stop taunting your enemies based on physical features

I have just posted this very important message on facebook, in response to a Reason.com article on Roseanne Barr and Bill Maher

http://reason.com/blog/2018/05/30/roseanne-cancellation-snags-bill-maher


here is my facebook post

IF someone irritates you, it's so easy to give in to temptation to mock how that person looks. I know I've done it before. (usually behind their backs <<< so much for bravery). We've seen it happen many times, from when 2pac taunted Biggie for being fat, Bill Maher taunted Donald Trump for looking like an orangutan, and now Roseanne Barr mocking Valerie Jarrett for looking like an ape!

As mature adults, we need to be better than that!

The problem with taunting someone's looks is that you are also taunting those who look like that other person through no fault of their own. Just like how it's already commonly known it's wrong to respond to an irritating person with racial slurs (because you are insulting everyone else of that race), we also should just not make insulting comments about the other person's physical features (because you are insulting everyone else with those physical features)!

If you don't like someone, just focus your comments on that person's content of character!

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Those who remember from when I started this blog (late 2003, wow, almost 15 years)  would remember I started this blog in response to a student troll and a rude professor at UH-Manoa.

Some of my comments in my earliest blog posts mocked their physical features, including their height, weight and shape of face. I have compared both to cartoon characters of different species! 

I have taken down those comments years ago!


Those comments about their physical features were totally uncalled for, insulting them on things they cannot change about themselves, whereas I should've focused on the things they can change about themselves (ie. their attitude, the way they treated me).

as I said in the 2013 post titled "1 decade anniversary of this blog" 
https://pablowegesend.blogspot.com/2013/10/1-decade-anniversary-of-this-blog.html

My only regret was mocking their physical appearances, which unintentionally targets those who might look like them, plus it distracts from my criticism of their attitudes.

I should go further than just expressing regret!

I truly apologize for my comments mocking their appearance.

I don't do this expecting forgiveness from them. 

I do this to let them know that I now understand that I went too far and I shouldn't have mocked their appearance.


 I also want to set an example for others that even someone annoys you, you shouldn't respond by mocking that person's physical appearance! Be better than that! 

personal evolution on my thoughts on US foreign policy, patriotism, imperialism and Hawaii independence

In the previous blog post, I mentioned about the political  comic by Mike Dawson and Chris Hayes  titled "The Good War: How America’s infatuation with World War II has eroded our conscience"

https://thenib.com/the-good-war

The previous blog post focused on how the general public and their reaction (and influence) to USA foreign policy.

This blog post will focus on how my views on USA foreign policy (and imperialism) has evolved over the years.

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I was born in 1980 in Hawaii, a land that was taken over by the US in 1898. 

While there is an independence movement here, the propaganda in favor of remaining in the US is so strong that I basically didn't even question it.

Our schools and history books are so focused on "we are part of the United States" that we are basically brainwashed into thinking "we are part of the USA" without much time to consider that we don't really need to be a part of the USA.  Depending on the school or their teacher (there really is no unified policy on this), the students might pledge allegiance to the USA flag every morning without being given time to ask "why can't we be independent again?" 

I grew up in a home with a lot of history books and encyclopedias. They were all written from a pro-USA point of view. 

And being that I'm on the same island as Pearl Harbor, I remember going there as a kid, fascinated by the video shown to us before we go on the boat to the memorial itself. 

Because of the trauma of the Pearl Harbor attacks and vulnerability Hawaii feels, many of us here feel we need USA protection. 

Also, we have allowed ourselves to be dependent on federal funds, it's basically like a drug addiction. 

----

In elementary education, teachers do tend to sugar-coat certain things. I have been a sub teacher with different age groups and I can definitely tell you that the impulse to sugar-coat things is totally correlated with the age group you are teaching. 

Elementary school textbooks tend to have a theme of "be proud of your country" (in this case, the USA), and "our country has overcome some of the sins of the past to be a better nation".

High school textbooks tend to be a little more skeptical of those visions, and college textbooks tend to over-the-top super-skeptical of those visions.

----

So basically, I grew up thinking "Hawaii should remain part of the USA". I did sort of experiment with pro-independence thought in the first year in college (1999-2000), thought the most vocal pro-independence activist Haunani-Kay Trask was a lunatic who viewed non-natives as "uninvited guests" and showed zero sympathy for an Anglo-American student who wrote that he was being harassed due to his ancestry. 

Around the same time, I was reading Jesse Ventura (wrestler turned governor of Minnesota), Source Magazine (a hip-hop magazine) and learning about libertarian politics, so I became more skeptical about USA foreign policy.

However, being that college campuses are more left-leaning, any non-leftist thought automatically gets you stereotyped as a right-winger even though I was  ALWAYS pro-sex-ed, ALWAYS pro-choice, ALWAYS pro-immigration.  But expressing criticisms of Haunani-Kay Trask, disagreeing with Democrats on certain issues will get you tagged as a "right-wing Republican" as if there weren't more than two ways of looking at the world!  It's as if you're either "right-wing" or "left-wing" with no in-between. Let's not forget that "right-wing" and "left-wing" are Western social constructs imported here by Western imperialism. 

Then 9/11 happened! It was my third year in college. It was a time of severe national trauma. US Americans of all political persuasions (except the radical fringes) came together to unite against a deadly enemy.   

The trauma was so deep that even a foreign-policy skeptic like me supported Bush's war on terror, and I even wrote articles in the university newspaper criticizing the anti-war rhetoric. 

 That led to a notorious troll Tobin Jones accusing me even more of being a "right-wing Republican" even though I've never agreed with that party's religious conservative agenda, and I had the nerve to acknowledge and praise Bush for his pro-immigration stance. 

At the time, many people bought USA flags and USA flag pins. I even wore them for a while, before they kept coming off.  Then I put them away.

As it became time for the USA to go to war in Iraq, I totally under-estimated what a trap that would be!  I was thinking "America did defeat two industrial powers in WW2, plus Iraq doesn't have the jungles like Vietnam, didn't have the mountain ranges like Afghanistan, winning over Iraq shouldn't be that hard"

But as time went on, the anti-war skeptics were correct. Iraqi was the total opposite of Japan & Germany being that the latter two were relatively homogeneous and conformist societies whose populations were easier to control than the heavily divided tribalist society that is Iraq.  The hard part wasn't overthrowing Saddam Hussein, the hard part was keeping control of the chaos afterward. In such tribalist societies, there is no such thing as patience when a leader gets overthrown, all the different factions literally fights to the death to take control.

As I look back now, the USA should've just left Iraq alone. Saddam Hussein was an evil menace, no doubt about it. But sometimes, the proposed cure is worse than the disease. 

While the ideal is that USA should stop being the world's police-officer,  even just sticking to using our air force to enforce the no-fly zones would've been enough to contain Saddam Hussein with causing the chaos that actually happened with a land invasion.

-------

As the years passed, I have become even more skeptical about US foreign policy. I no longer support having the US getting involved with suppressing foreign dictators. For what?

The US warplanes bombed Libya to stop Muammar Quadafi. Yes, he was a brutal tyrant. But our involvement left another power vacuum allowing shady characters to cause massive chaos, and it led to our embassy bombing in Benghazi. 

More on my ever-increasing skepticism of US foreign intervention

http://pablowegesend.blogspot.com/2011/07/defend-america-1st.html
http://pablowegesend.blogspot.com/2013/09/intervention-in-syria.html
http://pablowegesend.blogspot.com/2011/10/make-rich-pay.html 

----

Also, as the years passed, I get more angry at the Jones Act (US shipping law that restricts access to international trade), I get more disillusioned with USA interference with world affairs,  I began to feel that Hawaii would be better off independent already.

Plus, why should we send our tax revenues to Washington DC to have representatives argue over what to do with it, when our tax revenue can just stay here. 

The last straw was Donald Trump's election. There should be no reason why Hawaii should choose to remain so dependent on a nation that elects someone like that! 

I wrote on those issues
http://pablowegesend.blogspot.com/2016/11/its-time-for-hawaii-to-declare.html
http://pablowegesend.blogspot.com/2016/11/a-petition-to-make-hawaii-independent.html
http://pablowegesend.blogspot.com/2016/12/my-letter-to-newspaper-hawaii.html


This one on how Haunani-Kay Trask ruined the pro-independence cause, and how we can convince more people to support Hawaii's independence
http://pablowegesend.blogspot.com/2018/01/hawaiian-independence-movement-venting.html

Yeah, I know Barack Obama was born here. I think that fact alone has kept people here reluctant to become independent.  His election brought so much joy in Hawaii, it was a matter of pride that the US president came from Hawaii.

But that wasn't the first time Hawaii help raised those who eventually became foreign leaders. Sun Yat-sen, the Chinese revolutionary who became his homeland's leader in 1912 actually spent part of his adolescence in Hawaii. 

That all being said, Hawaii might've influenced Obama in a positive way in that he experienced a multi-racial environment growing up, but still, the fact remains that his private school (Punahou) was originally built for European-American missionaries, and therefore influenced their students to be "proud Americans" instead of having their students questioning why they should be part of the US.

My public school (McKinley High School) was named after the US president who took over Hawaii.  His real legacy wasn't discussed much at the school, it's as if the school had a shameful secret that they didn't want the students to think much about.

Sooner or later, we have to stop sugar-coating to our youth. 

It doesn't mean we have to preach like Jeremiah Wright and yell "god damn America" to our kids! We shouldn't!

But we should at least have our future generation understand more about colonialism and the psychological harm it does to the conquered populations.

We should at least allow our future generations question whether Hawaii should continue being under the US! 

That could start with allowing students to write a paper about the pros & cons of making Hawaii independent again. Just doing that alone will plant a seed in their minds about what positive possibilities may come with making Hawaii independent again. 

As they get older ask them to write a pros & cons paper about various US foreign policies. That can also plant seeds in the students' mind about being skeptical about US  military adventures. That can also get them questioning whether it's worth it for Hawaii to remain hostage to any rivalries the US may have with foreign powers.

This isn't about making all students pro-independence activists overnight! It shouldn't happen overnight! But planting a seed in their mind that will eventually grow is what it's all about!

World War 2 nostalgia and 9/11

During this past weekend, I came across a political comic by Mike Dawson and Chris Hayes that was posted on January 10th, 2018.

The comic was titled "The Good War: How America’s infatuation with World War II has eroded our conscience"

https://thenib.com/the-good-war


Basically, it was about how America's nostalgia for national unity of World War 2 (or at least how it was presented in history books, documentaries and more) influenced America's reaction to 9/11.

The comic pointed out that in the 1990's, there was some of the nostalgia presented in the very popular movie "Saving Private Ryan" (directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom Hanks), and the very popular book "The Greatest Generation" (written by then NBC newscaster Tom Brokaw).

World War 2 was presented as a noble cause for the USA, as we fought Nazi Germany and imperial Japan.

World War 2 was presented as a time of national unity, in contrast to the public reaction to the Vietnam War.

World War 2 was presented as a time when the USA wins a major war on two fronts in contrast to the Vietnam War where the US troops were getting outsmarted by the enemy's guerrilla warfare tactics. 

Obviously, World War 2 and Vietnam War were two very different situations.

At the start of World War 2, many US Americans were reluctant to get into another European war. "America First" was the major slogan for those who felt the USA should stay out of foreign affairs. Those who felt that way were called "isolationists".

Then the Pearl Harbor attacks happened.  This was war.  Much of the isolationist mentality melted after that fateful day.

Contrast that to the Vietnam War, where the Vietnamese communist didn't pose a threat to the United States.  So why did we have to get involved?

Also, the Vietnam War came at a time where people questioned America's position as the moral high standard.

After World War 2, many African-American soldiers came back home to a land where they didn't have the freedoms that they were supposedly fighting for.  They put their lives on the line for a country that didn't treat them equally. All that for nothing.

The 1950s was when the civil rights movement gained major momentum, where people questioned America's position as the moral high standard.

So the question became "why fight for freedom in Vietnam when we can't even have freedom here?". Or as Muhammad Ali famously said, "No Vietnamese ever called me a n----r".

Also, the post-World War 2 era was an era where many non-white countries fought to be independent of their European overlords. It was no longer a world dominated by European powers. 

The Vietnamese already fought off the Japanese invaders in WW2 and fought off the French who wanted to be their overlords again. The compromise solution after Vietnamese independence was that North Vietnam was to be Russia's puppet, and South Vietnam was to be USA's puppet.  The North & South got into a war. The Russians just provided funds and weapons. But the USA brought in troops, making them the latest colonizers telling them what to do.

North Vietnam's government was strong under the dictator Ho Chi Minh, South Vietnam's government was weak with constant coups and disorganization.  This made it easy for the communists to infiltrate the South.

The USA was basically propping up an ineffective government and using drafted troops to fight for a war in which they had no real motivation to fight.

In World War 2, millions of young men (even teenagers who lied about their age) signed up to get revenge for the Pearl Harbor attacks.

None of that motivation existed for US Americans to fight over who should be the dictator for all of Vietnam. 

So it was young men drafted against their will to fight in the jungles for a cause they didn't understand, against an enemy that knew the jungle terrain from childhood. 

Japan and Germany had an industrial machine and a conformist society. But they didn't have jungles where the enemy could hide and launch guerrilla attacks.

Add to that, TV news (which wasn't widely accessible to the general public in World War 2) showcased the latest bloodbath faced by US soldiers in Vietnam.

So by 1968, many Americans wanted out of Vietnam, but the USA political leaders didn't want to look like wusses running away from a fight.

By the 1970s, the US troops withdrew from Vietnam. The attitude was "if the communist took over Vietnam, that's their problem."

Meanwhile, some of the returning US troops who fought in Vietnam felt betrayed by much of US American society.  They felt that they put their lives on the line for the US, seen their friends die in battle, experienced physical and psychological injuries, and then to come home and not feel respected.

The wounds of the Vietnam War lasted a long time in US American society.

To add insult to injury, the Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan, and the Islamic Fascists took over Iran, overthrew the US-supported dictator, and held hostages at the US embassy.  There was a failed rescue attempt that made the USA look weak.

In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan came to power. He wanted to restore American strength but knew that sending a massive amount of troops to overseas battles just wasn't going to fly with the general public.  He sent a small amount of troops to the small island of Grenada to remove communists taking US hostages. He sent a few troops to Lebanon but left after their barracks got bombed.

Meanwhile, he boosted the military budget, started a missile defense system, told the Soviet president to tear down the wall, and used warplanes to bomb Lybia. He also supported any dictator that was an enemy to Soviet-supported dictators. According to Reagan, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. This had him supporting repressive regimes in Latin America, Africa, Middle East and Asia.

One of those regimes was Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Iraq was at war with Iran, and Reagan sided with Iraq just to support anyone fighting against the Iranian regime that held hostages. At the same time, Reagan's government was selling weapons to the same Iranian regime that he was supposedly against so that he could get funds to indirectly support the anti-communists fighting in Central America.

Getting confused? I don't blame you!

Meanwhile, the Soviet Union had a new leader Mikhail  Gorbachev, who wanted to end the imperialist ambitions of his nation and withdrew troops from Afghanistan and all the Eastern European nations under Soviet control. Berlin Wall came down and Germany reunited, this time as a peaceful nation.  Other Eastern European countries became newly independent, bringing the Cold War to an end.

As historian Francis Fukuyama said, it was an "end to history". The good guys won.

But wait a minute, not so fast! 

While the Soviet Union no longer existed and Russia lost its imperial ambitions, the US had new enemies on the horizon.

Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990 without realizing that the US would now turn against him.  USA president George HW Bush led a coalition to expel Iraqi troops out of Kuwait.

The USA troops won a war overseas. We are tough again.

But some people wanted more. Saddam Hussein has been presented to the public as a menacing dictator (which he was), and people started to ask "why not invade Iraq and get rid of him once and for all?"

That would have to wait. George HW Bush didn't want to risk another Vietnam quagmire, he just wanted to save Kuwait. But Saddam Hussein was furious! He wanted revenge against Bush and America.  There were now worries that he was supporting terrorists against the USA

There were already other terrorist groups in the Middle East who wanted revenge against the USA for supporting the Israeli government. The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) was notorious for taking hostages and killing children. Their leader Yassir Arafat later moderated his stance and wanted peace with Israel.  Other Palestinians felt betrayed by Arafat and started a new terrorist organization the Hamas which sponsored suicide bombings.

Meanwhile, back in Afghanistan, the Islamic fighters (who included the Taliban and Al Qaida) who took US money and weapons to expel the Soviets have since turned against the USA. They felt the US was the next imperial power to get rid of. 

The 90's were also a time when the US intervened as peacekeepers in Somalia & Bosnia. These were small-scale interventions compared to Vietnam. 

While that was all going on in the 1990s, most of the USA's general public felt that those foreign terrorist were just small-time nuisances compared to what the USA had dealt with in World War 2.  The 1990s were a time when the crime rate was declining and the economy was booming. We were the leaders of the new internet age. We were the world's last remaining superpower.

Movies, books, and documentaries about World War 2 were a way to remember our grandfather's generation, but they were also seen as a reminder of US strength. If we can defeat two industrial powers on two continents, then fighting a smaller group of terrorists shouldn't be that hard.

Well, that theory got put to a test on 9/11. 

For a nation that was feasting on World War 2 nostalgia, it was like Pearl Harbor all over again.

This was no longer Vietnam War. The Vietnamese communist didn't attack us. But Al Quaida did. The days of being reluctant to fight overseas is now officially over! 

Even the usually pacifist liberals were supporting the US fight against Al Qaeda and their Taliban hosts in Afghanistan. 

People were quickly reminded that the Taliban were religious fanatics that made US fundamentalist Christians look tame in comparison. 

It was really ridiculous to claim that the Taliban were fellow travelers out to fight the Western imperial forces in solidarity with all the world's oppressed. The Taliban were just a different group of oppressors. 

It was easy to make the USA fight on the War on Terror to be a war of "good vs evil".

Also, we were more careful to not repeat some of our mistakes from World War 2. Whereas Japanese-Americans were forced into prison camps during World War 2, this time, our president warned against anti-Arab racism and never singled out an ethnic group to be placed into prison camps.

Sadly, there were hate crimes against those of (or perceived to be of) Middle Eastern ancestry.  But the fact that there now wasn't an executive order to officially discriminate and imprison entire ethnic groups was seen as an improvement. 

-------

However, Saddam Hussein (who was guilty of many things, but had nothing to do with the 9/ll attacks) was still seen as a threat!

Hey, if the USA could get rid of Hitler and also bomb Japan into submission, we can get rid of Saddam Hussein. Plus, Iraq is mostly desert,  no jungles to hide in (like Vietnam),  no large mountains to hide in (like Afghanistan).

However, Iraq wasn't the homogeneous, conformist societies like Japan and Germany. Societies like Germany and Japan were easy to control. Those societies don't really put much resistance against charismatic tyrants, nor do they really put much resistance against the US taking over control

Iraq didn't have a homogeneous, conformist population. While most US American can't tell the different Iraqi cultural groups apart, that doesn't mean their divisions aren't real. The main groups (Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds) had long-standing grudges against each other.  Saddam Hussein favored the Sunnis and ruled over the other groups with an iron fist. If Saddam Hussein fell, there would be a battle over who has control. That's exactly what happened. There was an extremely brutal civil war between the different groups.

It took forever for the US troops to take control and calm down the situation, with the 2006 surge. By then it was too late. Thousands already died!

Meanwhile, the US troops later withdrew from Iraq in 2011.  ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq & Syria,) a group of disgruntled Sunnis,  saw a power vacuum and took advantage. They started their own reign of terror.  

Donald Trump (a person with a long history of promising totally opposite things) promised to get the US out of foreign wars, and yet said he's going to "bomb the s--- out of ISIS".  He did send warplanes to bomb ISIS bases, but I think he knows that sending army troops could mean the end of his political career if they don't have instant victories. I think Donald Trump would be more like Reagan and less like Bush Jr., and just rely on warplanes instead of land troops for future wars.

I think that even with a belligerent-talking wannabe tough-guy president like Donald Trump, that USA is pretty much done with sending land troops overseas. We already have seen the results from the Iraq war. The days were the US can fight land wars over two continents against two major industrial powers are over.  The world has changed. 

Donald Trump will continue to talk tough about Iran, North Korea, and China, but I doubt he would ever get support for a land war against them. He would have to rely on warplanes if worse comes to worse. China & North Korea got nukes so Trump will have to tread carefully.

Put a Tiger Statue on The Oval

Today, my alma mater McKinley High School had their graduation!

That's right, a new generation of Tigers join the alumni community!

Part of the tradition is for the new graduates to walk across the oval.

The students are forbidden to walk on the oval until graduation.

But what is on the oval?

A statue of William McKinley, the man the school is named after!

William McKinley was the United States president when the US took over Hawaii in 1898.

So imagine how it feels to have your country taken over, and to have the conquering leader have a prominent statue on the high school located in the urban center where everyone can see it!

While many will point out the benefits Hawaii had under the USA (and point out that "at least Hawaii wasn't taken over by Japan, Germany, Russia, etc), the fact remains that the USA took over  Hawaii not for the love or benefit of Hawaii's people, but as a imperialist military launching pad towards Asia!

William McKinley wanted the USA to have an empire just like the British and the French!

He wanted to build the US empire with the remains of the crumbling Spanish empire (with US taking Puerto Rico, Philippines and Guam instead of allowing them to become independent) and then add Hawaii as the half-way point.

William McKinley felt that the non-whites weren't to be trusted to run their own lands. He personified with the worst stereotypes of the "white savior" taking on the "white man's burden" to "civilize the natives".

That is not who we want to honor!

While we can't change the past, we can definitely change the future!

We can have a future in which Hawaii can be independent again

We can have a future where we no longer honor racist imperialist in our schools

We can have a future where our kids are no longer brainwashed to mindlessly accept colonialism.

We can have a future in which the school located in our capitol city's urban core will no longer have a statue built to be a middle finger towards the conquered natives. 

We can also have a future that honor the school's great traditions (ie. The Tiger Spirit, walking the oval in the graduation ceremony) without honoring an imperialist! 

There are many great things about McKinley High School. We have a grand, beautiful campus. We have great lawns.  We have grand buildings! We have a great educational legacy! We have great educational programs! We are in the urban core with easy access to many great urban places students can go to after school. We are located in the economic and political center of the state.

We have the best high school colors Black & Gold!

And of course, we got the Tiger Spirit!

The Tiger Spirit is very sacred to us!  It is NOT to be disrespected!


But we don't need to respect William McKinley!

Therefore I proposed that we replace the McKinley statue with a Tiger statue!

image copyright to Pablo Wegesend

I definitely encourage this image to go viral!


Obviously the Tiger statue will look a lot more grand that my cartoonish image 😉


But hey, if it gets a conversation rolling, then so be it! 

Go Tigers!