tags: colonialism

I spent much of the week basically retagging journal entries, rewriting stylesheets, and figuring out makefiles. You won't notice much of a difference and sometimes I wonder why I bothered, but hopefully it'll make things easier in the future.

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2006

March

2006 Mar 6

immigration

One would be hard pressed to convince me that anti-immigrant sentiments are not synonymous with outright racism. The arguments that immigration foes posit are specious at best. The whole, “they’re taking our jobs” idea just doesn’t fly. I really don’t see too many white people lining up for a back-breaking season of crop harvesting or signing up to clean out rich people’s toilets. These aren’t jobs that white people want, although in a lot of cases, they are jobs that need to be done. A more informed argument is the idea that we have to discourage them from taking these jobs because it only encourages rich bastards to pay workers poorly. There is a lot of truth in this. The problem is that (1) it doesn’t directly address how we can get the rich bastards to pay decent wages and (2) it doesn’t address the economic pressures that drives people from developing countries to find jobs in the U.S. And, realistically, I just don’t see people voluntarily paying top dollar for their lettuce and tomatoes just so my black and brown brothers and sisters can have a living wage, undocumented or no.

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2007

December

2007 Dec 28

Benazir Bhutto

I feel extremely saddened with thinking about Benazir Bhutto's assassination, casting a shadow on the end of the year. News of her death rocketed across the blogosphere at near light speed.

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2015

May

2015 May 4

The Etymology of "Thug"

There was never any clear definition of what a thug was, which is why it was so attractive to the British. It allowed them to criminalize any kind of indigenous activity as being something that was inherently irrational and politically illegitimate, not different from the way it’s used today. You’re effectively describing them as having no legitimate grievances and just being hoodlums.

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November

2015 Nov 14

The Opposite of Civilization is War

The people who promote the "clash of civilizations" paradigm are predictable and unsurprising. They say that accommodation and multiculturalism don't work at all, and while they may not say it out loud, their only solution seems to be genocide.

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