Hypocrisy is everywhere

 

With Michael Flynn “suggesting” a violent military coup and Sidney Powell advocating for a less violent “reinstatement” of Der Fuhrer, can anything get any crazier in this country, thank to Donald Trump?  But then again, perhaps the reason why this world is so difficult to understand is that people are essentially all in some way or another selfish and self-centered. Few actions are truly altruistic; most people do “good” because it makes themselves feel “good.” When people say they are representative of a social movement, they are just a conglomeration of individuals who happen to possess the same petty, self-obsessed considerations.  

Which of course opens up that can of worms called “hypocrisy.” It’s everywhere. Disney has another movie about an “evil” female character (Cruella from 101 Dalmatians), who, we discover, is only less evil than some others, so she can get away with her evil without any suffering any consequences. And then there are some black mothers of children killed by police who are complaining that the Black Lives Movement, and specifically founder Patrisse Cullors, are making a fortune for themselves off the deaths of their sons and daughters; perhaps they feel it wasn’t fair for them not to “cash in” too (just a thought).

The term “liberal” in the social sense is often used to imply people can do as they wish, and that there are no “traditional” guardrails that are subject to the judgment of  moral scrutiny. That may have been true in the 1960s, but that is certainly not true today, particularly in regard to gender issues. It says something about the gender politics of this country when full frontal nudity in a European film can be rated “12”—meaning “acceptable” for a 12-year-old so long as it doesn’t involve actual “sex”—yet a person up to the age of 17 in this country must be blindfolded to such things, and regard it as “unnatural” and “bad.” Isn’t it better to just take the “mystery” out of thing, like they do in a more “mature” society, as Europe pretends to be?

And yet…while it is offensive to women to depict them like this…

 

…it is “OK”  to place in prominent places in Seattle statues of completely naked men and boys:

 

Putting aside the tiny “members” on these figures just short of complete castration, some have accused the statues of the father and son as promoting “pedophilia.” But it is more emblematic of the fact the hypocrisy of social liberalism which has more to do today with who does or doesn’t have the power to impose their real or imagined grievances to the purpose of tyrannizing others. I mean, we live in a country that glorifies violence in films and yet wonder why there are so many mass shootings. Instead we have discuss such “philosophical” questions why we need to “cover” up some things, and not others.

There is plenty of frustrating activity going on all over the world these days, but on the HBO show “Last Week Tonight,” John Oliver seems to be scraping the barrel for topics that people actually care about—or don’t. For example, one recent clunker was about black people’s hairstyles, and how the people who are not black react to them. Like, who cares, except people who like being told they have another reason to feel “oppressed.” As mentioned before, some people do “good” because it makes them feel “good,” but doing things that are “bad” also makes them feel good. Take Oliver’s more recent clunker about “sponsored content,” probably his dumbest, most pointless, and least “funny” show ever. It demonstrated that Oliver doesn’t realize that you only have to be racially-insensitive against one group to be so.

The topic was apparently “inspired” by Oliver’s on-going “problem” with “Mexican” food.  He began with deriding “horrifying products” like French’s Crispy Jalapenos, the Velveeta Cheese Liquid Fountain (most likely to put on nachos), and something called Doritos Loaded; in regard to the latter, he claimed that the advertising spot lasted six seconds, which is “how long it stays in your body.” His “commentary” about what most people stereotype as “Mexican” food, even though it is created by people who are not “Mexican,” shows that ugly racist jokes are not “funny,” and a shit excuse to revolve a dumb topic around.

Of course white “liberals” are not the only hypocrites; how about black “liberals”—if that is the right word to call them. Take for example two professors named Andrea Plaid and Christopher MacDonald-Dennis, who last week co-wrote a self-serving, racist op-ed in Newsweek. They claimed that the term “people of color” should cease, because only black people apply. They admit that “people of color” is a term meant to apply to people who are “not white” or “minority.” However, they “say” that when the term is used, “we” really mean “black.” Says who? Says you, self-obsessed “victims.” Take this hypocritical, self-serving “only we matter” comment:

Take for example, police brutality. As America has come to understand finally, the police are disproportionately killing Black people. To use the term “people of color, or even the newly popular BIPOC, which stands for Black and Indigenous people of color, to speak about police brutality obscures Black people’s specific struggle against police brutality.

Of interest is that Newsweek is reporting that a “person of color” sucker punched an Asian woman in New York’s Chinatown. He was described as a “dark-skinned man” in a hoodie, but the video clearly showed him to be a black man. Now, I don’t know if he just picked out a “random” victim, but if he had slugged a white or Latino person, he would be “excused” for it because it was a “reaction” to “systemic” racism. But these days actions such as this allow Asians to be “special victims,” despite the fact that these anecdotal incidents of violence fail to address the notion of many minorities that most Asians have “racist” attitudes toward them—in fact some are more racist than white people.

In any case, if blacks are “disproportionately” the victim of police brutality, it only means that they are disproportionately the perpetrators of all manner of crime; the reality, not surprisingly, is that blacks are in fact less likely to be the victim of police abuse in proportion to their level of perpetration of violent crime, according to Justice Department statistics. White people are the victims of police brutality in proportion to their level of crime, while Latinos tend to be the victims of police abuse at an actual higher rate per their crime rate.

But what is particular despicable about this piece is that it ignores the fact that the white media laps up black grievance for its own self-serving, hypocritical reasons, and in general society pays more attention to black grievance because of the fear of violent action, whether it happens or not. Latinos have also been oppressed, the victims of legal and extra-legal violence and lynching, and  discriminated against in this country for almost two centuries, and their fight for justice predated that of blacks. Yet this history is virtually unknown, because between white and black prejudice and ignorance is a hard place.

George Floyd’s name has become a standard bearer for police brutality, but he isn’t the only one who has died in a similar fashion in the last year or two. In San Diego, Angel Zapata Hernandez died while handcuffed, and one officer knelt on his neck for more than six minutes. Never heard of it? Neither did the BLM protestors in San Diego. In Antioch, CA Angelo Quinto died after suffering a “mental health crisis,” and an officer knelt on his neck for five minutes until he lost consciousness.

In Tucson, AZ Carlos Ingram Lopez died a “gruesome” death after he was detained by police for wandering aimlessly around train tracks. Lopez was handcuffed, left face down on the ground while the officers kneed his face into the pavement for 12 minutes until he went into cardiac arrest and stopped breathing—despite his pleading for water and crying for his grandmother, and telling the officers he couldn’t breathe (there is now a belatedly-released YouTube video of the whole incident from the police bodycam). 

 

 

None of these people were black, and if you listen to people like Plaid and MacDonald-Dennis, that is the reason why their lives don’t “matter.” We can also assume that the “people of color” victims in the recent San Jose mass shooting who were clearly targeted because they were such don’t “matter” because none of them were black.

Still, we can’t let “conservatives” go untouched, since hypocrisy is their main “game.” Stephen Miller and Mark Meadows, who formed a far-right “legal” group called—what else—America First Legal, managed to secure their first “victory” in a far-right judge’s courtroom in the Northern District of Texas. They managed to “convince” the judge that the COVID-19 debt relief provision for “socially disadvantaged” farmers and “prioritizing” grants to restaurants owned by women, veterans and “socially disadvantaged” groups “discriminated” against people who were not in those groups, meaning people who look like Miller and Meadows.

The problem here is that the “socially disadvantaged” have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic. One study showed that “active” black-owned businesses declined by 41 percent, Latino businesses by 32 percent, Asian businesses by 26 percent, while white businesses declined by “only” 17 percent. It is apparently not coincidental that most of these businesses are located in minority urban areas where COVID-19 has disproportionately affected the population, and their business. Thus it does show that there is a much greater need for businesses owned by “persons of color” for assistance to get back on their feet due to the pandemic, and the relief bill is, after all, supposed to help people like this. Yet here we see people like Miller and Meadows who have made plain their racist inclinations, able to get their way before a probably racially-insenstive judge.

It is too bad that we can’t leave the hypocritical bullshit to the likes of Fox News, where on their “Media Buzz” show they whined and complained that the “liberal” media was all “abuzz” about news of grand juries being impanelled to hear evidence of criminal acts by Trump and his stooges, and extremist-right commentator Mark Levin doing even more bitching and moaning about how a “Democrat” city (New York) is attempting a “coup” to remove “our president”—that is “his” used-to-be “president.” Further down the sewer, Michael Flynn is in fact “suggesting” a violent Myanmar-like military coup to reinstate Trump. This is where Trump has taken us, when clearly mentally-disabled people are still allowed a forum in which to expectorate dangerous nonsense.