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: : : : And this is where you differ from Floyd, Barry, NJ and myself; you perceive the balance as tilted towards gays where we see it tilted the other way.: : : No they are definitely oppressed but I would appreciate more social rules of engagement, I know that's not always possible but would you want an advocate of black power to adopt an all whites are evil approach?
: : It was very effective for the Panthers and Malcolm X.
: First of all Floyd, while I don't fully agree with Lark on the factual question of whetehr most gays act that way, I do understand it when people object to public sexual displays. I kind of agree with Lark on the point that promiscuious and sex-obsessed lifestyles are not something desirable.
Are you suggesting that my own statements on this topic constitute a pro shagging-in-the-streets position? Because if so, then I must have been phenomenally unclear!
:I only disagree with him on the factual point of whetehr this is typical of homosexuals.
: Secondly, you're wrong about the Panthers. First of all, nothing these guys did was that effective,m except maybe for breaking Timothy Leary out of priosn and setting up some free clinics, etc.
I disagree entirely. The Panthers were quite effective in community policing, for example. Hard drug use and violence diminished radically in most Panther neighborhoods, for example (not counting the violence that was imported by the FBI, that is). The officially recognized police forces have never made any concerted attempt to prevent crime in Black neighborhoods, only to punish it after the fact. The Panthers did make this effort, and the effort was generally successful, at least for a while. Therefore the Panthers were effective, IMHO. (And breaking Leary out of prison was not, in the long term, effective at all, since it gave the FBI a chance to falsely claim that the Panthers were a fringe element of dope fiends, and thus discredit them in the eyes of teh general public.)
:They were repressed by the Feds with a vengeance. Second of all the Panthers broke from other black militant organizations over precisely the issue of whether whites were evil. The Panthers did not believe that all whites were evil; they didn't believe in racial essentialism in ANY form. They believed in divisions based on CLASS and IDEOLOGY, not on RACE.
Yes, but these are still essentialist divisions. I admit that my unintentional implication that they were anti-white was incorrect, and I thank you for clarifying this. However, my point was that a militant approach is sometimes the most effective means of convincing people that there is a problem in need of redress, whether or not it proves to be the most effective solution to that problem.
[snip]
:As for Malcolm X, he was indubitably a brilliant man, and an amazing orator, but a false prophet nonetheless.
What makes you say so? Malcolm X may have said things that you, personally, disagree with, but calling him a "false prophet" is completely non-sensical. Aside from being a matter of personal aesthetics (as any religious belief is, ultimately,) it is historically inaccurate. It's roughly the equivalent of calling G.W. Bush a shoddy race-car driver. Minister Malcolm was not prophesying, he was a social critic. The fact that he based his critique on religious principles is beside the point. Now if you want to say that you don't agree with that critique, that's fine, but as he was not a prophet at all, calling him a "false prophet" is just silly. Besides, even if he was prophesying, it's still out of line to call someone's religious beliefs "false." Silly, sure, ridiculous or even insane, fine, but not "false." Religious beliefs can't be evaluated on a "true/false" axis. (How many times am I going to have to say this?)
-Floyd
