Politics | The Hip Hop Philosopher

To Pander or Not to Pander

emctab — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 00:39:22 +0000

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

African + American = AFRIMERICAN

Mon, 09 Jul 2018 23:05:05 +0000

I wrote this in July of 2015 for my first blog, bwwrites.com and because its still relevant, I thought that I might share it here also, check it out.

For some time I’ve considered writing a post about this but never found the motivation to actually sit down and start writing, but the other day after addressing a post on Facebook and getting the typical response from so called “conscious” black dudes, I decided to finally pen this post.

So here’s the thing, Black people in this Country, the United States of America, have no true identity! We are the homeless, we are the disenfranchised, we are downtrodden, the oppressed! We seek to belong to something greater than this existence that we have right now in this place, in this space and time. We long for the glory days of our ancestors as if that is all we ever had, or ever will have. But I tell you that right here, right now, is all we have and will ever have here in this country, in this space, and in this time. Nothing else! The past is gone, yet it resides within us, and the future is yet to come, but it also resides within us. So with what we have right now, which is the past, the present and the future within, we should be able to create a future similar to our once glorious past!

But in order to get there, we need to come to a realization, one that will piss a lot of you off and others will accept wholeheartedly, and have no problem with. And that realization is the cold hard fact that the descendants of slaves, with African blood flowing through their veins, that we call African Americans, are Not Africans! Neither are we one hundred percent Americans!

We are an amalgamation of these things, these nationalism’s, these concepts, and these ideologies, and because these ideologies are viewed as opposing ideologies, our conditioning tells us that we need to embrace one or the other, not both. This programming is taught to us by our parents and elders as children; “right vs wrong”, “good vs evil”, “if you’re not with me you’re against me”, and re-enforced in church as the “you can’t straddle the fence” sermon. We’ve always been taught that you have to pick a side, and if we don’t, we’re the one in the wrong, there is no neutral position in life. But this is wrong when it comes down to the African/African American debate! (I chose to use the examples above to show how the thought process is indoctrinated into our psyches as young African American children, not to debate good and evil or right and wrong.)

This is why when we’re confronted with two seemingly opposing ideologies we quickly pick sides. Our programming says its either one or the other, and you will always pick the side of your highest understanding, the one that instills pride in you, which is the one that makes you feel the best about your Self. Therefore when one has to choose between African/Black, and American/White (even though American isn’t synonymous with white) we choose to identify with the African/Black and shun the American/White. Those that don’t choose Black first have been considered to be the sellouts and coons back in the day, therefore the “real Black man or woman is the one that embraces Africa over America! These so called conscious Black people lay claim that there’s no middle ground even if your mother was white and your father was Black, you must self identify as Black, ask any biracial American. But what they don’t seem to understand is that that very understanding is what the white man, or massa had during slavery, the one drop rule! And if you choose your white side, you’re considered a sellout, a coon, and a host of other derogatory names that seeks to take away your Blackness. And even if you don’t identify as white, or if you have two Black parents but don’t identify with being African, you’re put in the same category, because you have to pick a side, and if you’re not on their side then you’re against them, simply because you’re not with them.

So here we are in 2015 claiming to be conscious Black men but that conscious thought is built directly off the slave traders understanding of who we were to be in this country. The slaves were never meant to be Americans, and generations down the line we are too far removed from our African ancestors, that we are not Africans either, we are an amalgamation of the two. We are now a new people, a people manifested from the remnants of greatness that saw itself decline to the point of colonization and slavery to finally be back in control of our own destiny once again!

Malachi Z York called us NuWabians, some say we are the Moors, Hebrew Israelites, Egyptians, but I say we are all and we are none, therefore we must create a new understanding, a new people.

You can call yourself an African, an African American, or just a plain ole American, that’s up to you, but I will from this day forward, address myself and those in this diaspora in the US, as AFRIMERICAN!

Afrimerican: A people forged from the lowest point of mans existence as slaves, that fought to be free, earned that freedom and began to build. We have fought those that oppose us for over 400 years and we have made great strides. Our birthing pains have been great and there are still more to come. But we must understand and incorporate into our thinking that those that fight against and resist change will always end up on the loser’s side of history, it’s inevitable. Therefore we will always be victorious in our quest to change the things that ail our people, it just takes time!

Capitalism and The Black Re-Activist Revolutionary!

Tue, 26 Jun 2018 20:41:19 +0000

A very large portion of The Black Re-Acitivist Revolutionary community believes that if you come up with an idea for a product, you shouldn’t be able to make money/profit off that product. They believe that you should produce the product and sell it at cost. If the company doesn’t do this then the employees are wage slaves, and you’re a de facto slave master!

By equating laborers to slaves, they hope to get an emotional rise out of their followers and provoke anger so that their reasoning will be clouded, and they never get a true understanding of what capitalism really is. Thus they can continue advocating against capitalism, while not building the very businesses and institutions needed to sustain the Black population in this country, if they were somehow able to overthrow capitalism one day.

Capitalism is referred to as the “White Supremacy Capitalist System”, and if you support it in any way you are called an integrationist, a sellout, a coon or an Uncle Tom, but they overlook the varying ways they support the system and give themselves a pass for what ever reason they see fit to give themselves a pass. Another thing that they say is that a Black owned corporation that wants to make a profit is nothing more than a white owned corporation with a Black face in charge!

The reality of the situation is, most of them have not tried in one bit to create this utopian socialist community that they speak about; yet 100’s of thousands of them claim they want to see it come into existence. So I postulate that they really don’t want to try to create it because they know that opening a business is hard as it is, but once the profit motive is taken out of it, it becomes harder.

This is undoubtedly one of the reasons why so many of them shun opening businesses themselves, they simply don’t want to put in the work that it takes to open businesses and create institutions if they can’t profit from them, but they wont admit that! If not, why else aren’t they doing it?

And no, its not because they don’t know how, they always seem to quote the authors that have put together socialist economic plans and have written about how to build communal neighborhoods, but very few have actually tried to reproduce them in the real world, not even the authors! The thing is, without the profit motive, 99.9% of people will not seek to take on the daunting task of creating a product or opening a business

So to put it short, the BRAR Understanding is molded by a flawed ideology that seeks to remove the profit motive from the economic viability of a community, which leads them to not advocate for their followers to create businesses and build institutions, less they’d otherwise be lumped in with the coons and sellouts that they call other Black business owners.

So they’re course of strategy has been to advocate for Black businesses owners, the ones that they call sellouts and coons, to open businesses in the community that they don’t seek to profit from, to make white owned corporations shun their capitalist profit driven ways, and to demean anyone with a difference of opinion on what the Black community needs to sustain itself in the future.

And as you can see neither of these things have moved us from wage slaves to I’m guessing, wage freedom. None of them has put as much as a scratch on the “White Supremacy Capitalist System”!

This is part of the mentality that drives the Black consumer to walk into a Black owned establishment and immediately feel like they should get a discount because they’re Black, as if the business owner owes you something for being born Black! Every Black business owner has had this happen to them at some point along there entrepreneurial journey.

The BRAR has successfully conditioned Black people to immediately discount each others offerings, while simultaneously holding full value for any other businesses products. They’ve been able to spread an ideology that states that corporations shouldn’t make profits in a way that makes it seem as if they are being the champions of the Black Race for standing up to the White Supremacy Capitalist System! And this is why so many Black people buy into it, it feels like the right thing, but its not! All it has done is decrease the value associated with Black Entrepreneurialism, and slowed down our progress.

If we do not learn how to embrace capitalism for what it is, and utilize it to move forward, many of us will never move beyond the point that we are at today, and those that don’t will fully believe that some system and the racist that control these systems are the reason why they never moved forward. Never coming to realize that the capitalist system needs new businesses and ideas in order to survive, and there are millions of people trying to get to this country, and millions of people in this country that are already trying to build that next idea into a business, so why not you!

If you don’t do it somebody else will, and you’ll just be a “wage slave” to them, so why not be on the other side of the coin, because based off the BRAR’s ideology and how they fight the “White Supremacy Capitalist System”, it will be around for at least another century! And guess what, we will be in the same position within it unless we learn how to use it to our advantage!

The Illusion of Exclusion A Black Re-Activist Ideology!

Tue, 26 Jun 2018 12:00:46 +0000

The Black Re-Activist Revolutionary will say that Black people that aren’t trying to bring down the white supremacy system are suffering from the illusion of inclusion, or something akin to the Stockholm Syndrome.

The illusion of inclusion is said to be believing that we are a part of American society, and that we are Americans. That we believe that we’ve been included therefore why fight against the system!

And we all pretty much know what Stockholm Syndrome is, If not it’s basically said to be when a person is put in a dire situation for so long they start to see the very people that have put them in the dire situation as their saviors simply because they haven’t killed them yet or because they stop treating them bad.

These things are true to an extent and some Black people do suffer from them, like Black RepubliCon’s and conservatives. Most of them believe that white conservatism isn’t in the least bit racially motivated, and that because they’ve been included in the system, everything is good for all Black people. This is 100% wrong. Most Black people just want to live there lives as best they can without someone trying to impeded on that process!

What the BRAR does though is project that group of people’s attributes on to any Black person that doesn’t agree with there ideology fully. They simply dismiss your understanding as akin to the person that’s suffering from Stockholm Syndrome or the Illusion of Inclusion, thus never fully understanding the knowledge you’re trying to impart on them.

But once you take a deep dive into the BRAR ideology, it’s not hard to see that they suffer from the same ailments that they claim the Black RepubliCon suffers from, but in reverse. They suffer from the “Illusion of Exclusion”, and Stockholm Syndrome too, it just manifests itself differently!

They willfully take themselves out of the “race”, their logic is that the race is fixed, therefore why run it! Sounds right, why run in a rigged “race”? But the “race” isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon, and there are many positions that you can come in, plus there are new races everyday! Part of Stockholm syndrome is getting to a place where you no longer want to fight against the power that’s over you, and thats where they think everyone else is, but fail to realize that they put themselves in the same position when they willfully refuse to run the “race”!

Is this not the same thing? Your “captors” have successfully conditioned you to not play the game before you even understand the full game, they have you believing that you’re running a sprint not a marathon. And guess what, in a marathon you can eventually catch up no matter how slow you started. And even if you never come in first place, there are a myriad of positions between 1st place and last place! And here’s the thing, you will always come in worse than last place if you never join the race! There is no possible way of winning if you’re not in the race and this is where the BRAR understanding resides. They have no possible chance of winning the race because they aren’t in it, and not because white supremacy won’t allow them in the race, but because they have taken themselves out of it because it’s rigged to begin with!

They’ve essentially given up, but there conditioning has convinced them that they’re doing the the thing that can save us all by trying to destroy the race from the outside! But that’s not possible!

We’ve seen this for centuries now, when we destroy one barrier in the race, they place new barriers in our way, then when we finally win one of the races, they change the rules for the next one. But the only people that know that the rules have changed are the people that are running the race. By the time those on the outside realize that there are different rules the race has already been going for some time. They end up fighting to destroy something that doesn’t exist the same way as it did when they started the fight.

Let’s take mass incarceration for example: The War on Drugs started in the 80’s, devastated the 90’s and we started fighting against it once we realized what was going on but it took until the 2010’s to start getting any real traction on ending it, and now in 2018, we’re still fighting to end it! But guess what, the damage has already been done, they got what they wanted out of it, a destabilized Black family, now we’ve become our own worst enemies!

So now that we’re seeing progress in stopping mass incarceration mostly due to low level drug offenses, they decided to legalize the very thing that they were putting us in jail for, but then say that you can’t participate in it because you’re a felon.

So the question is, what have they changed to keep the race rigged? Or better yet, what is the race?

So now they have a valid argument for being excluded, you see, they don’t want us to make money, which is true, but there are ways around the law, you can invest in a company that’s majority owned by someone that’s not a felon, or you can buy shares in one of the already established companies. Plus you can always start to advocate and petition state authorities and legislators to write new laws. It took almost 3 decades to get marijuana laws to where hey are today, and that’s with white people advocating with other white people. They knew the race for legalization was a marathon not a sprint so they ran the race with all the barriers, had they not ran the race there would be no legalization at all!

Where the BRAR goes wrong at is that they’ll see the obstacles say there’s racism then choose not to run the race, even though they can, they choose not to based off the fact that they believe that they’ve been excluded, and that white people will only include a few of us!

This pathology is disseminated through out the Black community as fact, therefore we all should remove ourselves from the race, and if you advocate to stay in the race, you’re a coon, a sellout, etc, because they believe the real fight is on the outside.

But when confronted with the question, what has there BRAR ideology gotten done over the past 5 decades, they have no answer. At the end of the day all the progress that Black people have made in the past 5 decades came from those that decided to include themselves in the race and eventually won the the position they were looking for. Major League Baseball was segregated, we had our own league but the prize was to be able to play in the Majors, that’s where the real money was, and even though they were playing professional baseball and getting paid in the Negro League, they knew that the only way to make real progress was to get to the MLB and prove that they were just as good or better than they’re white counterparts. Had Jackie Robinson, who wasnt even the best Negro League player opted to stay in the NL because he felt like he was just a token, we may have never gotten to see the great Black players that graced the field since then. He knew the race was rigged but he chose to run it anyway because he knew that his choice would lead to more Black men being included in MLB down the line.

The BRAR’s of today would say, don’t participate, its rigged against you, and willfully take themselves out of the equation because they suffer from the illusion that they have been excluded, even though they know the history of Jackie Robinson, or Kenny Washington, or Earl Lloyd or Nat Clifton. All excluded at some point, then once included paved a way for a 75% Black NFL, or a 80% Black NBA. The MLB might not be predominantly Black at this point, but that’s because we have steered our kids toward the NFL and NBA instead of baseball, if we did the same there would undoubtedly be way more American born Blacks playing it nowadays, so that has nothing to do with not being included. The real sad part about suffering from the illusion of exclusion is that they use their logic in every part of their life.

Banks discriminate against Black people therefore don’t try to get a loan for a business or house, fully missing the fact that if you feel like you’ve been discriminated against because of your race when applying for a loan, you can contact specific agencies and report it, which will then launch an investigation into it. If they find that your credit score and job history is on par with other people who got a better interest rate, or that got the loan and you didn’t, you can sue and get your money back!

The same goes for trying to get an apartment, a job, in college, etc. if you feel like you’ve been discriminated against then there are agencies put in place to help you get restitution. The non racist white people understand that there will always be racist white people so they passed laws to protect our freedoms and liberties and rights so the racists can’t just trample on them. But the BRAR seems to dismiss this because they believe that things should be equal, don’t get me wrong, they should be, but since they aren’t, utilize what is necessary to equalize what you can.

Stating that things aren’t equal so I’m not even going to try, is defeatism at it’s best! And because they have this flawed understanding to begin with, that says removing yourself from the race is the answer to winning the race, they see they’re defeatist attitude as the correct attitude, they believe that they’re somehow the guardians of Blackness thus resulting in them categorizing any one that participates in the race as a race traitor, and then that diminishes any idea that the race runner presents.

They’ll say that you’re capitulating to white supremacy, you’re trying to integrate us into a burning house, you’re propping up white supremacy, etc! All the while they’re doing the opposite but ending with worse results than those that they claim are helping white supremacy thrive.

So even though they wear white owned brands, shop at white owned stores, buy white owned products, eat at white owned restaurants, use white owned wirelesses phones, use white owned social media networks and work for white owned corporations, all of which they say is upholding the white supremacy capitalist system, they see no hypocrisy in their own actions. The cognitive dissonance is unbelievable!

They say that you’re the real problem for doing it, because you don’t complain about the system being racist, as if complaining helps! And the reality about this is that they believe that what they post to social media is activism and revolutionary, although it actually amounts to nothing more than complaining, because they never do anything real about it!

The Failing Presidency, So Sad!

emctab — Sat, 25 Mar 2017 20:33:58 +0000

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!

The Unspoken War

emctab — Thu, 03 Nov 2016 23:59:01 +0000

BETTER KNOWN AS THE WAR ON CIVIL RIGHTS

This 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!

Why Every Vote Counts

emctab — Fri, 28 Oct 2016 00:42:00 +0000

Ok 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!

Birth of a Notion

emctab — Tue, 25 Oct 2016 00:31:25 +0000

So 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!

The Best Winner Ever, Believe Me!

emctab — Tue, 25 Oct 2016 00:29:15 +0000

Think 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!

< Two Evils

emctab — Thu, 25 Feb 2016 22:06:57 +0000

Over 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!