Ben Carson

Mikey · Post by **Mikey** » Mon Mar 06, 2017 9:15 pm

Still Ben Carson.

WASHINGTON ― Ben Carson made his debut as secretary of Housing and Urban Development Monday by telling agency employees about the virtues of the “can-do” American society. Carson said this value system was best exemplified by slaves, whom he characterized as immigrants who came to the United States with very little and worked very hard.

“That’s what America is about,” Carson said. “A land of dreams and opportunity. There were other immigrants who came here in the bottom of slave ships, worked even longer, even harder for less. But they too had a dream that one day their sons, daughters, grandsons, granddaughters, great grandsons, great granddaughters might pursue prosperity and happiness in this land.”

Yep. Those slaves came over here with a dream that their sons and daughters could pursue prosperity and happiness.

Wolfman · Post by **Wolfman** » Mon Mar 06, 2017 9:19 pm

I forget who it was, but he said he was glad his great-GrandDad survived the trip. Not everyone is a Pollyana and thank goodness not everyone is a Mikey.

Mikey · Post by **Mikey** » Mon Mar 06, 2017 9:27 pm

Wolfman wrote:I forget who it was, but he said he was glad his great-GrandDad survived the trip. Not everyone is a Pollyana and thank goodness not everyone is a Mikey.

You're absolutely right. If everybody was as good looking as I am there'd be no one as ugly as you to compare to.

Goober McTuber · Post by **Goober McTuber** » Mon Mar 06, 2017 10:05 pm

Wolfman wrote:I forget who it was, but he said he was glad his great-GrandDad survived the trip.

Well, duh. Of course he's glad his great-GrandDad survived the trip. Otherwise great-grand-child wouldn't be here today.

Check this out:

http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/patt ... aves-.html

Mikey · Post by **Mikey** » Mon Mar 06, 2017 10:17 pm

88 wrote: If not, what is it that you think they were dreaming about?

Surviving?

Or more likely, having nightmares about any number of things that might be happening to them.

Diego in Seattle · Post by **Diego in Seattle** » Mon Mar 06, 2017 10:25 pm

88 wrote:
Mikey wrote:what is it that you think they were dreaming about?

I seriously doubt anyone wearing these was dreaming about prosperity...

R-Jack · Post by **R-Jack** » Mon Mar 06, 2017 10:31 pm

88 wrote:what is it that you think they were dreaming about?

If blond......the plantation owners daughter?

Smackie Chan · Post by **Smackie Chan** » Mon Mar 06, 2017 10:55 pm

88 wrote:what is it that you think they were dreaming about?

Pikkle's ancestors.

Rooster · Post by **Rooster** » Tue Mar 07, 2017 1:08 am

Mikey wrote:Still Ben Carson.

WASHINGTON ― Ben Carson made his debut as secretary of Housing and Urban Development Monday by telling agency employees about the virtues of the “can-do” American society. Carson said this value system was best exemplified by slaves, whom he characterized as immigrants who came to the United States with very little and worked very hard.

“That’s what America is about,” Carson said. “A land of dreams and opportunity. There were other immigrants who came here in the bottom of slave ships, worked even longer, even harder for less. But they too had a dream that one day their sons, daughters, grandsons, granddaughters, great grandsons, great granddaughters might pursue prosperity and happiness in this land.”
Yep. Those slaves came over here with a dream that their sons and daughters could pursue prosperity and happiness.

So if you were in a bad situation or circumstances you'd lose all hope? I feel sorry for you that your world is so brittle that some unforeseen calamity will leave you in unending despair.

Mikey · Post by **Mikey** » Tue Mar 07, 2017 2:15 am

Rooster wrote:
Mikey wrote:Still Ben Carson.

WASHINGTON ― Ben Carson made his debut as secretary of Housing and Urban Development Monday by telling agency employees about the virtues of the “can-do” American society. Carson said this value system was best exemplified by slaves, whom he characterized as immigrants who came to the United States with very little and worked very hard.

“That’s what America is about,” Carson said. “A land of dreams and opportunity. There were other immigrants who came here in the bottom of slave ships, worked even longer, even harder for less. But they too had a dream that one day their sons, daughters, grandsons, granddaughters, great grandsons, great granddaughters might pursue prosperity and happiness in this land.”
Yep. Those slaves came over here with a dream that their sons and daughters could pursue prosperity and happiness.
So if you were in a bad situation or circumstances you'd lose all hope? I feel sorry for you that your world is so brittle that some unforeseen calamity will leave you in unending despair.

You're a fucking idiot. If you were kidnapped as a young man, chained, and thrown into the hold of a ship by strangers who you couldn't understand, can you honestly say you'd be thinking about the hopes and dreams of your future children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren in a wonderful land of freedom and opportunity?

Give me a fucking break. Your biggest hope at that point would be to survive.

Wolfman · Post by **Wolfman** » Tue Mar 07, 2017 2:12 pm

im·mi·grant
ˈiməɡrənt/
noun
noun: immigrant; plural noun: immigrants

a person who comes to live permanently in a foreign country.
synonyms: newcomer, settler, migrant, emigrant; nonnative, foreigner, alien, outsider;
expatriate;
informalexpat
"they will convene to discuss the civil liberties of immigrants"
antonyms: native

Look that up in your Funk & Wagnalls. I don't see any reference as to the method by which one becomes an "immigrant" to another country. Picky, picky, picky.

Diego in Seattle · Post by **Diego in Seattle** » Tue Mar 07, 2017 2:18 pm

According to Ben Carson & Wolftard, this is an African cruise ship:

Rooster · Post by **Rooster** » Tue Mar 07, 2017 3:10 pm

Actually, Mickey, I have done a tremendous amount of thinking on this topic since, as every serviceman who goes into war does, the prospect of becoming a POW is very real. What you suggest is that someone like John McCain and his fellow prisoners had no reason for hope and perhaps should have looked for opportunities to commit suicide?

Diego in Seattle · Post by **Diego in Seattle** » Tue Mar 07, 2017 3:14 pm

Rooster wrote:Actually, Mickey, I have done a tremendous amount of thinking on this topic since, as every serviceman who goes into war does, the prospect of becoming a POW is very real. What you suggest is that someone like John McCain and his fellow prisoners had no reason for hope and perhaps should have looked for opportunities to commit suicide?

It's hard to believe that someone who served would actually compare being a POW to being a slave. Epcot stupidity.

Rooster · Post by **Rooster** » Tue Mar 07, 2017 3:24 pm

And you are displaying your ignorance of the realities of war and the very real possibility of becoming for all purposes a slave-- or worse.

Rooster · Post by **Rooster** » Tue Mar 07, 2017 4:31 pm

Yes, your immediate concern would be survival. But once you arrived to wherever it is that your captors had taken you, be that South America, the Caribbean, the Middle East, or North America, time would pass and you'd stop focusing on your day-to-day life expectancy and begin thinking of what comes next-- after all, your captors and now your owners didn't outright kill you. Indeed, they have clothed you, fed you, sheltered you, maybe even given you a wife/husband/companion. And to what end? Obviously to work and perhaps to some extent to produce more slaves like yourself.

All of this points to a logical conclusion: They don't want to kill you.

This is what I mean by there being worse fates. As a prisoner of war whose only value is information or trade, torture is most likely your lot in life until such time as you can escape, be traded away, or killed. This doesn't diminish the horror of what slaves experienced, but should place into perspective the idea that Mickey has that being a slave is the worst possible existence out there, when in my opinion it's not.

Rooster · Post by **Rooster** » Tue Mar 07, 2017 5:31 pm

I'd also point out that the definitive idea of a slave is a sub-Saharan who was somehow captured by evil white slavers and sent in the bowels of a crowded boat and made to work on a white Southerner's plantation unto the point of death.

This is the picture that our present education system has painted of the life of a slave in pre-Civil War America.

The truth? One of the biggest slave owners was a black man who was a former slave himself, who incidentally was far crueler and vicious than nearly every white slave owner. All that aside, it didn't pay to mistreat your slaves because they cost you money to acquire them, feed, clothe, shelter, and keep them healthy enough to work at an efficient rate to offset the overhead costs of owning them.

The people capturing these now-slaves were Arabs or sub-Saharan Africans, only from a different tribe, generally of the Hutu and Tutsi tribes still seen in Africa today. There is no genetic difference between them, they just come from different extended families. Slavery was common in Africa, only more cruel. The captured slaves were put to work and then killed when their usefulness was gone. Why? Because there were plenty more where those came from-- and not too far away either. It was a lucrative business for people.

Furthermore, the idea that there were enormous numbers of slaves in the United States is false. Today, as we speak, there are more slaves around the world at any given moment than there were in aggregate during the entire time there were slaves in the New World. And the conditions these modern day slaves live in are far worse because the only value they have is what they produce to a specific owner, not to a society based on cheap labor in general.

The issue here is that the vast majority of people have been taught that life as a slave in the United States was the end-all to a bad existence, yet have no clue as to what life in Africa even today is like. As someone who has spent years living and working there, I can tell you that while your idea of being a slave is the very worst that you can imagine, for most Africans, it doesn't come close to what they would consider to be an awful life. Why? Because their values aren't your values and what they hold dear isn't what you hold dear.

Case in point: I was flying a woman around whose job it was to go out and inspect the local countryside for damage that may have been caused by some of the companies that operated out there in West Africa. After a few months of working together, she one day asked me if I would like to go fly over her home and see it? I was very interested in viewing her place since she was far more educated than your typical African and was curious as to what kind of home someone like her might own.

It became quickly apparent that my assumptions about her, her home, and life in general were completely wrong. When we arrived over her "house" it was a clearing in the jungle which consisted of her tent, a pile of sand, a foundation trench for the mud bricks she would eventually place there, and a dirt path that eventually led back to town several miles away. I asked her where she was living right then, and she pointed to the tent which consisted of several tarps hung from the trees. I was flabbergasted at the conditions she lived in, but tried to hide my surprise, but she noticed my dismay. She said she was very proud because it had taken her three years to get the government to give her a 99 year lease of the land and that she had worked the system so well because normally it took much longer than that to get a lease.

She explained that eventually her house would have a single room with a window and a "door" which would be a curtain over the portal. There'd be a metal roof of some kind, but no floor other than dirt. No bathroom, no kitchen, no separate bedroom, just a single room with no electricity or plumbing. She would walk into town in the morning for work and upon her return at night would bring back a five gallon (or the metric equivalent) jug of water on her head to wash, cook, and drink. For cooking she would purchase little 2 gallon propane tanks that were refillable and she'd go to the bathroom out in the bush.

I asked her in a roundabout way if this was satisfying for her, since just the previous hitch I'd seen the president's entourage at the airport getting ready to leave for his villa in Brazil, where he spends 8 of the 12 months of the year along with his motorcade of luxury Benz's, brand new business jet, and personal guard. After all, she was, in my mind, condemned to a life out in the toolies walking everywhere and living in a mud hut with dirt for a floor while her governmental leader lived a grand life off of her and everyone else's work.

To paraphrase her explanation, she said, "Oh no, our president, he is like the chief, the head of our village. His glory is our glory. It brings me joy that he is far grander than the leader of Country X next door, because it reflects well upon us." In other words, to live in abject poverty was fine because her tribal chief was "beating" the next door rival tribal chief in the African version of keeping up with the Joneses.

Astounding.

After many other conversations over the next months, I came to recognize that our values here in the United States are not universal, nor are the standards of living, health, prosperity. Political power is very much a relative thing. Personal freedoms is highly malleable. Slavery-- or the equivalent of it --is in the eye of the beholder. So, yeah, our history books say that slaves from Africa brought here to the United States had it worse than anybody else at any other time in the history of man, but, sorry, that just isn't close to the truth.

Rooster · Post by **Rooster** » Tue Mar 07, 2017 8:12 pm

The funny thing is that over in Africa they don't look at themselves and you or me and think, "Hmm, I'm black and he is white." Instead, they look at you and think, "Rich." And, in all truth, I suppose compared to them, we are. To be sure, they are aware of the skin pigmentation differences, but for them it's not colonial imperialism or racial privilege at play, but simply wealth. We are by nature of being from elsewhere other than Africa, wealthy. However, I ran across people a number of times who, because I am white, also attributed intelligence and innate talent to me based on just appearance alone. Yeah, yeah, Moving Sale, let me preempt your dumb incoming post by saying obviously they don't know me. Fine. Whatever.

Mikey · Post by **Mikey** » Wed Mar 08, 2017 3:55 pm

I understand that you have a strong opinion regarding slavery in America, that contrary to what all the liberal history books claim it was actually a "good" thing on balance, for both the slaves and their masters. Sorry, let's change that to "immigrants" and "hosts" - "slave" and "master" just has so many negative connotations that don't credit the beneficent relationships that actually dominated in the pre-Civil War South. After all, without slavery we wouldn't have had Willie Mays, John Coltrane, Oprah Winfrey or ~~Barak Obama~~ (sorry I got carried away there). Everybody's entitled to their own opinion, even if it exposes them as a demented racist sociopath. I'll cut you some slack, though, in recognition of your heroic service and PTSD.

But that's not what this thread was about. It was about the notion that young Africans, kidnapped and taken against their will, packed into the hold of slave ships and shipped off to some unknown place were probably not thinking, at the time, about the future of their children, grandchildren, etc., in the promised land, but probably were more worried about their own immediate survival.

This led you to making several comments along this line:

Rooster wrote: our history books say that slaves from Africa brought here to the United States had it worse than anybody else at any other time in the history of man,

I don't think anybody, including myself, has ever seriously made that claim. That still doesn't excuse the practice of slavery, which you seem to think is actually an OK thing.

Mikey · Post by **Mikey** » Wed Mar 08, 2017 4:01 pm

Papa Willie wrote:How did black people ever allow themselves to be put in positions to where they could have been sold by their own people?

That certainly excuses the practice.

trev · Post by **trev** » Wed Mar 08, 2017 4:02 pm

This thread was started to denounce Ben Carson who seems like a decent man. But Mikey doesn't like him anyway.

Mikey · Post by **Mikey** » Wed Mar 08, 2017 4:04 pm

Actually the main reason was to give you and Rooster a chance to display your ignorance and stupidity.

Succeeding spectacularly so far.

Diego in Seattle · Post by **Diego in Seattle** » Wed Mar 08, 2017 4:29 pm

Papa Willie wrote:How did black people ever allow themselves to be put in positions to where they could have been sold by their own people?

The gubmint took away all the guns.

Sin,
NRA

Mikey · Post by **Mikey** » Wed Mar 08, 2017 4:58 pm

They stole his eyes too, but at least they gave him some cool Star Trek stuff.

trev · Post by **trev** » Wed Mar 08, 2017 7:08 pm

It's OK if Obama does it.

You are all dumb shits.

-Mikey

Mikey · Post by **Mikey** » Wed Mar 08, 2017 7:31 pm

Sudden Sam wrote:
Mikey wrote:Actually the main reason was to give you and Rooster a chance to display your ignorance and stupidity.

Succeeding spectacularly so far.
Ahem...

Obama also referred to slaves as 'immigrants'

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/poli ... /98875122/

So what?

Much different context anyway.
You trying to join Rooster and Trev now in the ignorance and stupidity pool?

Mikey · Post by **Mikey** » Wed Mar 08, 2017 7:36 pm

trev wrote:It's OK if Obama does it.

You are all dumb shits.

-Mikey

Way to go Trev. You really got me there.

Have you ever come up with anything relevant on your own, or do you just hang out and go "yeah me too" when somebody else posts something that sounds good to you?

BTW...

You are all dumb shits.

If the shoe fits...

Mikey · Post by **Mikey** » Wed Mar 08, 2017 7:41 pm

Papa Willie wrote:
Perhaps you should start using context with a lot of what Trump says?

You mean like preceding it with "Trump tweeted at 4:00 a.m."?

Yeah, I'm sure that would help.

trev · Post by **trev** » Thu Mar 09, 2017 12:43 am

Mikey, take a lap, make yourself a nice glass of wine and relax. After you make me a sammich.

Rooster · Post by **Rooster** » Thu Mar 09, 2017 1:12 am

Apparently Obama misspoke eleven different times when he favorably compared slaves to immigrants.

http://thefederalist.com/2017/03/07/11- ... mmigrants/

Moving Sale · Post by **Moving Sale** » Thu Mar 09, 2017 1:26 am

So Carson is as dumb as Obama? Or is Obama as smart as Carson?

Rooster · Post by **Rooster** » Thu Mar 09, 2017 2:50 am

Or maybe, just maybe, Carson and Obama are on to something. Slavery isn't the permanently despair inducing condition that Miley thinks it is. Maybe, just maybe, people are more resilient than the psychologically and emotionally fragile Mikey and are able to you know, make lemonade from lemons. Crazy huh?

smackaholic · Post by **smackaholic** » Thu Mar 09, 2017 3:23 am

Question for mikey.

Let's say you are a modern day balck man in America. you have the ability to go back in time, track down the slave trader who is about to sell your great, great X 1000 grandaddy to papa willie's forebearer who will take him on an all expenses paid trip to Georgia. Do you make that trip and shoot that fukker in the head so your folks never make the trip and you are now a typical African?

I'll bet you wouldn't.

For as horrible an experience as being an American slave was, their progeny hit the fukking lotto compared to the fukker living in a hut (if he's lucky enough to have a hut) in modern day Congo.

And your attempt at explaining away Obama's statement as having a different context to Carson's is pathetic.

Shlomart Ben Yisrael · Thu Mar 09, 2017 3:28 am

smackaholic wrote: For as horrible an experience as being an American slave was, their progeny hit the fukking lotto compared to the fukker living in a hut (if he's lucky enough to have a hut) in modern day Congo.

The value you place on the concept of freedom is quite low.
Did you join the navy just to shower with other dudes?

smackaholic · Post by **smackaholic** » Thu Mar 09, 2017 3:38 am

Shlomart Ben Yisrael wrote:
smackaholic wrote: For as horrible an experience as being an American slave was, their progeny hit the fukking lotto compared to the fukker living in a hut (if he's lucky enough to have a hut) in modern day Congo.
The value you place on the concept of freedom is quite low.
Did you join the navy just to shower with other dudes?

No, that was just a fringe benefit. I am just pointing out that as sucky as being an American slave was, it was lightyears better than being an African slave, or for that matter, a free African.

Moving Sale · Post by **Moving Sale** » Thu Mar 09, 2017 3:40 am

Rooster wrote:Or maybe, just maybe

OMG you are so stupid. That was literally one of the two options I proposed.

Diego in Seattle · Post by **Diego in Seattle** » Thu Mar 09, 2017 3:53 am

smackaholic wrote:I am just pointing out that as sucky as being an American slave was, it was lightyears better than being an African slave, or for that matter, a free African.

That's one of the more stupid things I've ever read.

Shlomart Ben Yisrael · Thu Mar 09, 2017 10:55 am

smackaholic wrote:I am just pointing out that as sucky as being an American slave was, it was lightyears better than being an African slave, or for that matter, a free African.

You could just as well argue that being an African American slave was better than being a Catholic priest in Cromwell's England, you big dummy.

Hey, you know what was better than being a slave? Riding coach on the Titanic.

Shlomart Ben Yisrael · Thu Mar 09, 2017 11:09 am

I will concede that the fate an African slave was by far better than being AP...no contest.

smackaholic · Post by **smackaholic** » Thu Mar 09, 2017 1:14 pm

Diego in Seattle wrote:
smackaholic wrote:I am just pointing out that as sucky as being an American slave was, it was lightyears better than being an African slave, or for that matter, a free African.
That's one of the more stupid things I've ever read.

Which part of it do you disagree with?

Coming to America as a slave was certainly no picnic, but it did one thing for those fukkers, it made their descendants American citizens. If you think that isn't infinitely better than being a citizen of a third world African shithole, you are one dumb fukk.