It ain’t all bad, Geraldine. Look what you have to look forward to.

Galileo was put before the Inquisition and informed that he must recant or be tortured. He recanted, but spent the last years of his life under house arrest, during which time he wrote and published his most influential work on physics, Dialogue on Two New Sciences.

Courtesy of answers.com

smellthecoffee on March 12, 2008 at 11:28 PM

Nonfactor on March 13, 2008 at 1:13 AM

The child will receive the message given to him or her by the people of influence who happen to be around. Nobody is “sending messages.”

Obama is a neophyte, yet is being compared to JFK. One might compare him in the area of charisma, oratory, or looks, but some would have said the same about John Edwards, and we know how successful he was. Even he didn’t have the gall to try making that comparison. If one wonders whether Obama’s success, which appears to be out of proportion to his qualifications, could be due to his race, the question itself is considered racist. If one were to wonder whether the reason why the Duke lacrosse team rape case received sooooo much attention was because of the ethnicity of the victim, would that be a racist question? The question of whether Obama’s disproportionate success might be due to his race ought to have some kind of standing. On the other hand, the fact that his middle name in Hussein has no real salience, and in that case, I would suspect mischief. But is race not a salient factor in our polity? Does race have a way of skewing the way things are viewed in our culture sometimes? Clearly. So, begging your pardon, there is a basis for the question, in which case it ought not be quashed by the PC inquisitorial committee that finds heresy under every tree and rock. If it is such a preposterous question, why can’t you blow it out of the water with an argument, instead of lobbing your “racist” bomb?

I wrote above that no one is “sending messages.” No one, that is except you. Your message is the message of the inquisition. YOU MAY NOT SAY CERTAIN WORDS, OR THINK CERTAIN THOUGHTS AND IF YOU DO YOU WILL BE SILENCED, AND IF POSSIBLE, DESTROYED. F you and the horse you rode in on, you troll.

smellthecoffee on March 13, 2008 at 2:21 AM

Seriously, that was probably the worst rant I’ve ever read on this website.

Nonfactor on March 13, 2008 at 2:28 AM

And I couldn’t help but notice you didn’t have one word to say in defense of your previous post.

On further reflection, anyway the issue is not Obama’s race. Ferraro was really talking about the way people are reacting to Obama’s race, not about Obama himself. She correctly perceives that whether out of some kind of hope that someone of Obama’s race will produce a drastic improvement in race relations, or out of some kind of guilt that people have over past injustices against blacks, because of Obama’s race people are reacting to him not as much for who he is as a politician, but more for who he represents as a black leadership figure. So they’ve created kind of a bubble of that hope, or of that chance for expiation, which has nothing to do with how good a president he would be. And it is a bubble because there is no real substance to it–there’s nothing inside. Ferraro was trying to pop that bubble because she knows it has no substance, and because she thinks her gal would be better. Saying that Obama wouldn’t be where is if he were not black, is just as true as saying that Martin Luther King Jr. could not have had the impact that he did had he not been black. And btw, “sending black children the message,” that anytime things aren’t going their way all they have to do is scream “Racist!” is about as destructive to their future happiness/success as anything a real racist could throw at them. Just look at what Jesse Jackson, with all his victimhood and race-baiting, accomplished when compared to MLK. Bupkes.

smellthecoffee on March 13, 2008 at 12:48 PM