Saturday, April 21, 2018

Starbucks And The Evolution Of A Religion

Blogging Note: I need to spend mornings doing something other than writing, so I'm scaling back from obsessively blogging every day to committing to a Monday and Thursday blogging schedule. I might still jot something down or share a photo on the other days, but I'm not promising anything.

I haven't kept up with the news lately, but as I understand it, two black guys were arrested for loitering in a Starbucks, leading Starbucks to have a thousand (was that the number?) stores stand down for racial sensitivity training.

When Congress passed Hate Crime legislation several years back, part of it mandated the FBI to maintain statistics on hate crimes. Here they are for 2016.
In 2016, race was reported for 5,770 known hate crime offenders. Of these offenders:
  • 46.3 percent were White.
  • 26.1 percent were Black or African American.
Blacks are about 13% of the population which means that blacks double up on hate crimes on a per capita basis.

So I get why Starbucks wanted a refresher course on race relations, but where are the corresponding ones for other groups? There are all kinds of other statistics that could be trotted out, but I'm not going to give the Stormfront cretins more ammunition than they already have. The thing that hits me is not just the Nazi-esque nature of our dominant racial narrative: the Jews whites are exploiting the Germans people of color, it's how it is in direct contradiction of the facts. It's doubtful that many people are even aware of the hate crime stats. I wasn't until very recently.

Is this how Jim Jones worked? Did he control the flow of information in order to create a narrative for his followers and confirm the beliefs of his cult in their minds?

How do you deprogram a nation?

These cult things rarely end well.
Bonus tidbit: I just found out that Jim Jones was a socialist. Well, that caption goes double then. These socialist things rarely end well. (Someone tell Bernie Sanders, OK?)
He considered Jesus Christ as being in compliance with an overarching belief in Socialism as the correct social order.
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1 comment:

Foxfier said...

It wouldn't do much good to tell them to the people protesting; they would see that "whites" are committing more of them, not look at it in proportion to the population.

Imagine growing up in an area where 9 of 10 people are the same as you-- and not realizing that nationwide, the proportion is almost exactly the opposite. (That's before you consider things like what is meant by "white" and such.)
I've heard about some serious freak-outs by guys good enough to get into the military who simply can't process that, say, nobody "removed" all the black people from Portland, there just aren't as many as in the areas they grew up.

7:59 PM

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