What is the point of owning guns?

[molly bloom]

The US census and the Equal Employment Opportunity commission both say I am right:

Yeah, but common sense says you're a nincompoop with a propensity for being enthralled by Fascinating Fascism, and hung up on outdated and unscientific notions of racial purity.


By the way, the German encyclopaedia you referred to- what date was it published, and by whom ?

This is Sandra Laing, born to two white parents in apartheid era South Africa:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2003/mar/17/features11.g2

I've referenced her case before. The Race Classification Appeals Board, among its varied and quaint criteria, had a scrotum test. It assigned race based on the complexion or shade of the sac.

Another citizen of the glorious old R.S.A. was successfully reclassed as white- despite being of Chinese ancestry, in part because 350 white neighbours and work colleagues said they accepted him as white.

In the often bizarre system of weights-and-measures used by the apartheid state to classify people for purposes of separating them, Chinese South Africans were first deemed "Asiatic," then "Colored," and finally "the Chinese Group, which shall consist of persons who in fact are, or who, except in the case of persons who in fact are members of a race or class or tribe referred to in paragraph (1), (2), (3), (5) or (6) are generally accepted as members of a race or tribe whose national home is in China." Thus Population Registration Act of 1950, whose tortured language underlines the difficulties of creating an objective and rational basis for codifying racism. And a Chinese South African called David Song soon made a mockery of it.

In 1962, according to Yap and Man, Song applied successfully to be reclassified as "white" on the grounds that he associated with whites and was "generally accepted" as one. On March 23, 1962, the liberal Rand Daily Mail remarked: "Under the kind of legislation which allows an admitted Chinese, born in Canton, to be declared a White South African, anything can happen." Apartheid had "no accepted scientific basis," the paper editorialized, and attempting to "define the indefinable," inevitably resulted in "humiliating" and "endless" disputes.

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1828432,00.html

You couldn't make it up....

[Al B. Sure!]

And your point is what? America is not South Africa.

What is this 'common sense' that invalidates the US census and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission?

The 'common sense' of systematic European racism and Islamophobia? We're just outsiders who don't belong to you? Bunch of filthy Lebs and Asians?

[giblets]

Perhaps some skull measurements of Al's arab relatives would settle this.

[MichaeltheGreat]

The US census and the Equal Employment Opportunity commission both say I am right:

Only if you selectively snip the quote to show what you want to show. If you're an Australian aboriginal, you're the same as Hawaiian. If you're anything other than white, it's pretty much "how do you think of yourself?" and the definition of white had to be expanded to cover anyone (other than said aboriginals from Oz, Maori, and hundreds of other groups) who didn't feel like they were something else. And yeah, if you "identify" as white, you're white! Yay you!!!

I think today I'll identify as Pacific Islander. So move your haole ass out of my sun. Tomorrow I think I'll identify as an Indian, so I might have to go Woo-woo-woo-woo and scalp someone.

US race classification is based on historical practices (e.g. segregation), so there was a fair amount of historical litigation over racial classification for various purposes. Plessy v Ferguson, Gong Lum v. Rice and others. There's also some historical pigeonholing (about as scientifically sound as phrenology) into just five races, so if someone doesn't really fit, they just get lumped in with the closest.

The full relevant instructions from which you snipped are: (with a little added emphasis)

Race and ethnic designations as used by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission do not denote scientific definitions of anthropological origins. Definitions of the race and ethnicity categories are as follows:

Hispanic or Latino - A person of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin regardless of race.

White (Not Hispanic or Latino) - A person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa.

Black or African American (Not Hispanic or Latino) - A person having origins in any of the black racial groups of Africa.

Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander (Not Hispanic or Latino) - A person having origins in any of the peoples of Hawaii, Guam, Samoa, or other Pacific Islands.

Asian (Not Hispanic or Latino) - A person having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian Subcontinent, including, for example, Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippine Islands, Thailand, and Vietnam.

American Indian or Alaska Native (Not Hispanic or Latino) - A person having origins in any of the original peoples of North and South America (including Central America), and who maintain tribal affiliation or community attachment.

Two or More Races (Not Hispanic or Latino) - All persons who identify with more than one of the above five races.

Instructions for assigning employees into the race/ethnic categories:

Hispanic or Latino - Include all employees who answer YES to the question, Are you Hispanic or Latino. Report all Hispanic males in Column A and Hispanic females in Column B.

White (Not Hispanic or Latino) - Include all employees who identify as White males in Column C and as White females in Column I.

Black or African American (Not Hispanic or Latino)- Include all employees who identify as Black males in Column D and as Black females in Column J.

Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander (Not Hispanic or Latino) - Include all employees who identify as Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander males in Column E and as Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander females in Column K.

Asian (Not Hispanic or Latino) - Include all employees who identify as Asian males in Column F and as Asian females in Column L.

American Indian or Alaska Native (Not Hispanic or Latino) - Include all employees who identify as American Indian or Alaska Native males in Column G and as American Indian or Alaska Native females in Column M.

Two or More Races (Not Hispanic or Latino) - Report all male employees who identify with more than one of the above five races in Column H and all female employees who identify with more than one of the above five races in Column N.

As to the method of collecting data, the basic principles for ethnic and racial self-identification for purposes of the EEO-1 report are:

(1) Offer employees the opportunity to self- identify

(2) Provide a statement about the voluntary nature of this inquiry for employees. For example, language such as the following may be used (employers may adapt this language):

"The employer is subject to certain governmental recordkeeping and reporting requirements for the administration of civil rights laws and regulations. In order to comply with these laws, the employer invites employees to voluntarily self-identify their race or ethnicity. Submission of this information is voluntary and refusal to provide it will not subject you to any adverse treatment. The information obtained will be kept confidential and may only be used in accordance with the provisions of applicable laws, executive orders, and regulations, including those that require the information to be summarized and reported to the federal government for civil rights enforcement. When reported, data will not identify any specific individual."

So Australian aboriginals are SOL, unless you want to lump them in as Pacific Islanders. Portuguese aren't Hispanic (unless they feel like it), but Brazilians are (unless they don't). LMAO.

[MichaeltheGreat]

And your point is what? America is not South Africa.

What is this 'common sense' that invalidates the US census and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission?

Perhaps the fact that they admit they don't follow anthropology or science, or that everyone gets to "self-identify?"

Oh, and it's not "don't belong to" it's "not worthy of"

[MrFun]

You just pulled that out of your ass. I googled those names and came up with nothing.

Not all facts can be easily found on the Internet. Maybe you should try reading books sometime.

[Al B. Sure!]

Not all facts can be easily found on the Internet. Maybe you should try reading books sometime.

Yet another victim of Elok's hoax. A definite lack of skepticism here.

[MichaeltheGreat]

Yet another victim of Elok's hoax. A definite lack of skepticism here.

Any information which contradicts your views gains credibility thereby.

[The Mad Monk]

Interesting take on race and gun control

Excerpt:

Indisputably, for much of American history, gun-control measures, like many other laws, were used to oppress African Americans. The South had long prohibited blacks, both slave and free, from owning guns. In the North, however, at the end of the Civil War, the Union army allowed soldiers of any color to take home their rifles. Even blacks who hadn’t served could buy guns in the North, amid the glut of firearms produced for the war. President Lincoln had promised a “new birth of freedom,” but many blacks knew that white Southerners were not going to go along easily with such a vision. As one freedman in Louisiana recalled, “I would say to every colored soldier, ‘Bring your gun home.’”

After losing the Civil War, Southern states quickly adopted the Black Codes, laws designed to reestablish white supremacy by dictating what the freedmen could and couldn’t do. One common provision barred blacks from possessing firearms. To enforce the gun ban, white men riding in posses began terrorizing black communities. In January 1866, Harper’s Weekly reported that in Mississippi, such groups had “seized every gun and pistol found in the hands of the (so called) freedmen” in parts of the state. The most infamous of these disarmament posses, of course, was the Ku Klux Klan.

In response to the Black Codes and the mounting atrocities against blacks in the former Confederacy, the North sought to reaffirm the freedmen’s constitutional rights, including their right to possess guns. General Daniel E. Sickles, the commanding Union officer enforcing Reconstruction in South Carolina, ordered in January 1866 that “the constitutional rights of all loyal and well-disposed inhabitants to bear arms will not be infringed.” When South Carolinians ignored Sickles’s order and others like it, Congress passed the Freedmen’s Bureau Act of July 1866, which assured ex-slaves the “full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings concerning personal liberty … including the constitutional right to bear arms.”

That same year, Congress passed the nation’s first Civil Rights Act, which defined the freedmen as United States citizens and made it a federal offense to deprive them of their rights on the basis of race. Senator James Nye, a supporter of both laws, told his colleagues that the freedmen now had an “equal right to protection, and to keep and bear arms for self-defense.” President Andrew Johnson vetoed both laws. Congress overrode the vetoes and eventually made Johnson the first president to be impeached.

One prosecutor in the impeachment trial, Representative John Bingham of Ohio, thought that the only way to protect the freedmen’s rights was to amend the Constitution. Southern attempts to deny blacks equal rights, he said, were turning the Constitution—“a sublime and beautiful scripture—into a horrid charter of wrong.” In December of 1865, Bingham had proposed what would become the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Among its provisions was a guarantee that all citizens would be secure in their fundamental rights:

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

The key phrase, in Bingham’s view, was privileges or immunities of citizens—and those “privileges or immunities,” he said, were “chiefly defined in the first eight amendments to the Constitution.” Jacob Howard of Michigan, the principal sponsor of Bingham’s amendment in the Senate, reminded his colleagues that these amendments guaranteed “the freedom of speech and of the press,” “the right to be exempt from unreasonable searches and seizures,” and “the right to keep and bear arms.”

Whether or not the Founding Fathers thought the Second Amendment was primarily about state militias, the men behind the Fourteenth Amendment—America’s most sacred and significant civil-rights law—clearly believed that the right of individuals to have guns for self-defense was an essential element of citizenship. As the Yale law professor Akhil Reed Amar has observed, “Between 1775 and 1866 the poster boy of arms morphed from the Concord minuteman to the Carolina freedman.”

[DaShi]

That could have been one of two things.

[MichaeltheGreat]

Interesting take on race and gun control

Excerpt:

The individual right compared to collective right argument was pretty efficiently disposed of in United States v. Emerson, and confirmed in another case by SCOTUS (District of Columbia v. Heller applying to original Federal jurisdiction only and McDonald v. Chicago, applying to states via 14th Amendment)

So the individual right is settled law, and the historical basis from almost 150 years ago is pretty much irrelevant.

[Elok]

Yet another victim of Elok's hoax. A definite lack of skepticism here.

You're lucky I'm too lazy to dig up my most successful Al troll. You remember, the one where Lori said my church didn't classify rappers as human beings, I went with it, and you treated the whole thing as a serious discussion?

[SlowwHand]

[Alexander's Horse]

lol

[Elok]

Okay, I'm not too lazy.

Apolyton is such a nice place where posters espouse that whole professions of people should be denied basic human rights.

Good to know, Elok, that you are in favor of certain people being denied human rights due to their career choice/talent/views, etc.

So in your mind, the murder of Christopher Wallace should go unsolved because it was not a crime because he forfeited his human rights by being a rapper?

http://apolyton.net/showthread.php/194948-LAPD-implicated-by-former-investigator-in-murder-of-rap-star