Reply to Re: Let's talk power
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>the blacks, the muslims, the fabulous, transgender people, you name it. None of these groups have any power,
Those various groups and their representatives have immense power in the USA and elsewhere. The fact that you even mention them at all means that you've legitimised them as having power and are giving them power by apparently sympathising with them. If they didn't have any power you wouldn't know about them and their goals at all and you wouldn't have mentioned them at all since they'd have no power.
In the case of the trans, quite recently we've seen the House Bill 2 passed in North Carolina with the negative response from the fabulous and the transfolk being unparalleled. Bruce Springsteen has even cancelled a tour there because he doesn't like the laws. In total, over 100 major companies have refused to do business in North Carolina because of this new law.
Another good example is how Brendan Eich was forced to step down as Mozilla CEO because he was personally opposed to same-sex marriage. It had absolutely no bearing on the position at hand yet he was forced to step down anyway. In fact OKCupid even told its users to stop using Firefox while all of this was going on. The Chick-Fil-A backlash is also a relevant example.
Now onto Muslims. First and foremost, people are scared of Muslims and therefore simply do not criticise Islam on television ever. Even in the USA, Penn from Penn and Teller has stated that he won't do an episode of Bullshit about Islam (or Scientology) because he has family members that he loves. At a "draw Mohammed" competition, two guys turned up to kill everyone but were thankfully shot dead before they could do any harm. Muslims don't screw around. They react like petulant children every time someone insults Mohammed or themselves (remember The Innocence of Muslims?), and nobody will ever call them out on it because they're simply too frightened.
Every time one of these attacks occurs, nobody ever dares blame Islam or the contents of the Koran, and instead you've got morons lighting candles and disingenuously reciting "It's t-t-the religion of peace!" and effectively excusing their actions with Twitter hashtags. This power through public sympathy alone is huge.
I believe the black lobby has a fair bit of power as well through Al Sharpton and the NAACP and college affirmative action but I don't know enough about it.
Otherwise, in short, all of those groups you mention have large amounts of power in the public sphere. One is not allowed to criticise blacks or the fabulous (and Muslims to a lesser extent) in public without receiving huge amounts of negative publicity and potentially public condemnation. For a group to be actually powerless it has to be completely unacknowledged and unrecognised such as in the case of Zoroastrian folk singers or Estonian donkey wranglers. Although, how much power these groups you've listed wield is debatable, it is simply absurd to assert that they are powerless.
Those various groups and their representatives have immense power in the USA and elsewhere. The fact that you even mention them at all means that you've legitimised them as having power and are giving them power by apparently sympathising with them. If they didn't have any power you wouldn't know about them and their goals at all and you wouldn't have mentioned them at all since they'd have no power.
In the case of the trans, quite recently we've seen the House Bill 2 passed in North Carolina with the negative response from the fabulous and the transfolk being unparalleled. Bruce Springsteen has even cancelled a tour there because he doesn't like the laws. In total, over 100 major companies have refused to do business in North Carolina because of this new law.
Another good example is how Brendan Eich was forced to step down as Mozilla CEO because he was personally opposed to same-sex marriage. It had absolutely no bearing on the position at hand yet he was forced to step down anyway. In fact OKCupid even told its users to stop using Firefox while all of this was going on. The Chick-Fil-A backlash is also a relevant example.
Now onto Muslims. First and foremost, people are scared of Muslims and therefore simply do not criticise Islam on television ever. Even in the USA, Penn from Penn and Teller has stated that he won't do an episode of Bullshit about Islam (or Scientology) because he has family members that he loves. At a "draw Mohammed" competition, two guys turned up to kill everyone but were thankfully shot dead before they could do any harm. Muslims don't screw around. They react like petulant children every time someone insults Mohammed or themselves (remember The Innocence of Muslims?), and nobody will ever call them out on it because they're simply too frightened.
Every time one of these attacks occurs, nobody ever dares blame Islam or the contents of the Koran, and instead you've got morons lighting candles and disingenuously reciting "It's t-t-the religion of peace!" and effectively excusing their actions with Twitter hashtags. This power through public sympathy alone is huge.
I believe the black lobby has a fair bit of power as well through Al Sharpton and the NAACP and college affirmative action but I don't know enough about it.
Otherwise, in short, all of those groups you mention have large amounts of power in the public sphere. One is not allowed to criticise blacks or the fabulous (and Muslims to a lesser extent) in public without receiving huge amounts of negative publicity and potentially public condemnation. For a group to be actually powerless it has to be completely unacknowledged and unrecognised such as in the case of Zoroastrian folk singers or Estonian donkey wranglers. Although, how much power these groups you've listed wield is debatable, it is simply absurd to assert that they are powerless.
