Slavery has ZERO impact to today's society.


Everyone has the opportunity to become what ever one desires.
To hang on to the past is nothing more than a self inflicted wound.

My GGgrandfather was a laborer.
GFather was a plumber.
Dad was first to finish HS.
I was able to finish college.


Each generation trying to make the next a little better.

Also Cubans flooding Florida over last fifty years doing better than black counterparts

Illegals traveling thousand of miles for a chance of making a better life for themselves and family.

Yet you give blacks a pass to hang onto the crutch of the past.

Micro aggression! Really MICRO. If you are offended by micro anything then you are too thin skinned.

More Black Men Are In Prison Today Than Were Enslaved In 1850.
Knowing the past is important to understanding the future. There have been improvements, but there are still disparities too numerous to list. The thought that blacks make up excuses is just ignoring present realities they have to deal with.

As for getting over slavery, well Blacks have been free less then half the time they were enslaved in this country. Studies have even concluded the stressful, violent and brutal traumas experienced over lifetimes of generations of enslaved people may even be pass down to there offspring.

Epigenetics, if one believes in that sorta thing, could lead to explaining why on top of current modern day racial based micro aggressions, bias and abuses of power things within the Black population as a whole in america are still broken. Neither political party is willing to address that.

So the privately run "family detention centers" like the one set up in Dilley, Texas, by the Obama administration were acceptable, but this is a step too far?

This shit didn't magically appear out of thin air. You can trace it throughout the entire history of the US: the separation of children from their parents during slavery, the forceful removal of children from reservations and their placement into "Indian schools", the mass incarceration of primarily minority youths for the crime of being poor, and physical removal of parents in foreign nations by incinerating them in drone strikes, etc.

This shit is despicable, but it's not a deviation from previous actions -- it's just the next step. And for Maddow to "break down" over this... There are Syrian refugees living in the apartment building across the street from me. How many Syrian, Libyan, Somali, Pakistani, Afghani and Yemeni children have been separated from their parents by US bombs and missiles? Never stopped Maddow from warmongering.

To be fair, Sanders and his supporters were accused of some horrible stuff too....by both sides. Not child sex slavery and multiple murders, but still slanderous mud slinging.
Also to be fair, a large enough portion of the left turned on her in April/May when the DNC actions came to light and she didn't honorably walk away from a tainted candidacy, and instead hired the people who had clearly broken the rules in her favor....not just after the election.

That said, she has every right to be bitter, and she would have been exponentially better than Trump....Sanders could have been at least one order of magnitude better than that given the chance, imo, and he didn't come with an ingrained, well structured, long practiced, and exceptionally well funded opposition in place.

So much dumb.

45% identify as conservative, but only around 10% identify republicans as conservative. Is that difficult to grasp?

Kanye is a "race traitor" because of his 'slavery is a choice' position. Supporting Trump just makes him look a little crazier and drug addled.
Also he did this at the same time....
https://videosift.com/video/Kanye-West-Lift-Yourself-Scoop-de-Whoop

No one said he can't be a Trump republican, they've just said they won't support that.
Shunning people for their political views is a republican mainstay, exponentially more so under Trump...they're really going to complain? Sad.
Snowflakes.

I ran across this little tid bit today regarding Kanye. He has concluded that slavery was a choice. https://twitter.com/JordanUhl/status/991403300485558274?s=09

Really? Explain why. It's in there, as clear and codified religious law.
If old testament morality and laws were out the window, then everything is permitted because new testament essentially says Jesus made sin obsolete....but he also said clearly that ALL previous religious laws stand and anyone telling you different is an evil liar.

"Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For I tell you truly, until heaven and earth pass away, not a single jot, not a stroke of a pen, will disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. Therefore anyone who sets aside one of the least of these commands and teaches others accordingly will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven."
Sure sounds clear to me, wear blended fabrics, get stoned to death as an infidel, refuse to stone them, your an infidel too, now you get stoned.

You need me to tell you why slavery and murder are wrong? I guess so, since your moral guide says they are proper, even required.

Treating others like you would have them treat you, the golden rule....what Jesus told you is the most important rule.
Do you want to be raped, sold into slavery, stoned to death, or even just told constantly that you're immoral, evil, and going to hell? If not, stop doing it, and definitely stop pretending that not what the bible commands of you.
That covers it, and covers why trying to impose your narrow idea of religious morality on others is wrong, according to your own moral code.

Newtboy, this is simply a strawman argument. What you've got is a list of (inaccurate and biased) gotcha arguments but they are not tethered to a framework of understanding of what is in the bible. There are atheists out there who have studied the bible (not saying you haven't) and could tell you the difference between the Old and New Covenants for example. There is an intellectual honesty that comes to table which allows you to have a substantive discussion. You're free to have opinions about what God has done and why He has done it but at least let's get our facts straight so we can have a honest conservation.

Let's say you're right and everything you said is true. On what basis are the things you brought up like slavery or murder objectively wrong?

When your "objective standard for what's moral" includes rape, slavery, and murder, and your "objective standard for what's immoral" includes yard work on the wrong day and wearing certain shirts, how on earth do you convince yourself it's an objective standard at all?

Well, then you must find slavery moral, as well as the murder of any non Christians, while those who wear cotton poly blends or eat at red lobster or mow on Sunday are clearly irredeemably immoral.
Those are the moral requirements your God gave you, and which you believe you are judged on.

How many infidels have you stoned to death. If it's zero, you're also totally immoral and going to hell, right?

If not, because Jesus erased your sin, then there is nothing immoral for Christians and abortion and child rape are totally fine?

I don't think any prosecutor wants to be the first one to put a person of non-Caucasian ethnicity on the stand for a hate crime, even when it clearly should have been counted as one.

That said, Turner was most likely under-sentenced. Not 'just' because he was white, but because he was from a rich family. In addition, he was lucky because, at the time, California law did not consider digital penetration rape. If you did not penetrate the woman's body with your penis, the most they could charge you with was assault with the intent. They also managed to tack on sexual penetration by a 'foreign' object.

On the other hand, you have a gang rape that there was photo and video evidence of. Evidence that showed that the defendant mentioned in the video not only participated in the rape, but urinated on the victim and told her "That was for 400 years of slavery, you bitch."

Finally, this is a hot issue. There will always be disagreements. @C-note linked a high rated video featuring someone we would 'expect' to be racist, due to stereotyping, confirming that racism still does exist and that racial privilege does as well. I agree that there are still racist issues in our society, although I personally feel we are moving more towards privilege based on monetary worth than racial worth. However, the simple fact of the matter is, this video is playing hard AND loose with the facts to skew the opinion of the viewer. A lot of videos do that. One of the good things about the sift is they WILL call people out on it, usually gently at first but with more force if it is repeated.

Legal, yes. Culturally accepted, not so much, slavery always had cultural opposition by the non ruling class. Natural, WTF?! Show me an example of pure non human slavery (not harems, not parasites) and I'll discuss it.

Granted, I don't know exactly how they measured, but his gene expression is what they measured, not his pure DNA. This goes to my point, that environment determines how your DNA is expressed, so twin studies are flawed from the onset by thinking they begin identical, they don't. They don't even start with identical DNA, just close.

"Genes and the environment", but not pure gene study....at least not like people think. People think twins are carbon copies, so one can be a control to study effects of what they're studying. That's not quite right. Certainly they are useful in genetic studies, but not that way. From before birth, they diverge in how nearly identical DNA is expressed. They might be good for finding what genes/traits need closer scrutiny, but only with large samples.

Grounds for individuals to (privately) discriminate, perhaps, but not (public) businesses....at least not in America. Our national identity is a melting pot of cultures, intolerance for the different is antithetical to that idea.


Gender, nope, you can totally choose that now.
Race, many people change their racial identity...Rachael Dolizal comes to mind....as does the term "passing".
Ethnicity, people pass as ethnic groups they weren't born into, sometimes unknowingly, daily.....again, Dolizal springs to mind.

So, I'll argue that all you mentioned for all intents and purposes are today often the result of free will and not beyond the control of every individual, but a full grasp of brain chemistry and design and well understood methods to change them are well beyond our current knowledge, so their behaviors and actions are, in part, out of their control and not the result of free will but of brain construction.....now what?

@newtboy

"Discriminating against people for their legal, culturally accepted, natural behavior makes the person doing the discriminating an asshole. "

Slavery also exists in nature, so it's natural, and once upon a time it was legal and culturally accepted. Discriminating against slave owners though, even back than, is contrary to your claim, quite noble.

"The space study with twins showed that in under a year their genes permanently diverged a full 7%"

You gotta be careful there exactly what is being measured, they did not find that fully 7% of his DNA changed and now was that different. Depending what you measure people also claim that human and chimp DNA only differs by less than 2%...


"Twins aren't genetically identical, even at birth. ...That makes twin studies a piss poor method of gene study."

If you read your own linked article it states:
Twins share the same genes but their environments become more different as they age. This unique aspect of twins makes them an excellent model for understanding how genes and the environment contribute to certain traits, especially complex behaviors and diseases.

If you bother to read the list of peer reviewed articles I linked, they are comparing mono-zygotic twins to di-zygotic twins. The very basic and largely accepted theory being that if a trait has a genetic component, 1000 twins split from the same zygote should share the trait more often than di-zygotic twins.

My argument though really doesn't care much though. I simply argue that beliefs, choices and behaviours are the result of free will and grounds to judge(discriminate) for and against those you deem good or bad, hurtful or harmful. Similarly, gender, race and ethnicity being things that are in zero way the result of free will and beyond the control of an individual and NOT grounds to judge(discriminate) for or against.

That should be a tip off that it's misleading at best...especially when you actually bother to look at the statistics and notice a total of around 115 stranger abductions nationally per year, most of which are recovered and few sold into sex slavery. FBI shows a total of <34000 still missing kids under 18 (not just from this year) do you really believe 10000 per year get snatched and sold?!
When you see outrageous, unbelievable claims like this that support your narrative, why don't alarm bells ever go off?

That is a form of sickness....and you've got it bad, booboo.

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.