Troy

"The idea that prisons could reform or rehabilitate is only around 200 years old." During reconstruction and into the present day the use of inmates to do the work for businesses is the most blatant form of the exploitation of the prison system -- comparable to slavery. This video lends credence to the notion that jails are built to make money and Black people, due to a racist system, are disproportionately incarcerated. Today the prisons themselves are the profit centers. Hence the dramatic increase in the number of Americans incarcerated. The recidivism and collateral damage on Black families, communities, and Black people, in general, is incalculable. ...and I doubt we will ever make serious progress toward reparations.

To be clear. I would not allow someone to post racist ideas (falsehoods, distortions, and lies) without them being addressed. To make believe the ideas do not exist is a mistake to have them dispatched so well is actually very valuable. @ProfD I had to look up "VGQ." For the benefit of others who mya have been just as ignorant:

@Chevdove OK I'm just now seeing your video. Yeah, Kadeem sounds the same, but he did "blow up" and I would not have known who he was.

You know that can come back... I approving a lot more accounts now -- but I can see it being a little intimidating to jump in. So people just read, but we will see @frankster I'd never heard of Billy Carson until you posted that video. He is "out there" with stories of aliens modifying ancient hominids to work as slaves mining Africa for minerals. He says these stories are "written in stone." Clearly, ancient Africans had advanced technology. People like John Anthony West, theorize that the Sphinx was built 7 thousand years before many Egyptologists previously believed. Obviously, what we are taught about human history does not make sense if the pyramids were built 10,000 years ago -- before Europeans emerged from caves! When you couple this with the celestial knowledge of the Dogon who were aware of Sirius B. It is not just history that does not make sense -- nothing does This draws me back to the topic of religion versus spirituality.

This video describes Dogon religious beliefs, astrological knowledge, understanding of matter, and the beginning of the universe. How can this knowledge square with Western religion? This brother makes interesting videos.

Hey @Delano are you familiar with this book? I only learned about West this week while reading more about Ancient Eygpt.

Yeah I’m on my 60s man.

@ProfD one of my daily chores is to come here and approve new account request. i probably reject 60% of the accounts before a single post is make. Of the 40% i approve maybe 1 out of 10 actually end up posting. Sometimes someone will get by me and post something crazy and I’ll delete it right away. Sometimes they will start off normal then go crazy. In any event it is not like I’m saying hey racist vine sit in these forum, but your comment was amusing nonetheless. 😉

Every point in this conversation could be a completely separate conversation. I would like to explore the issue of spirituality versus religion, at some point.

Preach! Seriously, as @Pioneer1 suggested I actively avoid a lot of media because i realized the impact on me. This is also why my pop-culture-quotient is so low 😉 Some people can consume hours of social media and TV each day and feel they are not being impacted. I think they are deluding themselves. One could make a strong argument that no one under 18 should not be allowed to watch tv or use social media. I knew a family that did this with their children. At the time i thought it was draconian, but now i understand. These were also very wealthy people.

Word.

I was unfamiliar with Lin Chi @frankster seems i don’t even know what i don’t know sometimes 😉

sorry to hear about your friend @Delano when I was younger I was afraid of dying. Even as a kid it seemed like an irrational fear, as i got much much older i realized it was probably PTSD. That homeless guy may have had the poker for protection; the homeless catch beat downs all the time. but i agree, you still have to keep your eyes open. In the 70s it was a matter of survival. When i was a kid you could get jumped just for walking on the wrong streets. Hearing about DC, Chicago, LA at their worst made NYC seem relatively mild at its worst. The gangs were a problem in NYC but compared to what was published about South central LA — forget about it. A friend — a grown woman — was made to go back home and change her clothes cause she had the nerve to be wearing red (this was in the 80s). I don’t blame women, anyone really, for being fearful in some situations. you have to make fast judgements and these will be based on stereotypes . Which brings me to white women clutching their purse, or crossing the street upon seeing a black man approach. Some people get bent out of shape because of this, but if you consider all of the biased media demonizing, black men, how could you expect any other behavior?

How old are you and where exactly did you grow up? In my youth, there was definitely a danger of getting robbed. Almost every adult woman I know was mugged. My mother was robbed in her own apartment building twice once by gun, and another time the scumbag held a knife to my little sister's throat. This was in the 70's. I'm not aware of this happening now. As an adult living NYC (Park Slope and Harlem) as an adult from 1993 until 2011/17 my biggest threat came from law enforcement -- seriously. Crime is definitely on the rise there. People's cars are being robbed. My kid's bike was stolen (bike lock was cut). I can see why a woman would feel threatened by a group of homeless people in the area of an ATM. When you visit from someplace where you don't see homelessness, seeing it in NYC is jarring. It is hard to understand, from an outsider's perspective, how NYC tolerated this situation. NYC is not unique, I've seen these conditions in Tulsa OK, Sacramento CA, etc... At some point, NYC will need to deal with all of the issues you raised @richardmurray, for the chicken will come home to roost. BTW the PDF file you linked in your blog does not have the "NYC True Cost of Living" document. Here is the direct link: https://issuu.com/uwnyc/docs/nyctcl2023/8

The GOAT of women's gymnastics. I always wanted Simone to marry Kōhei Uchimura the GOAT of gymnastics of any gender. I would have loved to have seen what kind of kid they would have produced 🙂

@mellypops welcome to the forums! You make an important distinction between meeting someone for serious relationship and meeting someone for fun. I don't have data/studies/research to support my opinion, but I think men are usually looking for fun rather than a erious relationships. This difference becomes more profound as people get older. Basically, by the time you are in your mid to late 40's it is difficult to find a serious partner because perhaps all the ones interested in a true romance have been taken Relationships where the man is oblivious to, or does not care, about the woman's desire for a deeper serious relationship and where the woman ignores the clues that the man is only interested in "fun," usually end badly. I don't have the answer, because great relationships can start out as fun, and women who state up front that they want a committed romantic relationship will run off many guys. Actually, this is probably a good thing, because any guy run off knowing a woman wants to work toward a "romantic" relationship is not worth pursuing if that is your goal. And before someone accuses me of being sexist yes it could be men looking for something romantic and the woman who is just trying to have fun. 😍

Hi @isaashmiller thanks for using your first post to congratulate me. Welcome to the forum!

There will be three (3) hour-long book conversations on Octavia Butler’s prophetic novel Parable of the Talents. The conversations will be held, in person, at the Langston Hughes branch of the Queens Library and virtually via WebEx. The conversation will be moderated by the African American Literature Book Club’s Troy Johnson. The Sankofa Series is free and open to the public. Click this Link to Join the WebEx Conversations Parable of the Talents Conversation Schedule (all time Eastern): ▪ Chapters 1 through 7: Tuesday, April 25 at 4 pm ▪ Chapters 8 through 14: Tuesday, May 9 at 4 pm ▪ Chapter 15 to Completion: Tuesday. May 30 at 4 pm You can check out Parable of the Talents at the Queens Library or your local library. Copies may be purchased from the African American Literature Book Club, or wherever books are sold. We will also discuss the book, Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America by Robinson on Tuesday, May 16 at 4 pm.

Yeah nice guys can get victimized and taken advantage of by predatory women. These are the women that like the bad boys. @Steinsman I have never matched with anyone on a dating ap, but I don’t have a problem meeting women the old-fashioned way. I don’t know if it is easier or harder to meet people nowadays, but I’d assume it is easier. There are just more people, traveling is easier and race mixing is acceptable 🥰 so your pool of prospects is bigger. I’d rather be dating today than any other time in history.

Weed and fairly takes go together.

Don’t be like me @Delano @Pioneer1 is just taking your chain. 😉

“Unaliving” was a word the young lady used in the video Chevdove shared. I never heard the word before and thing it is silly way to say kill. Is the word “kill” too triggering?

Yeah the other day I saw Glenn Truman on some show and i was like how did he age so fast? He played a high school character in a film shot in the 70s. I was in high school in the 70s too. Then i did a little math an figured Preach was 30 years old playing s high school student, yeah i like the film and watched it within the past year turning a youngin’ on to it.

Well whether this was staged or not it does indeed seem to be the playbook. It does however feed into the worse narratives out there, which made me suspicious of the video, as it is the perfect thing to feed for social media for views. Again without access to the source, it is hard to tell. In the age of AI it may be impossible for a layperson to tell...

@Goldsteinberger No where on the link you shared does it say what you wrote. What is does say however is "Bias crimes rose in 2021 with 238 incidents reported. Of these, 40.3 percent were motivated by anti-Black or African American bias,..." Still even if what you wrote was true there were 201 murders in Minnesota in 2021. According to you 157 of these murders were committed by Black people. What does that mean to you? Do you really want to go down the path of comparing the relative murder rates between so called white and Black people? A cursory knowledge of history will tell you white people are the deadliest group of humans to ever roam the planet. The death toll is unimagainable in just the last few hundred years between your worlds wars, genocide, colonialism, imperialism, slavery... please! No group of people are immune to engaging in barbarous acts. To suggest that Black people are more violent than anyone else is ignorance at best and racist at worse.