Money that China is pumping into African countries is making it down to tangible things that average people can see and benefit from. People are finding it easier to secure loans in South Africa, Ghana, and Nigeria financed by Chinese banks then via british or american banks.

I do give a nod to Bill Gates and his initiatives, but even his project fail when it comes to the one thing the average person needs most, capital investment.

Because it seems important to you to hear, yes, anything dealing with race is, by one definition, racist.

....but....

Just like discrimination, that's not necessarily bad.
Discrimination just means noticing a difference just like racism can mean making any distinction by race. Most definitions include prejudice and superiority as parts of racism, but not all. Discrimination by itself is not bad, it's discriminating against someone (especially based on racial assumptions) that's considered wrong.

Racism-the belief that all members of each race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race.

That characteristic could be nothing more than pigmentation levels, a physical characteristic with no other connotations or prejudices attached....it's still technically racism. E.g.. it's racist and discriminatory to state that Americans of African descent are at risk for sickle cell anemia, but not malicious or prejudicial.

People who claim to be 100% non-racist are liars, blind and deaf, or 100% brain dead. Reasonable people admit they see race, even those who don't discriminate against others based on race.

Try reading again. You have it totally backwards.

When was I insulting or dismissive? Because it was unforseen that educated people would elect a bombastic insulting sexist popularist con man who was obviously lying to them simply because he wore a red hat and tie? Those are facts, not opinion. Many of them are saying how much they regret it now.

I offered solutions you appeared to agree with, like funding lower education so everyone has a decent, if not equal, opportunity to get an education.
Using race as ONE criteria amongst many for admission is not ideal, as I said, but until a better system for identifying and addressing financial and societal issues that stymie opportunities for people often based on their pigmentation is created, it's the best we've got.

What we don't have is what you imply is the problem.....rich white men with 1570 SAT scores (old school SAT, I don't know how it's scored now) and 3.9 gpas are not being turned away from Yale to make room for indigent African American women with 990 SATs and 2.7 gpas...but the Latina woman with 1550 and 3.6 gpa earned while raising 2 siblings and holding a full time job, yeah, she gets the slot, and that's proper. One skewed test that benefits one privileged group is hardly a decent measure of their work ethic or intelligence....often it's only an indication they hired the right student to take the SAT for them. There were at least 3 hired test takers out of 30 students taking the PSAT when I took it, we talked afterwards.

It is the right (and people making the arguments you are) who are far more insulting and dismissive of non white people's frustrations at being racially discriminated against....to a level and consistency exponentially higher than the trifling discriminations whites suffer. That doesn't mean some whites don't suffer some deleterious effects, it means they come out way ahead in the discrimination game.

You wish to ignore all racial discrimination and racial obstacles except that single instance you can point to where it doesn't come out in your favor, then suddenly racism IS a problem that needs eradicating....but only the kind that harms white guys, forget the myriad of insurmountable racist mountains non whites climb daily, both institutional and societal, this speed bump for whites is unconscionable and must be removed immediately!

Come back and whine about institutional anti white bias when anti white racism permeates every facet of your life but not when your race doesn't give you a free leg up that one time. Maybe talk to your right wing friends about why funding education for others is good for you as step one towards eliminating programs like this that address inequities in opportunities, and giving the less fortunate extra opportunity to overcome their situation is good for all. After reasonable basic educational opportunities are available for all, schools will still take the student's home life, finances, and extra curricular activities into account....with luck that will be on an individual basis eventually, but that's not likely until education reforms occur that give everyone an opportunity to display their skills on a more level field..

JC also said man should no lay with another man. I don't make the rules, he does. Yes we all brake them. I am as guilty as the gay.

You closed mind is full of hate. I just have a different point of view. Wrong is Wrong. I don't hate. Are you from an abused / broken family? Join a good church and give you problems over to GOD.

But to your point of anything goes.. Anything? banging a 12 year old? Looting, crossing countries illegally? These are all Liberal ideas. Are these ok?


Atheist ? sound like you missing out in live. Science points towards a higher power with every new discovery.


Muslims are murderers by faith. Their moto is convert or die. Learn about them don't just watch fake news.

You POV of African Americans is BS.. Conservative want ALL people to succeed. Democrat policies have done more harm to the black than any other thing. Democrat want blacks to stay in their place for their vote. #walkaway.


Intolerance and obedience to the law are two different things.
Maybe you should have stayed in school and not on the pipe.
Maybe your still a kid who yet to realize truth yet.

Says the right who wants to deny gay people equal rights under the law because they sin differently. Who want to deny service to gay people because they sin differently. Who cares that Jesus said to love one another, to treat others as you'd want to be treated, and that those without sin should toss the first stones, yet toss stones of intolerance, bigotry and hatred. Don't even get me started on intolerance of emigrants, of other faiths (try being an open atheist in most workplaces or trying to run for office, as much pure hate and intolerance over Muslims that the right has, they hate atheist even more), intolerance of other races and lack of empathy for the plight of African Americans and just want those black people to stay in their place and not show any sort of unity... Rich. Truly rich, calling the left the ones that are intolerant. It's the right's intolerance that proved to me Christianity is a sham, because that doesn't jive with what Christ taught, but that is the attitude of the Christian Right and the GOP.

I have a few French friends, and as I see it there's quite a fundamental cultural difference at play here. I'll do my best to explain it, although I don't fully understand it myself.

There's a very fundamental French principle of equality that's considered as sacred as American freedom of speech. It means that when you're French, you're French, and explicitly not a member of a sub-culture. I heard about this when they banned wearing a hijab (I think) in schools: the children are French first, and must comply by French norms above others.

The French government have fought very hard to fight the foundation of religious and ethnic sub-cultures within France. This is obviously very different to the American approach of embracing your heritage and, just as Freedom of Speech has unwanted side-effects, so does this. The players are French, not African. Their cultural past was indeed wiped when they became French (at birth or otherwise). Yes, they're of African descent, but that's considered very different to being African.

Now, it's fair enough to argue the the American approach is better, but I think it's important to understand that this is not the French approach. There is a fundamental cultural difference there, and without understanding that, you're going to miss the point of their argument.

This is needless escalation.

First, yeah, a joke on a tv show doesn't warrant a letter from an Ambassador, and is needlessly escalating things.

Next though, Noah's response is unwarranted too, and is needlessly escalating again. Worse still, Noah goes for the throat against the ambassador implying that the ambassador is party to the problem of calling troublesome immigrants African and successful ones simply French.

So, I googled Gerard Araud for a minute to see what I could about where he stood on immigration. That came to the link below after a round of Islamic terrorist attacks within France.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/01/14/377262623/french-ambassador-to-u-s-outlines-predicament-of-immigration

"France is a country of 65 million inhabitants. There are between 5 and 6 million Muslims. And I guess 99.9 percent of Muslims are peaceful citizens. All the polls are showing their commitment to France. They are French; most of them are born in our country. So the message that we have to send to them is, they are part of the nation. They are a full part of the nation."

So he seems like an ally who already unequivocally put himself out there fully supporting (largely Arab and African)Muslims in the heat of a terrorist attack 3 years ago. So, not so much a fair whether friend only embracing French citizens of diverse backgrounds when they are champions, but in the much much harder time when the press coverage was terrifically negative.

So, the face value reason for the Ambassador's letter of not legitimising the neo-nazi right notion that true French citizens are "white/christian" looks absolutely his true intent.

The escalation here is not to be celebrated, it is needless division between people with the same good cause. The racists don't need the help of the rest of us fighting with one another.

Bob, I'll try to ignore your having just being an ignorant douchbag who rudely dismissed those with far more knowledge and personal experience than you possess, simply because they disagreed with your non- medically based, non-scientific based, thoughtless, inhumane political position and I'll try a different tact.....

How is it that, in 2018, you are advocating slavery more foul than the African slave trade....yes, slavery.

Forcing one person to fulfill all the bodily functions of another, brain dead potential "person" (and make no mistake, a blastocyst is not a person, but for sake of argument and your limited understanding capabilities I'll let you claim it is one this one time)....that's Mengele level inhumanity and slavery.

You claim to believe in individual liberties over vague social responsibility....except when you don't.

Forcing one person to physically support another is so far to the left of full socialism you seem to think it went all the way around to the right. It doesn't work that way.
To add the typical right wing slippery slope argument, if the government can force one person to be life support for another potential person, they can force healthy people to give up organs to the unhealthy, or be consigned to hospitals to be used as human dialysis and so forth.
Until those cells can and have survived on their own without support, and can and have functioned as a mammal (meaning breathed, circulated body fluids, and consumed and evacuated foodstuffs) they have not reached "living human" status, and even if you can't grasp that fact, at no point can there be a requirement that another person acts as their sentient intensive care unit without reinstating legal slavery.

Why do you advocate slavery?

When are you donating your kidney and partial liver, and your children's? If you aren't, by your logic you're at least a double murderer and so are they. Why should I or anyone take morality advice from a double murderer?

Design a procedure where the offending not yet human can be safely removed without any (or at least less than an abortion would cause) risk to the mother, but survive on it's own without an incubator-slave, then come back and we'll talk.... until then forced incubation and forced birth is monstrously draconian socialism of a kind even Mengele would turn away from in disgust.

Edit: I came up with an argument I think might change your mind....how many baby Newtboys would you force on the planet before you decided abortion should be mandatory in some cases?

Denzel says "the system is rigged..."

John Ehrlichman in 1994 stated "... the drug war was simply a way to vilify African Americans and the anti-war left."

So it is clear that the people in power directed the nations institutions and resources by the creation of laws and policies which resulted in millions of people being incarcerated. Then as Denzel clearly explains generations of young black males ended up fatherless and the cycle repeats itself.

Infrared is possibly race-blind? Looks to me under infrared light, Caucasian to East Indian to African skin-tones have very similar shade of ghostly white with a hint of green. That's pretty cool.

Either you're a complete moron or a troll. If you honestly believe what you wrote then you live in one weird bubble and are honestly racist. You're definition of racism is so far removed from the actual definition it is straight up racist itself.

I'm gonna go ahead and guess you are a American or Canadian who lives in that typical America bubble where the world is just your immediate doorstep and things like ethnic cleansing and racial prejudice between Africans, Chinese, etc simply dont exist to you.

I would invite you to sincerely re-examine your beliefs and world-view my brother because you're views are frightening.

PS: I love how it took you only two posts to devolve straight into Godwin's law. That must be a record.

Neofacist Africaners changed their name?
Suidlanders started in 06, race baiting and warning of the impending race war ever since, their platform based on prophecies from pre 1926 by a cowardly illiterate uneducated rebel German sympathizer from WW1.
Good job, Bob. You reposted some racist propaganda repeating >92 year old warnings of impending race wars.
Your mom must be so proud.

Apparently on the order of 90% of the plastic in the oceans enters the oceans by way of 10 Asian and African rivers. Not saying landfills are great but they are better than having all your waste flushed into your rivers. I think the main problem is 3rd world countries that have poor infrastructure for waste collection.

jimnms, having seen the movie, I can see why people are reacting this positively to it. Have you seen it? Where you have or havent, consider the following.

You are right that this isn't the first black superhero movie. If you ignore comedies starring goofy concept heros, the list of movies narrows. Then, consider movies with black super heros who are not anti-heroes (Spawn, Blade). Why this distinction? Anti-heroes are great, but they aren't characters for a general young audience to aspire to. To notice that the majority of main character superheroes in movies are either partially a joke or a dark/brooding/scary/threatening/antisocial hero might be a drag. especially when you compare it to the pool of white super heroes who aren't (most of them). That's important.

First movie with a mostly black cast? No, but how many such movies arent about slavery, inner city gangs, extreme poverty, surviving racism, genocide or third world conflict. How many are almost purely optimistic blend of science fiction and the beauty of African culture? How many imagine what an African country unmolested by colonialism might look like in the future, where its citizens were allowed to reach their highest potential in terms of culture, government and technology? This is in part what the Afro-futurism science fiction genre is about and its a very rare genre to make it to film.

Especially a film that has a budget of $ 200 million dollars. That budget is important. It says that at this point in history, the largest (maybe?) movie studio recognizes that the public wants to see black characters in this light. That's a big deal too.

And considering how well this movie is doing at the box office, Black Panther is a signal of whats to come. More stories about inspirational black characters told at this kind of block buster scale.

Does that make a bit more sense? I'm sure there are other reasons; one being its a really good movie! Hope this helps.