually interchangeable. Wright’s unforgivable sin was that he violated our rigid code of national etiquette. Instead of the requisite “God bless America,” he said “God damn America.” He said 9/11 was a case of chickens coming home to roost. Now we must all furrow our brows and agree that such dreadful words are anathema and that no presidential candidate can ever have been within earshot of them.
This is absurd. We’re worrying about someone in Row 245 who refuses to stand up for “The Star Spangled Banner,” while the people who are singing loudest and waving the biggest flags are the ones who got us into the mess we’re in today.
Wright isn’t the problem. Stupid patriotism is the problem.
We are now five years into a war that may outrank Vietnam as the most pointless and disastrous one in our history. George W. Bush and his neoconservative brain trust conceived that war, but they were only able to push it through because the American people, their political leaders and the mainstream media signed off on it. And they did so because they were in the grip of the fearful, vengeful, patriotic frenzy that swept the nation after 9/11. Without 9/11 and America’s fateful reaction to it, there would be no Iraq war. Every day that the war drags on is yet another indictment of that self-righteous, unthinking “patriotism.”
Bill Clinton’s line that McCain and Hillary are “two people who love their country” may or may not have been intended to subtly denigrate Obama’s patriotism. But whatever it meant, it didn’t have anything to do with the actual problems facing the country. Loving America more than your opponent does is not a qualification for higher office.
In fact, the same all-American flag-wavers who called loudest for war against Iraq are now denouncing Wright as a hate-monger and a traitor, and attacking Michelle Obama for saying that only recently has she had reason to feel proud of her country. They insist that anyone who is not permanently proud of the United States, whose patriotism isn’t plastered on his or her face like the frozen smile of a beauty queen waving from a Fourth of July float, is beyond the pale. Never mind that the glorious results of their debased version of patriotism—4,000 American troops dead, a wrecked Iraq, and a greatly strengthened terrorist enemy—are plain for all to see.
You wouldn’t expect the Republican Party, Fox News, Bill Kristol or the readers of FreeRepublic to issue any mea culpas—they don’t acknowledge that they’ve done anything wrong. But the mainstream media’s pious tut-tutting over the Wright affair shows that it, too, has learned nothing from its disgraceful post 9/11 performance. The worst excesses of media groveling—the flag pins, the instructions not to run anti-U.S. stories—may be history, but the timorous mind-set remains the same.
Its reaction to Wright shows that the American establishment still cowers before the patriotic idol. It cited the “God damn America” sermon again and again, like the Spanish Inquisition ritually intoning the words of some heretic before drawing and quartering him. It didn’t matter that Wright uttered his curse in the context of demanding that America live up to its ideals—all that mattered were those three talismanic words. Anyone this angry, our media gatekeepers solemnly informed us, must be rejected. The only question was whether Obama was irrevocably tainted by his association with the evildoer. Wright’s “chickens coming home to roost” line about 9/11 produced the same unthinking, reflexive reaction. How dare this apostate suggest that America might not be blameless, that its actions could have had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks?
This isn’t a brief for Wright. I’m not a fan of Sharpton-style black demagoguery, with its knee-jerk grievance and identity politics. I don’t know Wright’s political philosophy or racial views well enough to place him on the vast spectrum of black leaders. Based on the few clips I’ve seen and the excerpts I’ve read, Wright certainly has his shortcomings. His preaching can be over-the-top, crude and ludicrous. His assertion that the U.S. government spread AIDS in the black population is a caricature of paranoid black demagoguery. In his “chickens coming home to roost” sermon, when he thundered that America’s sins were being revisited upon us, he failed to make the essential distinction between saying U.S. actions were partly responsible for the attacks and saying that we deserved the attacks. At times his aggressive, almost gloating tone and delivery made it seem like that’s exactly what he was saying.
But if Wright’s “chickens” sermon was unpleasant, the fact is that it was also largely right. He had the bad taste, and the courage, to say exactly what America did not want to hear at that moment. He said that although those who were murdered by terrorists were innocent, America itself was far from innocent. He placed 9/11 in a historical context, instead of pretending that it emerged out of nowhere. Critically, he said that lashing out in vengeful anger, however tempting, was not a wise or just response. To make this point, he used the Bible against itself, citing the terrible Verse 9 of Psalm 137, in which David, speaking in imagination to his Babylonian captors, gives voice to his people’s desire for vengeance: “Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.” This path, Wright pointed out, had biblical sanction. But it was not the right one.
Yes, Wright was angry, shrill and one-sided. But America would have been better off if his uncomfortable sermon had echoed through every church in the country after 9/11, instead of the patriotic, ahistorical pablum that did.
What’s strange, and depressing, is that all this has happened before—and we’ve learned nothing. In the days after 9/11, the nation whipped itself up into an ecstasy of moral sanctimony. Among the few who dared to resist the groupthink was Susan Sontag, who in a brief New Yorker piece wrote, “The disconnect between last Tuesday’s monstrous dose of reality and the self-righteous drivel and outright deceptions being peddled by public figures and TV commentators is startling, depressing. The voices licensed to follow the event seem to have joined together in a campaign to infantilize the public. Where is the acknowledgement that this was not a ‘cowardly’ attack on ‘civilization’ or ‘liberty’ or ‘humanity’ or ‘the free world’ but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed super-power, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?”
Sontag was saying the same things Wright did. Like him, she was instantly pilloried. She was called a traitor, an enemy of the state, an appeaser, a supporter of Osama bin Laden. But she was right.
Today, after five years of a catastrophic war driven by patriotic vengeance, it’s still not acceptable to disturb the myth of eternal American innocence. As David Bromwich wrote in a recent piece in the New York Review of Books, “the uniformity of the presentation by the mass media after 2001, to the effect that the United States now faced threats arising from a fanaticism with religious roots unconnected to anything America had done or could do, betrayed a stupefying abdication of judgment.” Stupefying indeed: Patriotism has proved to be a stronger opiate of the people than religion.
The taboo against any critical national self-examination has always existed here. But 9/11 sealed it in blood and made it virtually untouchable. Only a few academics, Middle East specialists and outspoken journalists have dared to suggest that U.S. foreign policies played a role in the 9/11 attacks. The Democrats, terrified of being called unpatriotic and “weak on national security,” won’t go there. Which is a big reason that the desperately needed national discussion over how to deal with the Arab/Muslim world after Bush leaves office still hasn’t started.
Turkey has a notorious law, Article 301, that makes “insulting Turkishness” a crime. We’re a lot closer to this than we like to think. In fact, we can expect John McCain’s entire campaign to basically be an American version of Article 301.
Our currently mandated version of patriotism is banal and genteel, as if we are afraid to dig beneath the surface of America and find out what’s really there. But there is another tradition of patriotism—a prophetic one. It is dark, angry, disturbing, even terrifying. And it cannot be dismissed, for its exponents include figures who exist at the very heart of the way Americans define themselves and their nation. Wright was vilified for saying “God damn America.” But it turns out that the words are inscribed in our national charter.
In “The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice,” the culture critic Greil Marcus looks at the dark visions articulated and made manifest by John Winthrop, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. Like Wright, these three figures did more than demand that America live up to its ideals. Whether in their rhetoric or by the example of their lives, they held a prophetic sword over it.
In 1630, Winthrop delivered a sermon to his fellow members of the Massachusetts Bay Company. The line that has gone down in history, oft cited by Ronald Reagan, is “wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill.” But Reagan, eager to present America as perfect, omitted the passage that followed. Winthrop warned that if the community of Puritans dealt falsely with their God, they would be cursed “till wee be consumed out of the good land whether wee are goeing.” Marcus describes this terrible image as “the replacement of God by a demon who, as citizens went about their work or leisure, would suddenly devour them.”
In his Second Inaugural Address, delivered near the end of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln issued an equally terrifying warning—one also largely erased from the national memory. “Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away,” Lincoln said. But then he added, “Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.’” Of this horrific vision, Marcus comments that it is “a call for a reenactment, on a national scale, of an Old Testament sacrifice.”
Finally, there is Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, delivered in 1963 in Washington. “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” King thundered. Time has smoothed and sentimentalized King’s soaring rhetoric; the sheer force of his language has allowed us to convince ourselves that his words came true. But as Marcus points out, they have still not come true—a fact that makes his great speech both inspiring and unbearably painful.
I am not comparing Jeremiah Wright to these towering figures. My point is that his angry claims that his nation has betrayed its promises of racial equality and a just foreign policy are part of a long and honorable prophetic tradition. It was not critics like Wright who got us into the bloody mess we’re in today. That honor belongs to the flag-wavers, the patriots—“the real Americans.”
[quote author="Diogenes" date="1206479408 Yes, the open-mindedness and tolerance of the professing atheist always astounds me too. It especially fun, after a diatribe like Kimpost just uttered, to ask them this: “Hey, Kimpost, why don’t you try giving us a proposed source of all matter/energy and an explanation of the beginning of time, that isn’t absolutely preposterous?” When an atheist comes up with any answer to that at all, I’ve never heard one that wasn’t totally absurd.
What is absurd about “I don’t know”?
To most folks, it would be obvious that “I don’t know.” is a non-answer. However, for you, I’ll explain. An athiest explicitly believes there is no god. There is no basis for that belief. There can be no evidence to support the nonexistence of a Creator. Therefore, atheism is a faith without any foundation whatsoever. Time extending into eternity past is an absurd concept. Time, and all matter/energy has to have had an origin. If you believe that there is no Creater God, and still have no theories on the origin of time and matter/energy, you have a totally absurd faith.
To say that it is absurd to not believe in something that every culture has a different explanation of doesn’t make much sense to me. You don’t have to explain the origins of the universe, if there is even an origin, to not believe in an invisible deity.
If you wanna believe in god, thats fine. I don’t understand why you think that to not believe in god requires any faith whatsoever. No evidence of god -> no belief in god. That makes perfect sense to me.
[quote author="Diogenes" date="1206479408 Yes, the open-mindedness and tolerance of the professing atheist always astounds me too. It especially fun, after a diatribe like Kimpost just uttered, to ask them this: “Hey, Kimpost, why don’t you try giving us a proposed source of all matter/energy and an explanation of the beginning of time, that isn’t absolutely preposterous?” When an atheist comes up with any answer to that at all, I’ve never heard one that wasn’t totally absurd.
What is absurd about “I don’t know”?
To most folks, it would be obvious that “I don’t know.” is a non-answer. However, for you, I’ll explain. An athiest explicitly believes there is no god. There is no basis for that belief. There can be no evidence to support the nonexistence of a Creator. Therefore, atheism is a faith without any foundation whatsoever. Time extending into eternity past is an absurd concept. Time, and all matter/energy has to have had an origin. If you believe that there is no Creater God, and still have no theories on the origin of time and matter/energy, you have a totally absurd faith.
To say that it is absurd to not believe in something that every culture has a different explanation of doesn’t make much sense to me. You don’t have to explain the origins of the universe, if there is even an origin, to not believe in an invisible deity.
If you wanna believe in god, thats fine. I don’t understand why you think that to not believe in god requires any faith whatsoever. No evidence of god -> no belief in god. That makes perfect sense to me.
It doesn’t surprise me at all that such an absurdity makes perfect sense to you, bartink.
I understand why someone like Wright, who was born in 1941, might think that the government would give blacks a disease. The fact is that the government basically experimented on blacks with the Tuskegee horror until 1972. If that had been done to my people I bet I might have some other strange beliefs.
I don’t think Wright thought this thing through to the logical conclusion. If he accepts that the US gov was able to create a disease that targets blacks, a priori he accepts that there is a genetic difference between blacks and the rest of us. Isn’t that what the NAACP and other black organizations have been fighting against: the idea that blacks are different?
When he said he was the son of God and savior he didn’t mean he was the son of God and savior. eh?
:)
To be honest I wouldn’t be surprised if you were being serious.
Anyway, I completely agree with Dio on this. If you’re in, you’re in. If not, then you’re not.
Which is possibly why there is a massive stumbling block for me when it comes to ‘seeing the light’ - it wouldn’t be just a matter of adding God to my beliefs, I’d have to fundamentally change everything.
I’d feel like a fraud unless I did it properly. I’m somewhat in awe of Dio in that respect.
I’m with Dio and you… and half serious. Either he said it or he didn’t (and someone interperted him as saying it… when he didn’t, ergo, he didn’t). If he said it, he was either right or not right.
Wow, Salon found a kook to carry water for the racist…
That aside, I really don’t know what your point is. I could post a bunch of vile nonsense from some paleo con rag without comment… so what? I could also post a bunch of mainstream conservative articles without comment. Again, so what?
Anyway, it’s time for change. No more 60s radicals, black nationalists, et cetera. Feel the change Mr Obama. ;)
bartink I understand why someone like Wright, who was born in 1941, might think that the government would give blacks a disease. The fact is that the government basically experimented on blacks with the Tuskegee horror until 1972. If that had been done to my people I bet I might have some other strange beliefs.
Why, because you’re a black man who was born in the ‘40’s? Perhaps you’re a poor black man born in the forties and living in the poverty and squalor that, according to Chance Obama, was the upbringing that Wright had:
OBAMA’S PASTOR RAISED IN PRIVILEGE, NOT POVERTY
How do I know?
It happens that, as a Philadelphian, I attended Central High School – the same public school Jeremiah Wright attended from 1955 to 1959. He could have gone to an integrated neighborhood school, but he chose to go to Central, a virtually all-white school. Central is the second oldest public high school in the country, which attracts the most serious academic students in the city. The school then was about 80% Jewish and 95% white. The African-American students, like all the others, were there on merit. Generally speaking, we came from lower/middle class backgrounds. Many of our parents had not received a formal education and we tended to live in row houses. In short, economically, we were roughly on par.
I attended Central a few years after Rev. Wright, so I did not know him personally. But I knew of him and I know where he used to live – in a tree-lined neighborhood of large stone houses in the Germantown section of Philadelphia. This is a lovely neighborhood to this day. Moreover, Rev. Wright’s father was a prominent pastor and his mother was a teacher and later vice-principal and disciplinarian of the Philadelphia High School for Girls, also a distinguished academic high school. Two of my acquaintances remember her as an intimidating and strict disciplinarian and excellent math teacher. In short, Rev. Wright had a comfortable upper-middle class upbringing. It was hardly the scene of poverty and indignity suggested by Senator Obama to explain what he calls Wright’s anger and what I describe as his hatred.
I understand why someone like Wright, who was born in 1941, might think that the government would give blacks a disease. The fact is that the government basically experimented on blacks with the Tuskegee horror until 1972. If that had been done to my people I bet I might have some other strange beliefs.
I don’t think Wright thought this thing through to the logical conclusion. If he accepts that the US gov was able to create a disease that targets blacks, a priori he accepts that there is a genetic difference between blacks and the rest of us. Isn’t that what the NAACP and other black organizations have been fighting against: the idea that blacks are different?
If you consider that the AIDS virus does not target blacks only (or homosexuals only for those who believe it was to kill homosexuals) then the evidence shows there is no major genetic difference between the races. (obviously there are genetic differences between all of us, but we can all catch the same diseases for the most part)
It could be Wrights opinion that the government wrongly thought it would only target blacks genetically, or vastly understimated the amount of inter racial sex going on but turned out to be wrong. Or to put it another way, their evil plan to kill off the blacks got out of control and spilled over into whites. Of course if they were so evil to plan this in the first place they probably don’t care about a few whites with “jungle fever” either, after all, what’s the worst that would happen? No Obama?
Obviously I don’t believe the US government invented aids to kill black folks
As I say above, it was to kill the homos!
