It’s Martin Luther King day here in the US. I thought I’d celebrate it with an open thread, and with a passage from King’s Where Do We Go From Here (1967), which takes on an added relevance in light of a lot that has happened in the last year or so.
Whites, it must frankly be said, are not putting in a … mass effort to reeducate themselves out of their racial ignorance. It is an aspect of their sense of superiority that the white people of America believe they have so little to learn. … Loose and easy language about equality, resonant resolutions about brotherhood fall pleasantly on the ear, but for the Negro there is a credibility gap he cannot overlook. He remembers that with each modest advance the white population promptly raises the argument that the Negro has come far enough. Each step forward accents an ever-present tendency to backlash.
NOTE: As is always the case with these open threads: No MRAs, no Trolls.
H/T — A Riot Is the Language of the Unheard’: 9 MLK Quotes the Mainstream Media Won’t Cite, by Kali Holloway on AlterNet
Trying to do this from my phone. It feels very complicated but let’s hope it works.
Today I went to the North Cape, he norternmost spot in continental Europe. Well, actually there’s a peninsula that’s slightly more north than the Nordkapp cliff, but it’s just not a nice place at all. It can be seen here, photographed from Nordkapp:
http://i374.photobucket.com/albums/oo188/dhag85/Mobile%20Uploads/20160118_122909_zpseakb3lv9.jpg
Here’s the city of Hønningsvåg, not too far from Nordkapp:
http://i374.photobucket.com/albums/oo188/dhag85/Mobile%20Uploads/20160118_112056_zpsdddxtmb4.jpg
In the winter you can only reach Nordkapp on twice/day, either at 11am or at noon. The reason for this is you need to drive in a convoy led by a plow, since cell phone reception is not guaranteed, and the road can be covered with deep snow at any moment.
Here I am, freezing my ass off at Nordkapp:
http://i374.photobucket.com/albums/oo188/dhag85/Mobile%20Uploads/20160118_123423_zpskqyfsbz2.jpg
The temperature was about -10C or 14F. I’ve been in temperatures as low as -30C, or -22F, before, but considering the wind I think this was the coldest place I’ve ever been. I had to take my gloves off for a few seconds in order to take pictures, and the pain was just unbearable.
Some more Nordkapp pictures:
http://i374.photobucket.com/albums/oo188/dhag85/Mobile%20Uploads/20160118_122942_zps5h3jr9pc.jpg
http://i374.photobucket.com/albums/oo188/dhag85/Mobile%20Uploads/20160118_133257_zpsxqdcvcmi.jpg
http://i374.photobucket.com/albums/oo188/dhag85/Mobile%20Uploads/20160118_123223_zpstnjzlctc.jpg
http://i374.photobucket.com/albums/oo188/dhag85/Mobile%20Uploads/20160118_122845_zpsfilskfxn.jpg
Found a bench disappearing in the snow:
http://i374.photobucket.com/albums/oo188/dhag85/Mobile%20Uploads/20160118_122317_zpsruvishnb.jpg
And some mysterious statues:
http://i374.photobucket.com/albums/oo188/dhag85/Mobile%20Uploads/20160118_133638_zpshhi0m1ox.jpg
There is a small Thai shrine/museum at Nordkapp, in honor of the Thai king who visited the place in 1907 and engraved his initials into the rock. There’s also a small Christian chapel where some people choose to get married.
There is apparently one Sami family living very close to Nordkapp, but only in summer. In the winter they bring the reindeer to a nearby Sami village, where the ground won’t be covered with ice. The reindeer will actually swim to the mainland, 1.8 kilometers across the fjord.
http://i374.photobucket.com/albums/oo188/dhag85/Mobile%20Uploads/20160118_140920_zpsgylcehqx.jpg
Thousands of reindeer, swimming through freezing water. This is a photograph of a photograph, by the way.
Tomorrow we’ll be on a plane home!
Victorious, thanks for your story. My father died this past week, so I’m all for dad stories right now. I’d tell some of my own, but…it’s too soon.
dhag, wonderful pictures.
I’m so sorry to hear about your dad, Peaches. Hugs if they’re wanted.
Although I’m Canadian, white and was only 10 when Martin Luther King was assassinated, I cried when I heard the news. I was sad for his kids and his wife. But I was also afraid for the world in general. Why did people hate other people so much just because of the colour of their skin? It was especially hard to take when the hated person was trying to get everyone to be peaceful and love each other as being equal and human.
One thing I’d believed since I was very young, no more than 7 and possibly younger, was that (white) women couldn’t possibly be prejudiced or racist against blacks because of all the rules women had to follow and all the crap they’d had to put up with since the beginning of time. The white wives of white slave owners were a mystery to me. How on earth could they live with their husbands? It never dawned on me that the wives might believe themselves to be entitled to owning slaves. But I was just a kid. I think it made me even sadder as I got older and better understood the ramifications.
What makes me almost as sad is to see people exploiting this thread for their own personal gain. Seriously, couldn’t they have found a less inappropriate topic than Martin Luther King? Just my opinion.
Thanks weirwood. It’s been a very hard couple of weeks.
You’re welcome, peaches. My condolences to you and your family. I look forward to hearing dad stories from you when you’re ready.
Peaches, I’m so sorry about your dad. Take good care of yourself. All the nice things he did? They’ll always be with you.
@dhag85
Those are some seriously kickass photos. (You look cold. Thanks for sharing that good-looking photo of yourself.) And the statues are cool, very humane, we-all-share-this-world stuff.
I love looking at photos of snow and ice — think Dr. Zhivago — even though it’s kind of a challenge for me to actually be in that snow and ice.
And here’s my favourite MLK quote;
I love/hate/love when people who absolutely would have sided against the civil rights movement name-drop King as some sort of indictment of modern protest movements.
Ah yes, the second installment in the “Happy Slaves Make Dessert” duology.
I don’t think the journalist who wrote that Independent piece properly understood what it was that he was writing about, because those two numbers aren’t “dangerous”; they’re just the Anthropic Principle writ large.
(The Anthropic Principle is that effect you get when a person is telling you a story in which they risked their life. You may indulge in some suspension of disbelief but deep down you know perfectly well that they survived because they’re here right now, telling you the story. The suspense is ruined because you know that whatever the odds were of them dying, that didn’t actually happen. Similarly in physics, we know that there was a very good chance that the universe wouldn’t exist or wouldn’t be capable of supporting life, but we also know that that didn’t happen because spoiler, us! The most that we can do is look back and say “wow, I bet a lot of other universes didn’t make it.”)
@Kat
Thanks! And awww, thanks (for the good looking part). 🙂
I forgot to add, we had no sunrise and no sunset today. There were a few hours around noon of not complete darkness, but that’s it. Those Nordkapp photos were all taken between noon and 1:30pm, i.e. that’s as light as it got. We got back to the ship after 2pm and then it was all dark again.
@peaches
So sorry about your dad. :/
Hugs if you would like them, Peaches.
Hugs, peaches.
@peaches
Lots of hugs from me. =)
It’s like inner bigots today think MLK’s speech just magically did away with all the problems of the world. Racism/sexism is over, and now since non-straight people can marry, homophobia/transphobia is over, too!
I run into this attitude a lot where you get a high proportion of the overprivileged white boy crowd like video game, comic book, and toy collecting forums. #alllivesmatter is such a cop out way of saying “I don’t want to talk about black people but I don’t want to come across as a racist shithead.” I haven’t seen anyone who used that line/hashtag actually NOT be a shithead. That, and #gloopygate (you know what I mean with this).
Thanks ya’ll. I’ve been mostly numb, a bit sad, and just going about my business as usual. The worst part is a few times a day I think “hey, I need to tell dad _”. And I can’t.
My sons (fourteen and eighteen) have an idea of how bad things are in this country (USA) and that they used to be a lot worse. They do not understand how recently our family would have been science fiction – two men, one Black, one white, legally married, living together as husband and husband, with two legally adopted children.
They are also unaware of the people who have the screaming fantods about families like ours existing, which is something that I am in no particular hurry to tell them about.
Dhag, thanks for the photos! Reminded me of visiting Barrow, Alaska back in the 1980s with my first husband – in February. Oh my that was cold.
Regarding the universe – self-aware, intelligent life is how the universe experiences itself. We are little chunks of Universe looking at (listening to, touching, tasting, smelling) the rest. Somehow, the emergent properties that evolved to help us find food and avoid becoming it are enough to enable us to learn about things we can’t see, have never seen and will never see.
@peaches
I’m so sorry for your loss.
Peaches:
*hugs*
Alan Robertshaw
I was actually just reading about this the other day (in Science of Discworld 4); the authors noted that the principal fallacy of the fine tuning argurment is that if you change one constant by a little bit, everything breaks, but if you change several, there are all kinds of balance points where a life-bearing universe is possible (not necessarily our kind of life, but something).
Which just goes to show how much the police are unjustifiably trusted by the culture at large; people get railroaded by police departments all the damn time, departments pull together to cover up murders in or out of custody (several highly publicized recent cases spring to mind), police departments build giant torture centers to illegally detain and abuse people, etc. It happens all the time. I have no trouble at all beleiving that the police manufactured/planted evidence against Avery, whether he’s guilty or not.
I’m also very sorry to hear about your loss, peaches. Lots of love. <3
On my end, things last week were kinda rough. Monday, my friend told me his company was looking for a lead generator in my area, which fits perfectly with stuff I already do, so I gave it a shot and sent my friend my resume. Thursday was whiplash, to put it mildly; my friend went from telling me I'd hear from the company's talent recruiter sometime soon to telling me the company had decided to shut down operations for my area. That meant no more lead generator position. Yeah, to say I was upset would be a HUGE understatement. But I don't blame my friend at all; he was looking out for me and he was likely surprised at the abrupt change.
Since the shock of that has worn off, I've been thinking today. I sew, and I make bags and small accessories that I sell online and at Artist tables at conventions. Job odds have not been in my favor to this point, and I've been debating ways to grow my online shop. I'm leaning heavily toward treating the sewing/online shop stuff as a full-time job (so 9-5:30 most days, hour break midday, so on and so forth) to both get through my project backlog/get new things done and on my shop sites, and b) have something to fill my days.
In case anyone's curious, here's my shop websites. Scott's Marketplace (newer since I'm on the fence about going back to Etsy, so not much there yet): https://www.scottsmarketplace.com/store/izzyandmarley/
Storenvy (Which needs MASSIVE updating/housekeeping, but gives a good overall picture of what I sell): http://www.storenvy.com/stores/32850-izzy-and-marley
Unless you’ve forbidden them from using the internet I highly doubt that this is true.
@ Robert
I don’t know what a “fantod” is, but somehow it just sounds right.
@peaches
I’m so sorry about your dad. The numbness sucks as much as the outright sobbing or grief.
@peaches
Condolences and hugs. =/
@ peaches
Words always seem inadequate at times like these but really feel for you.