scatology...,
2010-05-24 16:15:29
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one of these years i'm going to kill you dead for real...,
2010-06-01 10:14:52
the consequences of nostalgia for social movements we never participated in, but totally would have if we'd been born at the right time, dude:
Shit like this is really annoying. John Stossel wants to be able to boycott segregationist businesses and feels that Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was an unconstitutional usurpation of his right to not be served: that's what libertarianism is all about he says. Meanwhile liberals are re-enacting the eight day civil war they went through when Hillary handed all the credit for civil rights victories to Johnson and CRA64, except this time they've closed ranks behind Hillary against a greater evil: her position is no longer racist compared to these other racists, or something.
The complaint should be that when the idiot in question said "The free-market competition would have cleaned the clocks" of segregated business he was wrong: segregated businesses were having their clocks cleaned:
With the support of most of Montgomery's 50,000 African Americans, the boycott lasted for 381 days until the local ordinance segregating African-Americans and whites on public buses was lifted. Ninety percent of African Americans in Montgomery took part in the boycotts, which reduced bus revenue by 80%. A federal court ordered Montgomery's buses desegregated in November 1956, and the boycott ended. ...
In many towns, the sit-ins were successful in achieving the desegregation of lunch counters and other public places. Nashville's students attained citywide desegregation in May, 1960, and Greensboro’s Woolworth’s store desegregated its lunch counter several months after its sit-in, on July 26, 1960, serving blacks and whites alike. ...
The most successful previous sit-in started August 19, 1958, when twelve children from the Oklahoma City NAACP Youth Council, led by the mother of two of the children, Clara Luper, began their sit-ins. They were soon successful in desegregating drugstore lunch-counters in three states. That success began a six-year long campaign of successful sit-ins at other segregated lunch counters, restaurants, and cafes in Oklahoma City. ...
And so and so on, takes a second to glance at wikipedia to lift blockquotes to demonstrate that, like, the freely associating bands of do-gooders in the civil rights movement were successful without any intervention by anybody with a monopoly on force. And it continued to happen after the bill passed, for that matter:
After the 1964 professional American Football League season, the AFL All-Star Game had been scheduled for early 1965 in New Orleans' Tulane Stadium. After numerous black players were refused service by a number of New Orleans hotels and businesses, and white cabdrivers refused to carry black passengers, black and white players alike lobbied for a boycott of New Orleans. Under the leadership of Buffalo Bills' players, including Cookie Gilchrist, the players put up a unified front. The game was moved to Houston and its Jeppesen Stadium.
Thank heavens for Title II. When civil rights activists failed it was generally on account of violence from or sanctioned by local governments. Without Title II CRA64 still struck down the local Jim Crow laws under which such violence was authorized. If the rest of CRA64 were enforced by the Federal Government it was just a matter of time before the market - as in national boycotts and, let's call a sit-in a 'disruptive consumer preference' for kicks - made segregated businesses a rare and stark reminder of how ugly America can be, continuing to serve an educational role in an amnestic and ugly nation without actually existing anywhere where there was somebody to refuse service to.
That "if" back there is a big one, I suppose, because the way things worked out Title II was passed, and while it was enforced the rest of CRA64 sat on the back burner. Let's ask someone who was there:
No president has really done very much for the American Negro, though the past two presidents have received much undeserved credit for helping us. This credit has accrued to Lyndon Johnson and John Kennedy only because it was during their administrations that Negroes began doing more for themselves. Kennedy didn't voluntarily submit a civil rights bill, nor did Lyndon Johnson. In fact, both told us at one time that such legislation was impossible. President Johnson did respond realistically to the signs of the times and used his skills as a legislator to get bills through Congress that other men might not have gotten through. I must point out, in all honesty, however, that President Johnson has not been nearly so diligent in implementing the bills he has helped shepherd through Congress.
Of the ten titles of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, probably only the one concerning public accomodations -- the most bitterly contested section -- has been meaningfully enforced and implemented. Most of the other sections have been deliberately ignored.
...
I'm sure that most whites felt that with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, all race problems were automatically solved. Because most white people are so far removed from the life of the average Negro, there has been little to challenge this assumption. Yet Negroes continue to live with racism everyday.
Ain't that the truth.
But OK: Throughout this whole Rand 'Two Last Names' Paul thing liberals seem bent on erasing the victories of the Civil Rights movement against segregation in the free market and handing off all the credit for their hard and bitter and dangerous struggles to a genocidal Democratic President for signing a scrap of paper, while Rand Paul and John Stossel style glibertarians are also erasing those victories, in that they don't seem to have any idea that they ever occurred. This is why I have a hard time caring about the current spat of Texas schoolbook revisionism, I think. The old textbooks clearly weren't any good either.
But why stop at erasing a century of struggle. Maybe we'd be better off without Title II. Maybe by shifting the battles from the shopfront to the court room it undermined the vast grassroots organizational infrastructure of the Civil Rights movement and replaced it with an atomized network of attorneys and talking heads, making us all worse off. I'm kind of shocked that I haven't read anybody make that case yet, actually. Somebody must have. Whatever.
Also, what the fuck? If you want to get your fucking free market on there are a lot better places to start than fucking Title II, jesus tittyfucking christ these people. You've got the entire financial sector sucking on the trillion dollar tits of the public and BP hiding behind the government intervention of limited liability after a multi-billion dollar disaster and everybody in America dumping what passes for their lifestyles into the atmosphere, and what do these stupid fucks do to advance the discussion of their moronic pseudo-philosophy? Let's make it so we have to spend all our free time organizing boycotts against segregationist businesses! Whee!
I blame Rand Paul's namesake. The one, or maybe the other. I'm not sure which.
