Showing posts with label controversy. Show all posts
    Showing posts with label controversy. Show all posts

  • Deadspin's Greg Howard published a piece on the Richard Sherman debacle. The lede:

    When you're a public figure, there are rules. Here's one: A public personality can be black, talented, or arrogant, but he can't be any more than two of these traits at a time. It's why antics and soundbites from guys like Brett Favre, Johnny Football and Bryce Harper seem almost hyper-American, capable of capturing the country's imagination, but black superstars like Sherman, Floyd Mayweather, and Cam Newton are seen as polarizing, as selfish, as glory boys, as distasteful and perhaps offensive. It's why we recoil at Kanye West's rants, like when West, one of the greatest musical minds of our generation, had the audacity to publicly declare himself a genius (was this up for debate?), and partly why, over the six years of Barack Obama's presidency, a noisy, obstreperous wing of the GOP has seemed perpetually on the cusp of calling him "uppity." Barry Bonds at his peak was black, talented, and arrogant; he was a problem for America. Joe Louis was black, talented, and at least outwardly humble; he was "a credit to his race, the human race," as Jimmy Cannon once wrote.

    All this is based on the common, very American belief that black males must know their place, and more tellingly, that their place is somewhere different than that of whites. It's been etched into our cultural fabric that to act as anything but a loud, yet harmless buffoon or an immensely powerful, yet humble servant is overstepping. It's uppity. It is, as Fox Sports's Kayla Knapp tweeted last night, petrifying.

    No offense, but white Americans have always had this pathological fear of brash, outgoing, confident and yes, even arrogant black men and women, with the nexus of that fear being that such a Negro would never allow any white under any capacity to have authority or control over him. It's one of the world's oldest power plays - keeping those coloreds under control so they don't get any ideas and revolt.

    Humility is always a desired trait for any athlete as far as most people are concerned, but that desire's taken to a whole new level when it comes to black athletes. To avoid threatening and pissing off white spectators and sponsors, black athletes of old had to play the humble, almost contrite role. Today's athletes don't have to worry much about pissing off anyone, but white mainstream culture still gets upset over black athletes - or anyone else who happens to be black and famous - engaged in liberal amounts of braggadocio.

    In the case of Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman, what we have here is a big, brash energetic Negro scaring a poor white woman half to death with his arrogance and over-exuberance. Nevermind Erin herself reportedly said she wasn't scared - this big buck spooked this delicate white flower and he has to pay. Somehow. So he pays in the rough and tumble world of popular opinion, where any recliner-surfing bigot can call Sherman a "monkey" and a "nigger" many times over while longing for the day Peyton Manning rises up and puts him in his place on the gridiron.

    Not that it should bother Sherman any. Thanks to the whirlwinds of controversy, his name is a household name now, plus he's shown himself to be a brilliant player who can also rattle his opponents with a lot of strategically placed shit talk. His name's blown up on Twitter, Facebook and every other social media outlet imaginable.

    Inevitably, you get a certain segment of blacks who are also scared shitless of the talented, arrogant and black, but for a different reason. These are the same sort of folks who, countless lifetimes ago, would have been scared shitless of the rogue black buck getting the rest of the slavefolk in trouble. Cue Andre Iguodala's response:



    Here's the thing, Andre - no person's behavior sets back an entire group. It can't be done. You don't see white Americans complaining how the antics of their redneck, dudebro or douchebag counterparts somehow sets all of white America back to the age of the pilgrims. It's a stupid thing that needs to die a well-deserved death.

    But it's something that many successful blacks do anyway, because they're scared shitless of how the Richard Shermans of the world will make them look to the white guys and ladies who give them interviews, sign their paychecks and have meetings with. That's also a stupid thing that needs to die a well-deserved death, but that's not gonna happen anytime soon.

    Of course, Sherman had to walk back the braggadocio and assume a more contrite perspective, perhaps as a PR-directed move to quench the flames of controversy. He didn't have to do this and he shouldn't have.


  • Okay, you’re asking here about the Obama administration’s not-so-subtle signals that it wants to launch some cruise missiles at Syria, which would be punishment for what it says is Assad’s use of chemical weapons against civilians.

    It’s true that basically no one believes that this will turn the tide of the Syrian war. But this is important: it’s not supposed to. The strikes wouldn’t be meant to shape the course of the war or to topple Assad, which Obama thinks would just make things worse anyway. They would be meant to punish Assad for (allegedly) using chemical weapons and to deter him, or any future military leader in any future war, from using them again.

    The above quoted comes from Max Fisher's recent Washington Post piece, "9 questions about Syria you were too embarrassed to ask," a sort of Syrian Civil War for Dummies guide to help the average schlub keep up with current events. This answers question #7: "Why would President Obama just lob a few cruise missiles at Assad and call it a day?"

    The answer lies with question #6: "Why hasn't the U.S. shoved its collective foot up Assad's authoritarian ass until he can taste our Freedom™ and Liberty™-flavored shoe soles?" Because, as Fisher explains, all of our other military options would literally make things worse:

    • A full-on ground invasion would be Iraq all over again, only this time it's Barack Obama's presidential ass in the sling.
    • An air strike? Forget about it. Too much time and political capital needed to maintain a no-fly zone a la Iraq.
    • A targeted assassination of Bashir al-Assad would just open up a power vacuum for some other asshole or group of assholes to fill, putting the U.S. and ordinary Syrians right back where they started.
    • Giving the Syrian rebels all the weapons they can tote and letting God/Allah sort them out wouldn't work, either. Too many opportunities to accidentally outfit the next Taliban with decent weaponry for dominating future internecine conflicts. Besides, the Saudis gave Syrian rebels some weapons and look at what happened with that.
    • Doing nothing is also an option and it's one some on the left would rather Obama take. But doing nothing puts a bigger dent in his credibility in foreign matters than doing something.

    So the only option left on the table is to smack Assad on the wrist with a cruise missile-shaped ruler and hope he's shook enough to stay away from chemical weapons for the foreseeable future.

    Personally, I'm not so sure that this will be enough. We're talking about a guy whose goons have had no compunction against raping and killing civilians, children included. As far as everyone's concerned, Bashir al-Assad is a Bad Dude, as are is his majority-Alawite armed forces. To send any sort of message to Assad, it'd have to be a rather painful one - and there's always the fear of innocents accidentally sharing that pain.

    According to Omar Dahi, the answer involves action that eschews actual military intervention of any form with something that actually helps the Syrian people:

    What should be the response to these events? The answer for those who care about the fate of Syrians is the same as it has been to the ongoing violence previously, which is to push for a political settlement and an immediate cessation of violence coupled with humanitarian aid for Syrians.

    A US- or NATO-led attack, which appears to be imminent, is likely to be disastrous for Syrians (as well as Lebanese and Palestinians). If the attack is intense enough to completely destroy the Syrian regime it will destroy whatever is left of Syria. If it is not, it will leave the regime in place to retaliate where it is strong, against its internal enemies, except now having its nationalist credentials bolstered as having fought off US aggression. Either way the strike will be devastating to millions inside Syria, not to mention the millions of refugees and internally displaced populations who are living hand to mouth and who depend on daily humanitarian aid that will surely be disrupted or stopped. There is no such thing as a surgical strike, and no possibility in a country as densely populated as Syria for an attack that does not incur civilian casualties. This is excluding the fact that US foreign policy in the Middle East, past and present, including its own complicity in chemical weapons attacks, makes it impossible not to be cynical about the motives behind this attack. Moreover, in the past two years people within the region became convinced that US policy towards Syria is dictated—as before—by what benefits Israel, which had not desired a total regime collapse but was benefitting from a perpetual conflict in its northern border so long as it remained contained.

    It's not just Israel that has its eyes on Syria. Russia would very much like to keep its naval port on the Mediterranean while Iran would someday love to have the same. The Saudis seem to be working to cajole Russia into backing away from Assad, but the way it's going about it is likely to make things even worse.

    In the short term, there seems to be nothing that can be done. As Fisher explains, the long-term ramifications are just as bleak: the various Syrian factions are likely to continue killing one another for years until fatigue sets in or someone achieves something resembling a victory. Afterwards, a precarious peace among numerous ethnic groups - at least until something somewhere sparks up yet another conflict.


  • Spicy headlines attract readers. They also attract controversy. Chattanooga Times Free Press editor and political commentator Drew Johnson didn't expect his controversial headline to attract a pink slip and a trip to the unemployment office:

    Political commentator Drew Johnson, who had been editing for the Chattanooga Times Free Press for less than a year, was fired from the paper, after telling President Barack Obama to take his jobs’ plan and “shove it” in a headline, according to WND.

    During the President’s visit to the Tennessee town last week, Johnson decided to change a headline to “Take your jobs plan and shove it, Mr. President: Your policies have harmed Chattanooga enough,” causing the article to go viral and stir up controversy.

    Shortly after, Johnson was fired.

    At first, it seems like Drew Johnson was given the pink slip over criticism of President Obama's economic vision. Except that the meat of Johnson's article was left as-is.

    As it turns out, the Chattanooga Free Press claims that Johnson was told on multiple occasions not to dick around with the headlines. On this one, Johnson went so far as to wait until his editor was out for the day before changing the piece's original, less controversial headline to the above highlighted. Judging from the first of many tweets, Johnson wasn't seeing eye-to-eye with the bosses:


    That's a bit disingenuous isn't it, Drew?


    Drew, you knew full well the Times Free Press couldn't let that Johnny Paycheck reference slide under the radar. It's almost as if you were begging for the hammer to come down.


    Is Drew suggesting that the Times Free Press bounced him not because of their stated policy on headlines or their editorial standards, but because he had the temerity to tell the president to that his economic vision for Chattanooga and the rest of the country would make for a wonderful suppository? According to the Huffington Post, he maintains his ouster was for political reasons.

    The Times Free Press, on the other hand, stands by its decision to let Johnson go for violating the newspaper's standards:

    The language he chose was vulgar and not appropriate for this newspaper. Even Johnson himself admitted that the headline was “harsh and perhaps crass to a fault” in an editorial he wrote for this Sunday, which will not run.

    It also noted that Johnson's editorial freedom wasn't infringed upon except for obvious reasons:

    In fact the only instance when the Times Free Press ever denied Johnson the freedom to present his views was last week when he referred to pornography as a “miracle product” and touted the benefits of pornography stating that if teenagers watched pornography it would result in lower rates of teenage pregnancy.

    Porn as a "miracle product." I bet people would have paid good money to see that article.


    After doing the bit on the headline, I sat down and read the article that was attached to it. Overall, it comes off as a standard-issue conservative op-ed piece that strikes against the president and his efforts to spur job creation. Not much to it, except his article makes constant references to EPB, a non-profit utility serving the metro Chattanooga area.

    Although the big highlight of the president's visit was his brief tour of the Amazon fulfillment center, the president also highlighted the city's fiber optic network infrastructure. That belongs to EPB and it's part of a vast fiber optic network that spans a 600 square-mile, nine-county service area. But it's not just ordinary fiber optic service that skids to an abrupt halt at the last mile. If you're one of the lucky folks living within EPB's service area, that network comes straight to your front door.

    That means fast fiber optic Internet service with speeds of up to 1 Gbps. And since EPB is a public utility, that also means cheap fiber optic Internet service. EPB's slowest Internet tier is 50 Mbps for $57.99/month. Compare that to $89.99/month for Comcast's 50 Mbps "Blast Plus" service (or $69.95/month for those who take advantage of online-only 12-month pricing). And unlike Comcast, EPB offers symmetrical upload and download speeds.

    In all honesty, Drew should be glad he can get some "study material" for his piece on porn's "miracle" properties with lightning-fast speed, but alas:

    The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 helped fund the Gig to Nowhere project, a $552 million socialist-style experiment in government-owned Internet, cable and phone services orchestrated by EPB — Chattanooga’s government-owned electric monopoly.

    The Gig to Nowhere is a Smart Grid, a high tech local electricity infrastructure intended to improve energy efficiency and reduce power outages. After lobbying for, and receiving, $111.6 million in stimulus money from your administration, EPB decided to build a souped-up version of the Smart Grid with fiber optics rather than more cost-effective wireless technology. This decision was supposed to allow EPB to provide the fastest Internet service in the Western Hemisphere, a gigabit-per-second Internet speed that would send tech companies and web entrepreneurs stampeding to Chattanooga in droves.

    In reality, though, the gig, like most of the projects funded by your stimulus plan, has been an absolute bust.

    Drew also criticizes EPB for blowing taxpayer dough on its Smart Grid, which has done a lot to make electric service in Chattanooga more efficient, more cost-effective and less prone to getting knocked out of commission during bad storms:

    While the Smart Grid will cost taxpayers and local electric customers well over a half-billion dollars when all is said and done, there has been little improvement in the quality of EPB’s electric service. Worse, despite being heavily subsidized, EPB’s government-owned Internet, cable and telephone outfit that competes head-to-head against private companies like AT&T and Comcast is barely staying afloat, often relying on loans from electric service reserve funds to afford its business expenses.

    The above is the usual argument of public utilities being the business world equivalent of a clapped out Chevy Citation to the private sector's sleek, sexy and efficient Fisker Karma, as personified by Comcast and AT&T. Drew's beef is that EPB is wasting taxpayer money doing what Comcast and AT&T already do, to not only it's own fiscal detriment, but that of it's customers.

    The reality is that both Comcast and AT&T would be perfectly content to extract as much profit as it can without making but the slightest investments into their aging infrastructure. Without a public concern like EPB to make them step up their game, the major ISPs would be more than content to rest on their laurels and rake in the cash, to the everlasting detriment of customers. Which is how Internet service in the U.S. wound up so slow and expensive compared to the rest of the world.

    You can tell poor Drew has it out for EPB and for good reason. According to the former editor, his fiancé found herself out of a job after he wrote a few articles "exposing" the public utility.


    I tried to find info on Drew's fiancé and the reason for her termination, but Google-Fu's failing me. However, I did take a good look at the articles he linked above.

    The first article is a spiel that supposedly outlines how much money EPB wasted on its Smart Grid infrastructure, only to come off as an amateurish wank that ends with these choice nuggets:
    After all, government ownership of companies is the very essence of socialism.
    The true cost of the Smart Grid is liberty.

    The second article is the most interesting. It's about how Iron Labs, an upstart video gaming business, tried to partner with EPB to showcase the potential of the company's gigabit-level services and got cold-shouldered. It then offered to pay for the service and got cold-shouldered again. This led Iron Labs into the arms of Comcast, which proceeded to promote and support the startup.

    The problem? EPB only offers its $300/month 1 Gbps service to residential customers and businesses that only use a fraction of the bandwidth. For everyone else, the price of admission varies. The prospect of EPB having its bandwidth duly tested by hundreds of avid gamers running bandwidth-heavy apps was apparently enough for the company to craft a $9,000/month asking price.

    Drew bangs on EPB for doing what many other ISPs would have done when faced with the same scenario. Meanwhile, Comcast had the cognizance to put a marketing thumb in EPB's eye by welcoming them with open arms.

    Aaron Welch, the president and CEO of Iron Labs, admitted his company didn't necessarily need the gigabit-level bandwidth himself and cleared the air about the whole debacle. You can also see it in the article's comments, provided you get past the Comcast customer rep spam:

    #1. Iron Gaming won the $10,000 Warner Brothers digital media prize in the
    Gigtank Event this summer. We also receive $15,000 in seed capital that
    was funded by local and regional venture groups.

    #2. EPB valued our proposal for the "EPB Gig Gaming Center", an extension
    of the GigLabs project, at $50,000 per an email from Danna Bailey to me.

    #3. We were asking for the "Gig" only to help promote EPB in the media by
    visually showing and making a physical representation of what a "Gig" can
    do for gamers in EPB's customer base. This service would have been
    exclusive to EPB's customer base and have provided a way for Iron Gaming to
    promote our gaming league in the region. Did we NEED a gig, no. When we
    finally asked to pay for the service, we kept getting referred back to
    Danna Bailey and as of August 2 (before the end of the Gigtank Contest) we
    have not heard back from anyone at EPB.

    #4. Our relationship with Comcast has been fantastic from an Iron Labs
    (brick and mortar gaming store) and Iron Gaming (online gaming league)
    perspective. Comcast has helped open doors for us and provided a
    significant amount of support for our startup.

    #5. My only "beef" with EPB is that the people we were dealing with did
    not understand the technical details of what we were offering and therefor
    did not value what the proposal could provide them. To this day I do not
    hold any animosity towards EPB and will still do all that I can in
    supporting them and the growth of the startup community in the "Gig City".

    Aaron Welch
    President
    Iron Labs and Iron Gaming

    In the third article mentioned, Drew compares EPB salaries with those offered by the city of Chattanooga, focusing on the number of people earning six-figure incomes at both. Then he goes on to compare EPB employees to the average resident in Chattanooga. In short, those evil government workers are wasting your hard-earned taxpayer dollars by living high on the socialist hog. And I thought class envy was an affliction only liberals were supposed to suffer.

    To summarize, Drew has a beef with the EPB because:
    1. It's a public concern attempting to offer services that so-called "free market" competitors already offer, making it a juicy target for the former editor's right-leaning fury.
    2. EPB's taken federal handout money to spend on its infrastructure and other concerns, again making itself a juicy target for some good ol' fashioned conservative tongue-lashing.
    3. EPB also ties in to the president's economic vision for the nation. By now, that bullseye is about as big as Lookout Mountain itself.
    4. Drew believes his previous pieces on EPB got his fiancé shit-canned from her job. 
    But don't weep for Drew Johnson just yet. Johnson's tale of how he got burned by his former employer made him the talk of the right-wing media (despite how Johnson's viewpoints are more or less in tune with the libertarian point-of-view), judging from all the support he's gotten from conservative media and his recent appearance on Fox and Friends. He won't have long on the unemployment line - in fact, I do believe he's found himself another job.

  • Today, yours truly will take a look at Rick Ross. No, not "Freeway" Rick Ross, infamous L.A.-based drug dealer with possible but not concretely proven CIA connections. I'm talking about William Roberts, the former corrections officer who appropriated Rick Ross's story and image to launch his own commercial rap career.

    I've actually listened to a few of Rick Ross's songs and they come off as the typical formulaic pablum that epitomizes commercial rap music: a few lines of verse about the money you're making, a few more about your material possessions, some mentions about your drug dealing/gangster past and how you still retain the capacity to kill in spite of your current profession, some lines about your sexual prowess and conquests, all topped off with a few shoutouts to your allies in the commercial rap business, packaged to either a machine-generated beat or a "sample" of some 70s/80s/90s R&B or soul tune, slowed down or sped up to invoke "fair use" and avoid royalty payments.

    In normal circumstances, Rick Ross wouldn't interest me. Except he's caught some flak over the lyrics in rapper Rocko's "U.O.E.N.O," an onomatopoeia for “you don’t even know.” Crafty wordsmiths, these folks.

    In particular, these two lines:

    Put Molly all in her champagne, she ain’t even know it
    I took her home and I enjoyed that, she ain't even know it

    Uh oh. Did "the Boss" just suggest that he slipped something (most likely MDMA or GHB) in her drink and then had sex with her, presumably while she was unconscious or too drugged up to notice?

    People say it's just lyrics. He probably meant nothing by it. At least that was Rick Ross's argument at first:

    I wanted to come down to the radio station. There is certain things you can’t tweet, you have to verbalize. I want to make sure this is clear, that woman is the most precious gift known to man, you understand? It was a misunderstanding with a lyric, a misinterpretation where the term rape wasn’t used. I would never use the term rape. As far as my camp, hip hop don’t condone that. The streets don’t condone that. Nobody condones that. So I wanted to reach out to all the queens that’s on my timeline, all the sexy ladies, the beautiful ladies that have been reaching out to me with the misunderstanding. We don’t condone rape and I’m not with that.

    It's the type of mea culpa that usually comes in printed or online press releases. If anyone was expecting a heartfelt apology, waiting for it would be akin to waiting for Godot. Or for the next C-Tran bus at Southlake Mall.

    Unlike that severely-underfunded and ultimately axed bus service, the criticism kept coming. As Talib Kweli and others took Ricky to the woodshed over his lyrics and as Ultraviolet started a concerted effort to shorn the rapper of his promotional deal with Reebok, Ross issued two more relatively weak appeals to his critics and fans:



    His fans will forgive him. Chances are they're only upset at everyone else being so hard on Ricky. To understand why, it means realizing how Rick Ross's lyrics (and those of other rappers) are both a reflection and a product of the culture that enables and glorifies the activity described by those lyrics. It's an echo chamber that amplifies itself many times over, with little to no opportunity for any positive message to break the cycle. Not that the people who are actually making money off of this stuff (music executives and their shareholders) mind - it'd probably be bad business to interrupt the cycle.

    But interrupt someone must. These lyrics reflect and reinforce a rape culture that promotes an overall view of women as sex objects who are duty-bound to either "give up the pussy" or have it taken, whether by fraud, deception or force. These sentiments echo throughout the rap subculture, to be internalized by fans who live vicariously through the imaginative storytelling of each song or through observing and emulating the actions of rappers and others around them.

    In the end, Rick Ross's apologies don't mean much. When things die down as they usually do in today's world of accelerated media cycles, he'll go back to doing the same thing he's been doing and get rewarded handsomely for it. At worst, he might lose his deal with Reebok, but that'll probably be it. Dismantling rape culture won't happen from the top, at least not solely on backhanding rappers who step over the line. On this issue, the line's been crossed hundreds of miles ago.

    Whenever the question of how to end rape culture comes about, solutions are always expected to be brought forth and put into play by the womenfolk. That's over and done, as it should have been a long time ago. Asking women to continuously shoulder the burden of preventing rape and blaming them when it happens while giving men implied card blanche on the issue is something that should end, posthaste.

    In other words, the beginning of the end of rape culture will happen once us menfolk finally understand and internalize one thing and one thing only: don't rape.

    Translation: the pussy is not yours to take.

    P.S. If you have kids, don't let them consume commercial rap in their formative years. Yours truly spent most of his childhood blissfully unaware of rap while being exposed to copious amounts of jazz, R&B, soul and soft rock. The impact it made on my growing up was drastically different than the kids next door, who were basically given free rein to listen to commercial rap.
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