Community | The Hip Hop Philosopher https://thehiphopphilosopher.com Wizdom From The Hip Hop Generation Thu, 26 Sep 2024 01:20:26 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.7 https://i0.wp.com/thehiphopphilosopher.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/cropped-Afrimerican-Flag.jpg?fit=32%2C32&ssl=1 Community | The Hip Hop Philosopher https://thehiphopphilosopher.com 32 32 146347196 To Pander or Not to Pander https://thehiphopphilosopher.com/to-pander-or-not/ Thu, 26 Sep 2024 00:39:22 +0000 https://thehiphopphilosopher.com/?p=1285

To Pander or Not to Pander: The Hip-Hop Philosopher’s Take

From the Hip Hop Philosopher’s perspective, it’s fascinating how people actively crave pandering, even when they know it’s not real. It’s like vibing to a track with a killer beat, but if you break down the lyrics, there’s nothing there, yet people stay locked in, nodding their heads, fully aware that they’re being played. So why is pandering so powerful? Here’s how I see it!

Feeding the Need for Validation

First off, everyone wants to feel seen, understood, and respected. Pandering is all about hitting those emotional sweet spots, serving up exactly what people want to hear. It’s like the perfect hook in a song that’s so catchy, you keep replaying it, even if the substance is thin. It’s easier to accept a flattering lie than to face a hard truth that might leave you feeling invisible.

In the Hip Hop world, we’ve seen how artists pander to their audience. Take a mainstream rapper who constantly flexes about street life, but they’ve been living in luxury for years. Their fans know that the artist isn’t living that life anymore, but they still embrace it because it speaks to the fantasy, the grind, the hustle, the struggle. The pander isn’t about reality, it’s about feeding into the emotional narrative that resonates.

Pandering in Politics: The Oldest Trick in the Book

Politicians are masters at pandering, and the game is as old as politics itself. Whether it’s promising jobs, safety, or radical change, politicians know how to hit people where they’re most vulnerable. They craft messages tailored to what their base already believes, feeding into their constituents’ desires and fears. It’s not that politicians always believe what they say or intend to follow through, but they understand that voters want to hear things that confirm their existing worldview.

For example, a politician may campaign on the promise of economic reform, knowing full well that such changes might not happen. But to the voters in struggling communities, this message provides hope. It plays into their bias that the politician will be their savior, even if the track record says otherwise. The voters might even see the inconsistencies, but the alternative, accepting that the politician won’t deliver is too hard to face.

Politicians also capitalize on cognitive dissonance. For example, a leader may shift stances or contradict themselves, but their loyal base will rationalize these shifts. Why? Because accepting the truth that their hero may not have their best interest at heart creates discomfort. So instead, they cling to the pander, reinforcing their own biases. This is why you often hear the same empty promises recycled during election season. This is why a politician can tell a proven lie, over and over again, and their base stays strong. It’s a formula that works because it’s less about action and more about emotional validation.

And whats really crazy is that every election cycle you hear people complaining about the fact the certain politicians don’t pander to them at all, thats why the politicians always go to the swing states multiple times.

The Cognitive Dissonance Dance

Cognitive dissonance is the mental tug-a-war people go through when holding two conflicting beliefs. When someone is being pandered to, they often recognize that what they’re hearing isn’t entirely truthful, but they accept it because it’s easier. It’s like fans loving a rapper who talks about loyalty to the streets, and at the same time be up to their neck with corporations. Fans could call them out, but that would mean confronting the uncomfortable truth that their hero is playing a role.

This same mental gymnastics plays out in politics. Voters might know that a politician is lying or pandering, but accepting the truth would mean dealing with the discomfort of realizing that they’ve been duped. Instead, they go along with the lie, holding on to the myth because it feels good.

Biases and the Pandering Game

Bias is another key factor. Everyone sees the world through their own filter, shaped by their beliefs, culture, and experiences. And the truth is, most people don’t want to have their biases challenged. Pandering works because it taps directly into these pre-existing biases. Whether it’s a politician feeding recycled promises or an artist giving you that “real shit ” it’s all about reinforcing what you already believe.

In Hip Hop culture, where authenticity is constantly being questioned, we see these biases in action. Fans want to believe their favorite rapper is the realest, even when the evidence shows otherwise. But their bias towards that artist or their favorite politician allows them to overlook the contradictions. Pandering doesn’t just feed desires, it reinforces them.

Pandering in the Digital Age

Social media has taken pandering to a whole new level by the use of algorithms. Algorithms are designed to keep people locked into their biases, feeding them content that aligns with what they already believe. If you click on a particular type of content, the algorithm floods you with more of the same, reinforcing your worldview. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, and Twitter aren’t here to challenge your thinking, they’re here to keep you engaged by showing you things that stroke your ego, all in an effort to keep you on their platforms.

This digital pandering creates echo chambers, where people only hear opinions that confirm what they already believe. The more you engage, the deeper the cycle of validation becomes, and the more resistant you are to stepping outside your bubble. You know deep down the content might not reflect the full truth, but it’s easier to keep scrolling than to confront the uncomfortable reality.

The Performance and the Real

In Hip Hop Culture, we’ve always navigated that fine line between performance and realness. There’s always been this tension between keeping it a 100 and selling the image. Artists, like politicians, know how to hit those emotional notes that keep people engaged. It’s why certain songs blow up, not because they tell the full truth, but because they feel true enough.

This is why pandering hits hard. People know, on some level, that they’re being sold a fantasy, but that fantasy is grounded in emotions they live with daily. A rapper may no longer live the struggle, but a track about grinding to get out of the hood resonates deeply with people who are still trying to escape those circumstances.

Conclusion: Lies Are Easier to Swallow

At the end of the day, people love being pandered to because it’s easier. It validates their beliefs, strokes their ego, and saves them from facing uncomfortable truths. In Hip Hop, we understand this dance between realness and performance all too well. We know that sometimes, the lie feels better than the truth.

Pandering isn’t just manipulation, it’s about feeding into biases and giving people the emotional hits they crave. As long as the lie feels more comforting than reality, people will continue to embrace it, whether it’s coming from their favorite rapper or their chosen politician.

— The Hip Hop Philosopher

An easily digestible eBook is coming soon

#cognitivedissonance #thhp #coffeeandcannabinoids #hiphopculture #hiphopphilosophy #socailmediaengineering #pandertous

 

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The Failing Presidency, So Sad! https://thehiphopphilosopher.com/816-2/ Sat, 25 Mar 2017 20:33:58 +0000 http://bwwrites.com/?p=816 In 2009 Obamacare went to the House and Senate to be voted on. Not one RepubliCon voted for it in the House or Senate, not one, but 34 Democrats voted against it and it still passed and was signed into law in March of 2010. We got what we believed would be the road to to a universal single payer health care system, boy were we wrong!

After it was passed and went into law, RepubliCon’s voted over 50 times to repeal it but were not successful. Some RepubliCon governors even refused to implement it in their states, then blamed Obama for their constituents health problems.

After 5 years of RepubliCon obstruction the rates started to rise because there wasn’t enough young people opting to purchase the minimum coverage to keep rates stable. They also rose because of the fact that RepubliCon lead states continued to find ways to not implement it which kept a significant amount of people out of the market, yet they blamed the rate hikes on Obama.

Seven years in a row; 50 plus votes to repeal comes out to 7 plus votes a year, all the while they’re actively trying to sabotage it on the state level, and it stood even with a majority RepubliCon Congress.

Now its 2017 with a RepubliCon held White House, Senate and House of Representatives, and they still cant find enough votes to repeal Obamacare because they cant get all their members on board a fix that the CBO has shown to be a disaster that would leave 14 million people uninsured next year, with an additional 10 million added over the next 10 years.

Premiums would still rise 15 to 20 percent before they eventually become 10 percent lower. What hasn’t been discussed is, would that be 10 percent lower than the cost right now, or 10 percent lower than the 15 to 20 percent rate hike? You see what I’m getting at here right? Ten percent lower than the 15 to 20 percent increase means that the rates would rise 5 to 10 percent after the repeal, which means that they’re selling us their usual RepubliCon bullshit. Luckily it didn’t pass.

Whats really crazy is that the so called president has decided to say that its the Democrats fault that it didn’t pass, which is partially true, but he’s trying to spin it and say that they didn’t give him any of their votes as if they should have. This is the so called presidents way of diverting the attention away from the fact that he lost bigly, as he would say, and it wasn’t because of Democratic obstruction, it was at the hands of his own party. He has a majority in the House and Senate but couldn’t muster up enough votes to get it through the House. Obama lost 34 Democrats and still got the bill signed into law with Not One RepubliCon vote, read that again, Not One.

So explain to me why 45 needs to have Democrats to help him out! President Obama reached his hand across the aisle for 8 years trying to get members of the Get Out Party (GOP) to help govern this country and they refused to do anything significant because of their hatred of him. They’re leadership stated that their only mission was to make him a one term President, and obstruct anything he tried to accomplish.

They stopped his attempts to fix the infrastructure, they blocked his jobs bills, they fought against solar, they shut the government down, and so on and so on, all in an effort to make him look incompetent and make sure that his legacy wouldn’t be great.

Then as soon as they won the White House they immediately went into action to try to erase anything and everything that he did in his 8 years as President, but now this so called president is whining about not getting any help from Democrats, GTFOH!

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The Unspoken War https://thehiphopphilosopher.com/the-unspoken-war/ Thu, 03 Nov 2016 23:59:01 +0000 http://bwwrites.com/?p=811 BETTER KNOWN AS THE WAR ON CIVIL RIGHTS

civil-rightsThis election is quite possibly the most important election of our lives and if you’re going to participate in this Representative Democracy, you need to read this.
In 2008 a curious thing started to occur, a large swath of people appeared seemingly from out of the blue to voice their heinous opinions about race and race relations in this country, Up until then it was a part of the underbelly of the USA’s existence for the past 40 something odd years.
It stretches back longer than that, but I’m just going to take it from end of The Civil Rights Era.
These people became the Tea Party and now the Alt Right Movement, and there entire agenda is to overturn the legislature of The Civil Rights and Affirmative Action Movements that helped Blacks achieve a small modicum of success in this country.
They were emboldened by the rise of a Black man smart and capable enough to challenge a white man to the highest seat of power this nation has to offer. Why does this uppity nigger think that he can do something like that? If it wasn’t for those damn Civil Rights theres no way a nigger would have ever thought he could do something this preposterous. We need to go back to the good ole days, The days when them niggers knew their place, the days when they couldn’t vote, the days when we could beat and kill them indiscriminately for being Black. The good ole days!
And here we are with the culmination of all that anger and vitriol because we dared to vote a nigger into the white house! And his name is Donald Trump, the figurehead of the movement closer than I would have ever believed to becoming the fucking President of the United States of America, I can do nothing but shake my head.
How is it possible that a misogynistic, racially biased, xenophobic entertainer is capable of doing something like this, unless there’s a very large sum of people that fit into those categorizations that are willing to vote for him. This is the only way how!
So now that we are here, we need to really evaluate whats actually on the table this election. If you can walk away from this article and not vote to keep our Civil Rights in tact, we will soon be a nation at war within ourselves, because Black people, Mexicans and women are not going back to the good ole days, because those days weren’t good for us. It was only good for the misogynist, the waist and the xenophobic!

Voting Rights
They’ve been steadily trying to whittle away with voting rights over the past eight years because trends are showing that the GOP are losing ground with young voters in unprecedented numbers. This means that the future of the party is at stake, so they needed to find a way to stop the youth from voting them out in droves in the coming years.
They’re doing this by trying to make them more cynical about the election process, which helps to depress the voter turnout amongst the youth.
They’re also finding ways to suppress votes by challenging the legitimacy of some peoples voting credentials, while finding ways to make it more difficult to vote for others by making harder to get the very credentials needed to vote in the first place. They know that if you have to jump through too many hoops to get credentials to vote, a nice percentage will forgo the process altogether and become apathetic to the process in general, which lowers the vote totals for minorities and the youth.
The reason why they know these things will effect minority and youth turnout is because we are the ones being targeted by these new voting laws, that have been proven to work.

Women’s Rights
Women’s rights have been under fire for longer than Obama’s presidency, but those trying to scale back their rights began to become more vocal under the Black POTUS as the Tea Party rose to prominence.
These people claim that they’re operating under religious freedoms, and certain things are against their religion; like abortion, and they claim that they’re the family values people, yet a lot of the ones in power have cheated on their wives multiple times and been divorced multi times. Because nothing says family values like cheating on your wife and then divorcing her for the person you cheated with, good ole GOP.
Through all these claims you start to see a pattern start to emerge.
I can cheat but you should hold fast to your marital values. I can send my mistress to get an abortion, but you should by no means ever get an abortion.
Equal Pay for Equal Work is off the table, back in the good ole days women count even vote or work, thats when things were at there best, unless you were a woman.
They’ve collectively made it harder for a woman to exercise her reproductive rights by defunding Planned Parenthood, and shutting down offices across each GOP held state.
Plus they don’t want to give women paid parental leave or extra time off after having a baby! This all on the ballot come Nov 8th!

Immigrant Rights
Now check this out, the very people that don’t want to increase the minimum wage, that use illegal immigrants in the workforce so they can pay them below minimum wage, and keep the salaries lower for the rest of America, actually lay claim to wanting to keep illegal immigrants out of the country. And some don’t want any immigrants to come here at all, legal or illegal, regardless of the fact that they are first and second generation immigrants themselves.
So if they don’t want to pay higher wages but they’re going to kick all the immigrants out so those jibs can go to Merican’s, ask yourself this, how much will they be willing to pay you to do the job that an illegal immigrant did for $5, which helped keep the job at just around minimum wage for others? Do you think they’re going to pay you top dollar for that job, hell no! They’re going to say that the industry standard for that type of job is right around minimum wage, and if you want a raise they’ll find someone else for that entry level position.
Therefore wages won’t go up because they get rid of the undocumented, they’ll stay the same or even go down because the GOP leaders have already started to implement right to work laws.

Workers Rights
In several GOP held states they have been implementing Right to Work laws. The name of the law makes a person fill like they’re ensuring our right to work and earn a living. But the laws are actually to benefit corporations.
It gives them the ability to get rid of unions, and without unions corporations wouldn’t have to give workers benefits or raises, unless they felt like it, and because of rampant corporate greed, we know that most of them would opt out of doing so.
They claim the unions make the cost of hiring go up, therefore they cant stay competitive in the marketplace. And if they cant stay competitive they will have to shut doors and fire people.
So they coined the law as Right to Work to so it would sound like they were giving you something. You have a right to work, right! But what it does is give corporations the right to set salaries at the lowest wage and not give you any benefits for a job that used to have higher pay points and other benefits.
Now remember that a lot of GOP, Tea Partiers and Alt Right political groups down think that there should be a minimum wage, so if they control the House, The Senate, the Supreme Court and the White House, plus 30+ governorships across this nation, what do you think will happen.
In 2008 Barack Obama came into the White House with a Senate and House majority and thats when he got his signature piece of legislation passed The Affordable Healthcare Act. So what do you think trump and his cohorts would do with a stacked Congress and House? What would be Trumps signature piece of legislation?

Health Rights
The Affordable Healthcare Act was meant togged the ball rolling toward a single payer system like the on Bernie Sanders campaigned about. It hasn’t reached its true potential because a lot of the Republican governor held states refused to implement it within their states. This lead to less coverage which lead to higher premiums than expected, which has lead to the Affordable part of ObamaCare being axed from the original plan, now its just high priced health insurance, just like the GOP wanted.
If corporatist like Trump gets in office he’s going to repeal it and I guess, replace it. But with what? Do you think that the party that didn’t want universal healthcare, the one that fought tooth and nail to make sure it didn’t live up to it’s promises is going to replace it with something that will lower the prices? Of course not, they’re not going to enact legislature that make it where insurance companies didn’t hit their profit projection, its not going to happen! Its back to fending for yourself while insurance premiums rise anyway, there just wouldn’t be any protections built in!

Constitutional Rights
The Supreme Court is the most important thing on the ballot this year because a conservative leaning Supreme Court would be in place to strike down any dissent from the liberals and progressives when the constitutionality of these laws are challenged, or uphold new quasi constitutional laws are put in affect!
Think about this, the appointment of a ninth justice is so important to the GOP that they have literally refused to do their constitutionally bound duty of selecting another member for almost a year now.
If they believe that the appointment is that important, then you should believe that it is too. If we fail to appoint a liberal justice to the seat thats vacant and to another possible two that could become vacant in the next four years, we could end up with six conservatives on the bench vs three liberals, and that can be a disaster for all things Civil Rights based in the coming years.

These are all things that we will be voting for on Nov 8th, and The Supreme Court has the power to strike down or uphold them as laws of the land!
We can stop the constant attack on our voting rights, on women rights, on workers rights, nonimmigrant rights and on our health rights, by electing Hillary Clinton as the next President, we are electing someone that will fight to keep the hard fought advances of the Civil Rights Movement. 
Plus we can start the process of ending mass incarceration, of adding more regulations to truly tackle banking reform, and start working on college loan reform and free college for all, but every single thing I just wrote about will go the way that the GOP wants it to go if Donald Drumf gets in office.
Hillary Clinton may not be the best politician for the job but she’s the best one on the ticket that has a chance to win. So the question to you is, are you willing to bet your future on GOP led reform or Liberal led reform? Im going with Liberal all day and everyday after that, conservatives have shown what they’ll do if they get in office, just look up Brownback, Rauner, Pence, Walker, and Pawlenty to name a few, and see how they have and still are running their states into the ground, and taking the middle and lower class down with them!

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Why Every Vote Counts https://thehiphopphilosopher.com/why-every-vote-counts/ Fri, 28 Oct 2016 00:42:00 +0000 http://bwwrites.com/?p=802 vote-counts11Ok people gather around and let me tell you why voting for a third party candidate is tantamount to taking your ballot out of the booth and throwing it in the garbage after you’ve waited in line all day to vote!

The first thing that you need to realize is that every single vote holds value. That value isn’t exactly what you think it is, its value is definitively attached to the party affiliation that you are registered under. So if you are a Democrat, then your vote holds value for the Democratic Party, and vise versa for Republicans.

This is why Dems do voter registration drives in Democratic leaning areas to try to sign up more Democrats, they want to register more voters for their party, not for the other party, and they have this down to a science. How often do you here about Republicans doing voter registration drives in Chicago or New York, they’ll do them in the surrounding GOP leaning suburbs, but not in the inner cities and downtown. The reason for this is that you can not tell people who to register with, which means that if I showed up to register in a GOP held area, it’s against the law for them to throw my registration out, which means that they are registering me to help their opposition. So holding it in predominantly GOP or Dem areas will net more party registrations that fall inline with the party that’s doing the drive.

Now that you got that, you need to understand that in 2014 in the US there were 142.166 million registered voters, which comes out to be 64% of the voting age population, which should be higher for the 2016 election.

But using these numbers we now need to take a look at what percentage of voters are registered Democrat, Republican or Independent. As of Sept 2016 Gallup says that 40% of all voters are registered as Independents, 32% as Democrats and 27% as Republicans. But when taking into consideration, which way Independents lean in a two party system; Democrats edge out Republicans 49% to 44%. This leaves 7% for the other parties like the Green and Libertarian Party.

So in an election, I’ll round off the 142.166 million to an easier manageable number, 142 million people are divided into these party affiliations.

That gives the Democrats approximately 69.58 million voters, Republicans, 62.48 million voters and the remaining 9.94 million voters go to the other two parties to equal a rounded out 142 million registered voters. (Once again these numbers have went up over the past two years in pretty much the same way that they leaned back then)

Now lets take a look at the gap between the two major parties, there is only a 7.1 million difference between the two parties. This is why every vote counts, that’s about 5-6% of the total vote, so losing an actual vote to the opposing party, as in crossing party lines to vote, gives the other party a two vote swing, because it takes one away from the Dems and gives it to the GOP or vise versa. This actually means that the gap isn’t actually 7.1 million; it’s more like 3.55 million, so now you begin to see how every vote actual counts even more if you cross party lines.

If you are a registered Democrat and you decide to vote third party, then you’re doing the same thing but a little differently because the Dems lose a vote, but the Republicans don’t gain the extra vote, and they do close the gap by that vote, without needing that vote to go in as a Republican ballot. Basically for every registered Democrats vote that goes to a third party candidate, the Republican closes the 3.55 million voter gap, which makes it easier to win. The same goes for people who decide not to vote. Every vote that isn’t cast shortens the voter gap between the two parties, this is why Republicans always try to suppress the voter turnout, it helps them especially when voter registration trends skew heavily towards liberal values as opposed to conservative values, which means Democrats are registering more voters than Republicans and it shows.

In Sept 2014 it was 42% independent, 30% Democrat and 26% Republican, with it leaning 48% Dem to 44% GOP, that’s a 4% gap going the liberal way. But now in 2016 Republicans have only gained 1% point on their base, Independents lost 2% and Democrats gained 2% to their base. The difference comes in at how independents lean, republicans stayed at 44% and the Dems ticked up an extra percentage point. So Republican added 1% to their base and no extra leaning votes over 2 years and Dems added 2% to their base and an extra percentage point to the leaning vote, which gives them a 3% boost over a 1% boost for the GOP. This might not sound like much but that actually adds up to more than 4.2 million new voters to their approximate 1.5, which means that Liberals are adding close to 3 times as many voters to their bottom line than Conservatives. If this trend keeps up, Dems will have over 10 million more voters either solid or leaning Democratic by the 2020 election!

What this means is that the GOP will never be able to win another national election unless they make it harder for people to vote (suppression) or make people apathetic to the voting process altogether (depression), which helps keep people at home and not voting at all.

Now take into consideration the only other path to victory for Republicans, a spoiler candidate, a candidate that can take votes from the Democrats side of the equation, not theirs. This is the Jill Stein vote! She has no numerical way of winning because there aren’t enough voters left after 93% go to the two major parties. She can’t win any state. But Gary Johnson is the spoiler for the Republicans, and Evan McMullin in Utah will upset Trumps chances in that state, but neither of these three have a chance to win any state besides Evan in Utah, which helps Hillary because Donald wont get the electoral votes from that state.

So what we see is, there aren’t enough voters in the gap for a third party candidate to actually win the nomination, the very best that one could possibly do is stop one of the two major party candidates from getting to 270, which benefits the other.

Even if a third party candidate mounted a campaign that made neither of the major party candidates reach the required 270, the third party candidate still will not be able to win the presidency.

The reason for this is that the House of Representatives then are tasked with the job of voting for the new president. With a quick scan of the House, you realize real fast that out of the 435 members and not one of them is from the Green or Libertarian Party. This means that they have no one from their party that will vote for them if 270 isn’t reached. Explain to me why would a Democrat or Republican member of the House vote for Stein or Johnson to be the next President over Hillary or Donald? What would make them cross party lines to vote third party when most of them wouldn’t even cross party lines to stop Donald?

So if no party reaches 270 electoral votes, the seat of the presidency will go to whoever controls the House of Representatives, and right now that’s the GOP, which means Trump will be our next president. At this point we do not know if Democrats will be able to retake the House, and because of that we cant risk letting a third party candidate throw a monkey wrench into the electoral college!

Democrats need to vote for Hillary and stop all this nonsensical talk about voting their conscience. Republicans have denounced Trump for multiple things that he ahs said and done and took back their endorsements, but all of them say that they will still vote for him. Think about that, they don’t like him, unendorsed him but are still going to vote for him! Why? Because they feel like no matter what he’s a better option than Hillary! How many Republicans do you think are going to vote third party come Nov 8?

Wake up people, the GOP will be out voting in force for Donald on election day, and as long as they can depress and suppress enough Democrat voters they can win this election.

If too many Democrats vote for one of the third party candidates, all you’re doing is taking something that held value and throwing it away in an effort to lay claim to a symbolic fuck you to the system, because no matter what you do, one of the two major party candidates is going to win anyway. So that fuck you that you directed towards the system will respond in kind, because you’re fucking yourself if you allow Trump to win the candidacy, install his picks on the Supreme Court, and bring his policies to fruition!

 

 

 

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Birth of a Notion https://thehiphopphilosopher.com/birth-of-a-notion/ Tue, 25 Oct 2016 00:31:25 +0000 http://bwwrites.com/?p=798 boanSo Birth of a Nation debuted at the box office 17 days ago, and it has grossed $14.2 million dollars since then. For an indie film that cost $8.5 million to make, it has nearly doubled its cost and can be seen in some circles as a success. It also sold for $17.5 million at Cannes, the highest ever paid for an indie film coming out of there with a limited audience. First time director, producer and writer, looks like he did pretty good, right! Well he actually did, but we, Black people, literally failed him and every other Black man that wants to make a movie about something other than the movies that are commonplace.
It turned out that all the talk before this movie came out about wanting to see movies about the slaves that revolted, not the 12 Years a Slave type of movies was just that, talk!

More Black people went to see Django, written by a closet racist, and championed it because a fictional slave got to shoot some fictional white people on screen. Y’all looked past the fact that a white closet racist wrote the word Nigger into his script over a hundred times, for no fucking reason at all, besides the fact that he likes to use the word Nigger an awful lot. He’s used it in every movie he’s ever made, even the there was no reason for it! He re-hashed Blaxploitation movies, which we all know was a racist genre and no one gives a damn! But enough about the closet racist that hires Black actors so he can use Nigger indiscriminately, I’ll never watch another movie that he makes period! As a matter of fact when one comes out, Im going to actively boycott his shit and give a way free bootleg copies to everyone that wants one!

Now back to y’all trifling ass niggas that would rather see a white man exploit Blackness, but wont support a Black man that tried to show the strength of his people, y’all disgust me, literally!

I wrote a blog post a while back entitled ‘Phuck Real Hip Hop Heads” because real Hip Hop emcee’s cant sell records even though they have millions of fans on various social media platforms, which makes no sense at all. How can millions of people claim to be a fan but you only sell 30 thousand albums?

This is what just happened to Nate Silver’s, “The Birth of a Nation”! $14.2 million dollars in sells roughly equates to a little over one million ticket sells over a 17 day period, which means that there’s a whole lot of talking and and very little action. It released on 2105 screens and made an average of $6300 per theater over the first 14 days, which breaks down to 37 people per day. To be truthful, I haven’t seen the movie yet, but I did purchase tickets to see it on its opening weekend, knowing that I wouldn’t be able to go see it because I was headed out of town. I wanted to support it in the opening weekend because the money that it makes during that timeframe usually dictates how long the movie will stay in the box office, and how many theaters it will stay on. Plus I’m going to go and see it at a theater, so I’ll have supported the movie 4 times and some of y’all haven’t even did it once.

Then over the third weekend they dropped it down to 633 screens and it only made $907k, which means that it will drop out of theaters all together over the next few weeks.

This is completely unacceptable, and the major reason why I say that it’s completely unacceptable is because, last week Kevin Hart debuted his stand up comedy “What Now” and it opened with $11.7 million in revenue and over the past 7 days after it debuted, its made an additional $7.2 million, to have $18.9 million in box office receipts.

Then the icing on the pathetic cake was Tyler Perry’s “A Madea Halloween” comedy, that opened this past weekend at number one in the theaters with $28.5 million in sells!

What I’ve learned is that social media is not a good indicator when it comes down to certain things, because based off of what i saw in the lead up to Birth of a Nation, coupled with the angst directed toward Tyler Perry’s over saturation of his Madea character, I would have sworn that Nate Silver would have made at least $30 – $50 million off this movie at the box office. Not in the first 3 weeks, but I thought the receipts would have kept it in the running for more than 3 to 5 weeks so it could make it to those numbers.

I thought that people were going to put their money where their mouth is, but I guess I have to remember the old adage, talk is cheap!

In the mean time people are saying that it flopped, but in reality, it didn’t flop, it made the filmmakers their money back and then some, it just didn’t live up to the hype that a lot of us thought it would, but thats our fault! Whats real is that I have heard great reviews from the people that did support it, so all in all he made a great movie thats about to double the amount that was put into it, and thats not a flop no matter how you look at it!

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The Best Winner Ever, Believe Me! https://thehiphopphilosopher.com/the-best-winner-ever/ Tue, 25 Oct 2016 00:29:15 +0000 http://bwwrites.com/?p=795 trump-failedThink about this:
When you are considered to be one of the first people, the actual first in New York, to hire a female head of construction, that means that you would have put her in a unprecedented position within that industry, which means that would have helped her to elevate herself within the industry, which also means that she would owe a lot of her success in that industry to you for giving her that first big break, right.

But then you run for president and that same person doesn’t endorse you as her candidate, that really says a lot about who you are. Mark Cuban said something a while back about how great business men will always have a long line of people that they’ve helped make successful who will vouch for them, and Trump doesn’t have any.

He’s been in business for four decades and the only people that vouch for him impacting their lives through his great business acumen are his kids!
Everyone that vouches for him are employed by him, not people that he mentored who went out and became great businessmen, but people that can be fired for not supporting him. Really just think about that, how good of a businessman can he really be if no one has become a great businessman because of him, besides his kids? Which is a given! But guess what, they’re succeeding just like him, trading off their name.

The only way Donald has ever made money is by tricking people into believing that the Trump name is synonymous with success, all the while he’s being sued by the people he’s doing business with.

He’s been involved in at least 3500 lawsuits involving himself or one of his businesses, 150 of those dealing with bankruptcy. 1900 as a plaintiff, another 1450 as a defendant. Some would say that 1900 is because he’s been done wrong, but keep in mind that one of his business tactics is to tie cash strapped contractors up in litigation to force them to accept whatever crumbs he wants to give them, this is widely known, he’s even spoken about it.
He literally sued, then withdrew a lawsuit against Bill Maher for saying he’d give him $5 million dollars if he could prove that his father wasn’t an orangutan! How petty do you have to be to do something like that when he knew it was a joke? Had Bill been a lot less cash positive, and couldn’t defend him self in court for just as long as Trump, I guarantee he would’ve never withdrew the suit!

All in all, I don’t see a successful businessman when I see Trump, I see a rich kid trading off his family name who’s businesses outside of the family real estate empire have all gone down in flames.

The only way any of them are still in business is because he uses them at his hotels, and resorts, other than that no one would use them at all!
Show me a kid that had a rich father with name recognition within a specific industry that wasn’t able to follow in their fathers footsteps within that industry and be successful. Those that do fail are few and far in between, they’re the exception, not the rule! If Bill Gates son wasn’t able to be successful at Microsoft, then Bill Gates was completely incompetent in the raising of his child, period!

Now tell me if I’m making this up!

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< Two Evils https://thehiphopphilosopher.com/two-evils/ Thu, 25 Feb 2016 22:06:57 +0000 http://bwwrites.com/?p=786 two evilsOver the last eight years a new crop of so called “enlightened” Black people are starting to emerge, the “politically enlightened” that is. These people are the ones that got into politics when Barack Obama first ran for president, but really weren’t into politics, they we’re just into wanting to see Barack become the first Black POTUS. They’re mostly under 35 and are a part of the millennial generation that came of age after the internet became a household thing. They’re part of the microwave, short attention span, self entitled, Twitter generation that thinks things should happen specifically for them and immediately after they say something about it.

This generation of Black people has jumped into social media politics head first with little to no understanding of how politics actually work. They think that because they have an opinion and that there are other people that share that opinion, that they are right about what they think and that anyone that disagrees is wrong. This is the furthest thing from the truth, and it’s the epitome of confirmation bias! But never the less, it’s the lay of the social media landscape.

These social media politico’s have usurped true political debate and replaced it with a millennial mindset which is becoming a detriment to the Black political voice that we once shared. At one point we spoke with one voice politically, but over the past eight years, that voice is being chipped away little by little, election by election. And each election cycle we see more and more Republicans being voted into office who seek to destroy all the progress that our forefathers gained after the Civil Rights Movement. And each time we see more and more black people either no voting, or voting across party lines based off of a flawed but prevalent thought pattern among these voters.

The three things that are causing this is; no real understanding of politics, the “what have you done for me lately” philosophy has been condensed because of their short attention spans, and they don’t understand the lesser of two evils philosophy.

When these three things occur within a person we get what we see today and this group of people are getting larger and larger each election cycle.

1: No real understanding of politics means that you are looking at political parties through a black and white mentality, both racially and as opposites of the same paradigm. So what happens is race is applied to everything along with political party affiliations, which means that they are specifically searching for what each party has done for Black people.

2: Add the microwave mentality to that and these short attention span social media politico’s apply their minuscule understanding of politics, and racial biases with the what have you done for me lately mentality and deduce the Democrat party down to within the last election cycle, as a matter of fact, they break it down to the latest news cycle stories that are being ran day in and day out trying to convince you of this, or that.

I’ve seen so many Black people mention what have they done for me lately when talking about politics than I’ve ever seen in my entire life over the past few years and it shows that they have no actual working knowledge of politics before they became “activist” on different social media platforms. And whats really crazy is that the people responsible for starting this dialog and spreading it are none other than Fox news pundits and reporters. Ask yourself what their agenda is? For those that can’t figure it out, its to divide and conquer.

Republicans only win statewide elections when there is a low voter turnout, or Black voters either no-vote or cross party lines. Whats one of the best ways to achieve these results, convince Black voters that the other party hasn’t done anything for them lately, therefore why would you continue to show allegiance to the party.

3: Because they don’t truly understand the lesser of two evils philosophy, they either no-vote or cross party lines based off election promises, which are mostly pandering. Within the last 100 years, the Republican party has been against every social change that has helped Black people in America. They’ve stood in opposition of Civil Rights, Equal Employment Opportunity acts and Affirmative Action, voter registration, etc. So how can a political party trumpet what have they done for you lately, when they’ve never done anything at all for you period, yet a lot of y’all actual listen to this nonsense and show that you believe it by no-voting or crossing party lines! This is where a true understanding of the lesser of two evils philosophy would come in handy.

The lesser of two evils means that if you have to make a choice between two things, could be more than two things, you should choose the one that is the least bad for you!

So in the instance of a two party political system like the one set up now, you should pick the one that does the least harm to you. This doesn’t mean that you’re voting for evil people, evil is just a metaphor, you’re voting for the person or party that will do the least amount of harm to your position in this country.

Now with that said, which party has stood with Black people for over a century, and which has been in opposition to the progress of Black people, at every turn. Which party is actively trying to get rid of affirmative action? Which party has trampled on voting rights across the country? And the list can go on and on, but you get the picture right?

So all in all Democrats may not be actively trying to court the Black vote by making empty promises during the election cycle, but they have tried to beat back the Republican progress by regress machine that’s been in full effect over the past three decades and that has gotten worse since President Obama has taken office.

At the end of the day, if you’re one of these people that has no-voted or crossed party lines because the Democrats have done nothing for you lately, or they’re the lesser of the two evils, and you don’t vote like that, you are the reason that Republicans who have never done anything for you are able to win elections. So when they go on to dismantle the hard fought legislation that our forefathers died for, I’m going to need you to STFU and take what’s coming to you. All you gotta do is look at what Rauner is doing in Illinois!

 

 

 

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The Jury Ain’t That Grand https://thehiphopphilosopher.com/776-2/ https://thehiphopphilosopher.com/776-2/#comments Wed, 30 Dec 2015 22:08:37 +0000 http://bwwrites.com/?p=776 scalesSo here’s the thing, the media has conditioned us over the years to believe that a grand jury is the epitome of justice. They make it seem as if they hold value intrinsic to equalizing the deployment of justice when justice may go un-served, but the reality of the situation is that it’s just as flawed as the justice system is.

It takes the same biased people that would serve on a transparent jury and asks them to figure out if a person should be charged with a certain crime, but with no transparency.

Like all other things in a racially biased society like the one that we live in, those types of biases seep into every aspect of our system. From hiring practices (Google racism in hiring practices or black sounding name biases), to loans for houses (Google racial bias in subprime loans), to Redlining (Google the term redlining), read The New Jim Crow so that you better understand the racist practices behind mass incarceration, and so on.

What you’ll realize is that racist people control all these institutions therefore they are proliferated with racist thought and biased outcomes, the grand jury is no different than an all white jury of your so-called peers.

As a matter of fact, its even worse, because the defendant doesn’t even get a chance to present his/her side of the story, it’s just the prosecutor in the vast majority of the cases presenting them with the evidence that they feel is good enough to bring a case to trial. It sounds good on the surface, but when you add the fact that the prosecutor has a racial bias, and the grand jury participants have a racial bias, how exactly do we expect the outcome to be non-biased!?

We been conditioned to believe that a “jury” of our “peers” is the perfect way to deliver justice, that the outcome of every single case is in the hands of people that only listen to what the law says and don’t bring any of their biases into the courtroom with them, but the truth of the matter is that it’s almost impossible to check your biases at the door and its been proven time and time again when we see grand juries refusing to indict racist police officers, that murder unarmed Black men, women and children, with the latest being Tamir Rice. A young Black child playing with a pellet gun, who was gunned down within seconds of police officers arriving on the scene. Yet we’ve witnessed grown white men that have engaged with shoot outs with the police being taken into custody alive. How do we quantify that with reason and logic, if justice is supposed to blind and harbor no racial bias? How do we rationalize the fact that a police officer was caught on tape administering a banned maneuver; banned by the police and governmental body, the chokehold, but a grand jury felt that it was a justifiable act?

The law stated that police officers were never supposed to use the chokehold when trying to apprehend a suspect, yet a grand jury sat in a room and came to the conclusion that it was ok and justifiable for the officer to use it on a Black man (Eric Garner) that was panhandling cigarettes! How exactly do we rationalize that a police officer broke the LAW in doing what he did; yet it’s viewed as a justifiable offense, unless racial bias is brought into the picture.

Once you add racism, then it all makes sense, it makes sense that a racist would view a big Black man as a threat!

It makes sense that a Black kid with a pellet gun is a cold-blooded killer just waiting to kill someone, if I’m viewing him through racist eyes!

It makes sense that a Black man (John Crawford) walking through a store that sells toy guns is immediately shot by police officers without them checking to see if the gun was real or fake if we add the fact that the officers who shot him were racially biased or flat out racist!

This is the only way that any of these things can make any sense, period!

I can go on and on saying what makes sense but I hope that you get the picture!

And the reality of the situation is that, a group of white individuals sitting in a room where there is no transparency at all, who harbor racial biases, will in most cases see nothing wrong with a police officer, who has supposedly been sworn “to protect the people and the law” killing and unarmed Black man, woman or child.

At every turn of events we are reminded of this!

I believe that if we continue to use Grand Jury’s they need to be transparent, ALL the testimony MUST be available to the public!

The reason why they claim that they are not made public is for the safety of the witnesses that come forward, but the reality of the situation is that they can at anytime redact the names of the witnesses that testified as well as the names of the grand jury members, therefore making the safety argument moot!

They make them private and allow the prosecutor to have free reign because they know that any half way competent prosecutor will be able to convince a grand jury that a prosecutable crime has been committed, as long as there is no defense present and they actually want to bring a case to court. If they don’t want to actually prosecute, the grand jury will almost always come back with no indictment!

It’s playing out right in front of our eyes right now, for the world to see!

 

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Still Serve and Protect! https://thehiphopphilosopher.com/768-2/ https://thehiphopphilosopher.com/768-2/#comments Sat, 28 Nov 2015 03:33:11 +0000 http://bwwrites.com/?p=768 Over the past few years I’ve heard an echo growing stronger and getting louder every time a Black man is shot by a police officer, and its not what you think. It’s not #HandsUpDontShoot, it’s not #JusticeOrElse, and it’s not #BlackLivesMatter, it’s “if we don’t stop killing each other, they wont stop killing us”!

This disturbing trend is becoming more and more commonplace on social media sites every time a Black man is murdered by a cowardice piece of shit racist cop. Every comment thread will have some racist white person saying he got what he deserved and a bunch of ass backward negro’s saying that if we don’t respect ourselves why should they respect us.

Well for one, it’s their job! They’re supposed to Protect and Serve the public; nowhere in their job description states that they need to RESPECT us first. Nowhere in their job description states that they are the judge, jury, and executioner. But it does state that they are supposed to apprehend suspects and let the prosecutors present a case where the jury determines if they’re guilty.

They are supposed to respect the law, and if they do that they’ll never kill someone that is not trying to kill them first! And the incidences that bring about anger and protest are the ones that are clearly known to be police acting as the judge, jury and executioners.

But what’s strange about this is that this usually only plays out when the murdered individual is Black! We rarely ever see a white cop playing all the roles when it comes down to a white individual, for some odd reason they RESPECT the law and lives when the person looks like them. Over 80% of all white people that are murdered are murdered by other white people! They kill each other all the time, but we never see white people saying that cops wont respect white lives as long as white people don’t respect white lives.Screen Shot 2015-11-27 at 9.28.49 PM

Why do you think that is?

Well I’ll tell you, its because even though white people kill each other all the time, those same white cops still RESPECT white lives, its evident because they don’t kill white people at the same rate that they kill Black people! So us respecting ourselves, and Black on Black crime has nothing at all to do with why some cops don’t RESPECT our lives!

They don’t respect our lives because they are racist and they believe that a Black life is not as valuable as a white life, plain and simple! It’s been like that since we were stolen from our homeland and shipped around the world as slaves! There’s no way we can change that by RESPECTING ourselves! As long as there are racist who infiltrate police departments, it doesn’t matter what we do, they’ll continue to kill us if they can keep getting away with it.

There’s been no time in our history where our RESPECT for one another stopped racist white people/cops from killing us. They simply don’t care about that, they just hate Black people and when given a chance to harm one they will, especially when they can hide behind a badge and the “fear for their lives”. And as I said the only way they will stop doing it is if they are held accountable, and even then some will still do it!

WHAT WE NEED TO DO IS STAY VIGILANT IN EXPOSING THEM; KEEP OUR CAMERAS POINTED AT THEM AND NEVER ACCEPT THE OFFICIAL STORY!

DEMAND THAT ALL EVIDENCE BECOME AVAILABLE TO THE PUBLIC!

DEMAND THAT ALL COPS WEAR BODY CAMS!

DEMAND THAT ANY OFFICER CAUGHT CUTTING OFF A BODY CAM DURING AN INCIDENT BE FIRED IMMEDIATELY!

DEMAND THAT A FEDERAL LAW BE PASSED SO THAT EVERY PERSON IN THE U.S. KNOWS THAT IT IS LEGAL TO RECORD POLICE OFFICERS AS LONG AS THEY ARE NOT IMPEDING ON THE SCENE, AND REMAIN AT A SAFE DISTANCE!

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#JusticeForSandraBland https://thehiphopphilosopher.com/justiceforsandrabland/ Thu, 23 Jul 2015 15:12:08 +0000 http://bwwrites.com/?p=761 sandra blandThese are a few things that I haven’t heard mentioned yet, but bring into question the cops motives and the alleged suicide. Read them and let me know what you think.

1) When the cop finally got her out of her vehicle, why did he instruct her to stand where he told her stand. At first pass the average person would say, so they won’t be in the street, and they could avoid traffic, sounds legit.
But now juxtapose that with your own experience or those that you’ve witnessed and you’ll realize that most, upwards of 95% of the time when a police takes you out of your car, they instruct you to stand at the back of your vehicle.
This cop deliberately instructed her to stand in an area where the police camera could not see exactly what was going on. When she moved to put her phone on the car he made sure he told her to come back to the area where the camera couldn’t see what was going on and he searched her off camera. Had he done like most cops and told her to stand at the back of the vehicle, everything would have been on tape.
So he knew exactly what he was doing, making sure that his actions were off camera but in a position where he could be heard! Notice where he is standing, with her just out of the view of the camera, then by the time he throws her down they are both outside of the camera view!

Screen Shot 2015-07-23 at 10.07.19 AM2) If the tape was not doctored or edited like the officers claimed, then why do we have continuous audio overlay. A glitch in the upload of the footage that results in looping of the film would have looped the audio also. There is no possible way for the audio to play straight through while the actual video footage glitches, if they are on the same file. The only way for the audio to play straight through is for it to be on a different file which means that you would need video editing software to separate the video from the audio.
So the software glitch story is fabricated, thus once again proving that something outside the ordinary happened that they are trying to cover up!

3) A News source reported that she was found in a semi standing position. Yes you read that right, semi-standing
This means that she supposedly hung herself by leaning over until she died. What they’re trying to tell us is that her will to live, the strongest urge of any living creature wasn’t there in any capacity, because all she had to do was stand up and she would have lived. Then all of a sudden they come out with a story that she told the arresting officers that she attempted suicide a few months earlier. Which by the way means that the officers should have put her on 24 suicide watch, which means that they should have taken any and everything out of her cell that she could use to harm herself. Which means that there should not have been a plastic garbage bag in the cell. They are at the very least complicit in her suicide for allowing those objects to be in a jail cell with her. And let’s be clear here, no one, and I mean no one has ever used a plastic bag to hang themselves, ever. If a plastic bag is used, the individual always puts the bag over there head and suffocates to death!

4) The media showed a garbage can during the spot and said that the plastic bag was similar to the one seen in the picture. Thus helping to create a narrative that made it seem like the the garbage can and bag were the ones in the cell with her, and that the the garbage bag was big enough to kill herself with!

5) In the footage that shows the paramedics rushing to her cell, something struck me as strange. The cell that was directly in front of the camera was empty, but they had her in a cell in a dark corner where she was once again conveniently out of camera range. Which once again begs the question, why put her in that corner where they knew no footage could be taken of what went on? Notice the empty cell, why don’t they have garbage cans in this one!

Screen Shot 2015-07-23 at 9.19.57 AM6) If they have footage from inside the station of the paramedics coming in to try to save her, then that means that they should also have footage of everything else that transpired in the that area from when she was put in the cell up until the paramedics wheeled her away dead. And they also said that the footage doesn’t show anyone going into the cell that morning but they haven’t released any of that footage.
But guess what, they already have their lie in place for when they say that the footage is messed up or gone, remember the glitch from uploading the dash cam footage, it’s already in play!

7) And lastly where’s the dash cam footage from the second officer on the scene, the lights were on so why hasn’t that footage been released! The second car had arrived on the scene before the this was taken, but if you listen to the first video put out, you can hear when the second car arrived and the lights were on in this video, which means that the dash cam should have been activated in the second car also!

Screen Shot 2015-07-23 at 9.36.38 AMSo as I sit here thinking about the fact that I found 7 reasons why there’s a problem with this story and I’m not a crime scene investigator or a lawyer, I have to believe that the justice department has noticed these things also, and are preparing to look into the death of Sandra Bland. Another Black face in this every growing collage of Black men and women who died in the custody of those who swore an oath to serve and protect!
If you think that I have valid points and that the justice department should investigate this incident, please share this with your friends and family and call for justice for Sandra Bland.

#JusticeForSandraBland

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