Unpopular opinions thread

You need a significant other.

Oh, no I don't. I had that for three years and it was too much for me. I am perfectly happy being on my own- at least for now.

If you wouldn’t do drugs even if they were legal, then doesn’t that show you why they don’t need to be illegal?
Prohibition doesn’t work because people who want to use addictive mind-altering substances will do them whether they are legal or not. People who don’t want to use them will choose not to regardless of legality. People should be free to make their own choices and bare their own consequences.

Disney is super fun when you’re a kid and is a different kind of fun as a young adult with a SO. Not my style, but I know a lot of people who go as couples and have a blast. There’s good rides, plenty of nostalgia, and a lot more adult activities now like “Drinking Around the World”.

The Bible okays alcohol in moderation

Whatever insurance companies want them to be.

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The Bible okays alcohol in moderation

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Well Jesus did turn water into wine at the Marriage at Cana.
Apparently He wanted people to enjoy the celebration.

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Unpopular opinions thread

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Parks and Rec was a better show than The Office. The Office is just bigger because of how main stream it is. (I like them both)

The wine was much safer to drink than the water in those days. And it was better wine than that first served by the master of the feast.

A letter to fellow white folks… because black people really don’t need to hear from a white guy on this topic, especially not right now.

I can breathe.

And in my 40 years on this earth, I’ve never had to fear that an encounter with the police might change that. That is privilege.

As people all over America protest following the murder of George Floyd, it’s important that we understand something—we as white Americans are all products of racism in one form or another, products of white supremacy that is older than our country’s independence.

Yes, you. Me. Every single one of us.

No, I’m not calling you racist, but there’s no denying that your privileged stems in part from four centuries of racism, particularly in the form of oppressing, exploiting and killing black people. And far too often, those centuries of racism allow for that oppression, exploitation and killing goes unchecked by the government and legal system that should serve every individual in this country.

And no, I’m not blaming you personally for the death of Floyd or for the history of systemic racism that has gotten us to where we are today. I’m not asking you to apologize for being white. I am asking you to recognize your white privilege so we can better empathize with the struggles of black people and understand how much different their experiences are in a country that for centuries legally classified them as less than human.

Odds are good you don’t have direct ties to slaveholders, but that doesn’t mean your privilege wasn’t built on racism. Maybe your grandpa went to college or got a great home loan on the G.I. Bill that helped him build wealth through home ownership. Go ahead and google how accessible the G.I. Bill was to blacks after World War II.

Did your ancestors get denied home loans or college admission or job opportunities or medical treatment, or were they told what neighborhood they could live in, or were they denied the right to vote and potentially change some of those racist policies at the poll, all due to the color of their skin? Nope. All of that adds up, bit by bit, not just to the difference in quality of lives for those people who came generations before us, but in the generational wealth that has blesses so many white families and that has been unavailable to so many black families.

We all learned the way-too-abbreviated version of black history in school: slavery (bad!), emancipation (yay!), Jim Crow and other forms of legal discrimination long after the 13th Amendment purported to free black people (maybe if you had a good history teacher), Martin Luther King Jr gives a speech about having a dream, something vague about Malcolm X (but he’s a little radical for us white kids so let’s move along, shall we class?) King assassinated, Civil Right Act of 1968 passes, all is well.

So, um, yeah, we missed a lot in there. Even if we skip over for now everything that isn’t taught prior to 1968—how many of y’all knew about Black Wall Street and the Tulsa Race Massacre before you saw something about it on Instagram or Twitter this week? Or about how convict leasing kept a form of slavery alive in practice, if not in name, well into the 20th century?—even if we skip over all of that, pretending that institutional racism ended with the Civil Rights Acts passed in the 1960s is laughably disingenuous.

From Nixon to Reagan to Bush to Clinton to Bush again, our country spent most of four decades criminalizing blackness in a misguided effort to look tough on crime. A war on drugs, for-profit prisons and discrimination in the legal system—from policing, to prosecutors deciding who gets charged and with what crimes, to jury manipulation, to biased sentencing—the US managed to increase its prison population from about 35,000 in 1970 to just over 2 million 2000, and did so in large part by locking up blacks at an alarming rate. And let’s be clear here, blacks don’t make up a hugely disproportionate percentage of the U.S. prison population because they are inherently bad or are more dangerous than the rest of us, it’s because the system has been rigged against them for as long as black bodies have been stolen from Africa.

White privilege means that when I get pulled over, my first thought is, “shite, is my insurance going to go up now?” While a black man wonders, “Will I survive this encounter with the police?”

Which brings us back to George Floyd and the cops—yes, plural—who killed him in Minneapolis last week and everything that has transpired since. When you see a man get his life slowly choked out of him by a police officer for nearly 9 minutes—an officer who knows he’s on camera and is still unfazed—it’s impossible not to be sad and outraged. Now try to imagine you’re black and watching a scene like that unfold, again, knowing that you or a loved one could be next, and feeling hopeless because centuries of racism tell you that this is just going to happen again and again and again.

And before I get accused of being anti-cop, I promise you I’m not. I’m anti-bad cop, and there’s way too many of them, which is why substantial reform is needed. If you’re a law enforcement officer who strives to protect and serve, to make your community a better place, or if you’re the loved one of a such a police officer, then you should be as outraged as anyone right now, because men like Derek Chauvin are sullying your reputation by association. This isn’t about demonizing the police; it’s about condemning a broken system that allows too many bad cops to keep their jobs and often times avoid punishment killing black people they deem to be threatening.

And no, this is not just a few bad apples; it’s a bushel of them sprung from a tree that has been rotting from the inside due to the cancer of racism, a cancer that still plagues this country 400 years after we began stealing Africans, and 157 years since slavery was abolished.

Real change is needed, not just in policing and the legal system, but in how all of us, white folks in particular, educate ourselves about racism and how it shapes the history that got us to scenes like the one that unfolded in Minneapolis last week when a white cop so no problem casually taking the life of a black man who was accused of passing a counterfeit $20.
Black people are hurting right now. They’re angry. They’re sad. They’re scared.

From William Lloyd Garrison to Frederick Douglas to Harriet Tubman to Ida B. Wells to W.E.B Du Bois to Medgar Evers to Rosa Parks to Malcolm X to Martin Luther King Jr. to James Baldwin to Stokley Carmichael to John Lewis to Tommy Smith and John Carlos to Angela Davis to Colin Kaepernick, black people have been telling this country for centuries that it has a huge problem with race, and not nearly enough people have been listening.