Random Politics & Religion #00

Where is Viciousss celebrating or warmongering ...?

Russian incompetence continues in Syria. Cool pictures tho.

Pictures are posted in Random P&R, I like the one where the plane is leaving a giant trail of fire.

Where is Viciousss celebrating or warmongering ...?

he's either completely delusional or the greatest troll to ever walk the earth, idk why you guys even entertain him.

Don't forget, Turkey did commit an act of war by shooting down 2 Russian jets. Regardless of the warnings, they shot them down instead of escorting them out of Turkey's airspace. And you are gleeful about the jets being shot down.

I don't like what has just happened over there but the situation is not that simple to be called an act of war right off the bat.

They didn't respond to 10 warnings over 5 minutes according to our military authorities. If they did, they wouldn't even needed to be escorted out. They would have just left. I don't like what has just happened over there but the situation is not that simple to be called an act of war right off the bat.

The russians have been trampling all over everyone's sovereignty for the last two years, they had an incident like this one coming. Turkey has every right to defend it's airspace.

At least 30 social media profiles of so-called “white student unions” have been set up in the last week, in response to nationwide student protests demanding action to address campus racism.

The pages claim to represent students at universities like Stanford, New York University and UC Berkeley, as well as at the University of Missouri, where protests this month forced the ouster of president Tim Wolfe and inspired activism on campuses elsewhere.

It appears that the first of these WSUs was the “Illini White Student Union”, created at the University of Illinois just hours after students gathered for a black solidarity event on campus last Wednesday. Its page has since been taken down by Facebook at the request of campus administrators.

“The Illinois student union that came on last week made us jump at the chance of creating an online presence,” according to someone claiming to be a spokesman for the WSU at UT Austin, who would not give his real name. “We kind of kicked ourselves for not doing it beforehand.”

UT Austin’s WSU describes itself on its page as a “group to promote the ethnic interests of white students and to protect us from BLM [Black Lives Matter] terrorism”. The spokesman said the group started as a collection of like-minded friends who began meeting to discuss topics like pride in white heritage and a sense that, in college classes, students are “drowning in an anti-white narrative”.

Given the rapid speed with which they have emerged, some have questioned whether the groups are really created by students. In a Medium post by the author “Bears for Equity”, it was noted late Sunday that well known white-supremacist and Neo-Nazi blogger Andrew Anglin called for his followers to “[m]ake more of these White Student Union pages on Facebook for various universities. You don’t have to go there. Make one for Dartmouth, Princeton, etc.”

The spokesman for the UT Austin WSU denied any connection to Anglin, and said that Anglin’s call for more group pages “really makes me cringe” and “cheapens what we are doing”. He also noted that the first post on his group’s page was made Friday, one day before Anglin’s post.

Other groups contacted by the Guardian also denied any connection to Anglin. A representative for the University of North Carolina WSU told the Guardian that “we denounce Anglin’s call for ‘dummy’ WSUs” and said they do not want to be associated with Anglin’s blog “The Stormer”. Similarly, a representative for the UCLA WSU said that Anglin’s “views and website are not at all representative of what we believe”. The WSU at UC Berkeley also denied any affiliation.

None of the representatives contacted were willing to identify themselves, citing security concerns. All of them also refused requests to confirm their student status by sending a message from an official school email.

Several of the WSUs claim to be part of the “National European American Student Association”, which, according to the representative for the UNC WSU, was “founded late last month as an umbrella congress for white student unions”.

María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, a professor at NYU’s School of Social and Cultural Analysis, said that the analogy the groups were making between white student unions and the student unions for black, Latino, Native American and other marginalized groups was a weak one. “The celebration of whiteness as a race has a particular history of racial violence, and exclusion,” she said.

In the late 1980s, according to the Journal of Higher Education, at least six white students’ groups emerged around the country, and, at Temple University and the University of Florida, even managed to become officially recognized by the schools. Several school administrators told the journal in 1990 that the students were largely inspired “by the conservative politics of Ronald Reagan”.

According to a spokesperson for the University of Florida, that school’s WSU had just five members and only lasted about a year, dissolving when its members graduated. Temple University did not respond to a Guardian request for comment.

In 2012, Townson University senior Matthew Heimbach briefly gained national attention for founding a white student union which sought to “create a safe space for members who have filed hate/bias reports and who have had anti-white language used against them”. Some other students, often claiming to be inspired by Heimbach, have launched similar efforts since, but not with the apparent frequency seen in the last week.

Some of the recent pages seem more likely than others to be fake. A recent graduate of NYU, who didn’t want to give his name out of fear of online reprisals, said that when he started engaging with posters on the NYU WSU page, he noticed many had online ties to the white supremacist website Stormfront, and were far from New York City, in places like Atlanta and Portland, Maine. “I think that it probably did originate on Stormfront,” he said, “and got picked up by people on 4chan who just get amusement out of riling up ‘social justice warriors’, as they call them.”

Saldaña-Portillo said that even if the NYU WSU group wasn’t “real”, it still presented a problem. “It’s a parody that wants to belittle the language of black student movements and to try to show them as ridiculous,” she said. “So they don’t get let off the hook if it’s a hoax, because the hoax is the point.

Let's start with Oklahoma first!

Yeah because they didn't get enough of that the with home-grown terrorism already.

While I don't get the purpose of these white union groups other than to counter the BLM movement (and their nuking ability...just kidding >.>), you can't really decry "racism" on these groups, because they have every right to create a white union group as black union groups have a right to be created also.

I had a different reason, actually

Besides, McVeigh was doing terrorism before terrorism was considered cool.

While they do have every right to create the group in the grand scheme -- regardless of whether or not it exists just to be a bunch of contrarians -- let's not forget that the university is an institution with the right to regulate its associations and affiliations, and if they deem it to be some sort of racist group and strike it down, that's (I'm pretty sure?) well within their rights?

Unless I'm misreading the situation -- which is possible as I'm tired of giving racists free press, so I generally only give some of this stuff a cursory glance -- basically it boils down to: they have a right to create a misguided "white rights" group? Yes. The university has a right to deny them association with the university? Also yes.

While they do have every right to create the group in the grand scheme -- regardless of whether or not it exists just to be a bunch of contrarians -- let's not forget that the university is an institution with the right to regulate its associations and affiliations, and if they deem it to be some sort of racist group and strike it down, that's (I'm pretty sure?) well within their rights?

Unless I'm misreading the situation -- which is possible as I'm tired of giving racists free press, so I generally only give some of this stuff a cursory glance -- basically it boils down to: they have a right to create a misguided "white rights" group? Yes. The university has a right to deny them association with the university? Also yes.

Black mages?

Joke already made.

It's the abbreviation of "Black Lives Matter." I'm sure you heard of it, it's been all over the news lately.

It wasn't a joke, I didn't know it was an acronym for that.

A blind man could see the double standard here.

, but when a group of whites tries to promote their agenda in the same way all of a sudden now it is wrong for them?

But shooting the pilots while they were parachuting is beyond appalling.

(I despise the word "race," as if we're not all human)

who is reporting that? cnn says "their fate is unknown"