More on the way deliberate, planned racial segregation has crushed people’s aspirations as a matter of policy, this time from Jamelle Bouie.

In the Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood where Freddie Gray lived before he died in police custody on April 12, one-half the residents are unemployed and one-third of the homes are vacant. Sixty percent of residents have less than a high school diploma, and the violent crime rate is among the highest in Baltimore. You can paint a similar picture for the neighborhoods and housing projects on the east side of the city as well. If you are poor and black in Charm City, your life—or at least your opportunity to have a better life—looks bleak.

But then, this is

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This is probably the article that brought Richard Rothstein to the attention of the producers at Morning Edition and then Fresh Air: This Is One Reason Why Places Like Ferguson and Baltimore Have Become Explosive.

(Rothstein has written a number of articles. I’m going to read every one I can find.)

In Baltimore in 1910, a black Yale law school graduate purchased a home in a previously all-white neighborhood. The Baltimore city government reacted by adopting a residential segregation ordinance, restricting African Americans to designated blocks. Explaining the policy, Baltimore’s mayor proclaimed, “Blacks should be quarantined in isolated slums in order to reduce the incidence of civil disturbance, to prevent the spread of communicable disease into the nearby White

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Republican legislators in Wisconsin have thought of a new way of tormenting poor people: say they can have food stamps but ban ALL THE FOODS.

On Wednesday, Wisconsin Republicans in the statehouse took the first step in their agenda to punish people who use Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits.

Assembly Bill 177 seeks to ban people who rely on food stamps to survive on a daily basis from buying a huge list of products deemed unworthy for the mouths of poor people and their children.

The legislation specifically bans poor people from buying any kind of shellfish, including lobster, shrimp, and crab.

Too fancy! Too fancy for the likes of poor people who have low wages because rich … Read the rest

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Meet Washington state legislator Ed Orcutt, Republican. He thinks bikers are bad for the environment.

This is from 2013, but it’s funny enough to be resurrected now.

Representative Ed Orcutt (R – Kalama) does not think bicycling is environmentally friendly because the activity causes cyclists to have “an increased heart rate and respiration.”

This is according to comments he made in an email to a constituent who questioned the wisdom of a new bike tax the legislature is considering as part of a large transportation package.

A bike tax does seem like an incredibly stupid idea. You want to encourage bikes, not tax them.

We spoke with Rep. Orcutt to confirm the email’s authenticity and to get further clarification.

“You

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The US military and the people who should be supervising the US military are doing such a bad job of addressing sexual harassment that the UN has taken notice, Jenna McLaughlin reports at Mother Jones. How impressive is that? I feel so proud.

The US military has a problem with sexual violence. That’s the conclusion of the Universal Periodic Review Panel, a UN panel that aims to address the human rights records of the 193 UN member states. This is the second time that the panel has scrutinized the United States; the first was in 2010, when the list of concerns included detention in Guantanamo Bay, torture, the death penalty, and access to health care. Its latest report came

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The marriage equality referendum in Ireland is in a week and it’s close. Aoife at Consider the Tea Cosy is hosting guest posts for equality. Here is The No side’s warped understanding of democracy is a bad joke:

In the course of this referendum debate there have been many complaints, in particular from the No side, about an undemocratic atmosphere of censorship. When No posters are defaced by unknown persons, they behave as if the Yes campaign had ordered an official strike. When a mural depicting two men embracing was permitted on George Street in Dublin, they behaved as though the government was conspiring against them to give the Yes campaign more publicity.

In short, they are trying to

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A random tweet spotted in a crowd.

…liberalism is about individual liberty & free speech, not about authoritarian rules to protect sensibilities.

Classical liberalism is, but then that’s why classical liberalism by itself isn’t enough.

Or to put it another way, one thing I find increasingly repellent about some classical liberals is this disdain for other people’s “sensibilities” – this assumption that “sensibilities” is all they are, and that they’re kind of a joke. The tweeter checks most of the privilege boxes – male, pale, Anglo, straight, educated – so isn’t subject to the kind of social contempt that people who check fewer boxes may be.

Individual liberty and free speech are good, and so is equality.… Read the rest

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More Richard Rothstein. NPR, Morning Edition, May 6.

DAVID GREENE, HOST:

Scenes of West Baltimore’s troubled neighborhoods do raise natural questions. One is why they seem heavily segregated generations after legal segregation ended.

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

Richard Rothstein studied that question. He’s with the Economic Policy Institute, and he says Baltimore neighborhoods reflect a national legacy of segregation. Generations ago, during President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, the federal government started subsidizing a lot of housing. But they did it a certain way.

RICHARD ROTHSTEIN: The New Deal was a coalition of Northern Democrats and Southern Democrats. The Southern Democrats were segregationist, and in many cases, the Northern Democrats compromised with them in order to get housing programs enacted.

Result: … Read the rest

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There’s a new audio message that IS says is from its beloved führer Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Whoever it is has a charmingly blunt message for those of us who decline to submit to Allah.

The speaker says: “There is no excuse for any Muslim not to migrate to the Islamic State… joining [its fight] is a duty on every Muslim. We are calling on you either to join or carry weapons [to fight] wherever you are.”

He adds: “Islam was never a religion of peace. Islam is the religion of fighting. No-one should believe that the war that we are waging is the war of the Islamic State. It is the war of all Muslims, but the Islamic State

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There was an exceptionally good interview on Fresh Air yesterday with Richard Rothstein, explaining the way ghettoization in the US was an official government policy, along with the fact that it fully accounts for the massive wealth gap – as distinct from income gap – between blacks and whites. Whites were able to buy cheap decent housing in the 40s and 50s while blacks were not, so that became the equity that is now the wealth that while people have while black people have 5% of that wealth. 5%.

5%. That’s a lot of university educations not paid for, houses not bought, equity not built.

Richard Rothstein, a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute, has spent years studying the

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Another CBC reporter offers some thoughts on “punch her right in the face fuck her right in the pussy.”

It was trending on Twitter across Canada Tuesday after it happened to a CityNews reporter outside of a Toronto FC game. Except once they yelled it into her microphone, Shauna Hunt fought back. She asked them why they did it. Now the video of her confronting them has gone viral.

Hunt told them it happens to her ten times per day and I don’t doubt it. My dad called me one evening from Manitoba because he’d seen it happen live on a broadcast — and he fumbled to explain what he heard before I cut him off and told him

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I did my Freethinker column about the death toll from theocratic murderers over the past few months. It’s not a very cheerful story.

Here’s Amnesty Italy, resisting the trend:

… Read the rest

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An NPR story from 2011:

During the Holocaust, Nazis referred to Jews as rats. Hutus involved in the Rwanda genocide called Tutsis cockroaches. Slave owners throughout history considered slaves subhuman animals. In Less Than Human, David Livingstone Smith argues that it’s important to define and describe dehumanization, because it’s what opens the door for cruelty and genocide.

“We all know, despite what we see in the movies,” Smith tells NPR’s Neal Conan, “that it’s very difficult, psychologically, to kill another human being up close and in cold blood, or to inflict atrocities on them.” So, when it does happen, it can be helpful to understand what it is that allows human beings “to overcome the very deep and natural

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… Read the rest

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In Chechnya…

A journalist has left the southern Russian republic of Chechnya amid fears for her safety, after writing that a teenage girl was being forced to marry a police commander much older than her.

Elena Milashina had written that the local police head, Nazhud Guchigov, had threatened reprisals against the girl’s family if she was not handed over.

The police commander was also said to be married to another woman.

Ms Milashina’s newspaper said she fled after her safety was threatened.

That’s an interesting style of “police head.” Sounds more like a crime boss.

Chechnya’s authoritarian leader Ramzan Kadyrov, a diehard loyalist of President Vladimir Putin, has in recent years outlawed the abduction of brides and underage marriage.

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