Fred Hampton

by Wholesome Rage | 7 June 2018

I want to talk about Fred Hampton. The year is 1969.

Fred Hampton is only 21, and one of the most charismatic men of the 20th century. He is the leader of the Chicago branch of the Black Panther organization, and in May he had finally allied the Black Panthers with the Young Lords, the Red Guard, the Brown Berets and the Students for a Democratic Society — whites, blacks, latinos and Chinese together into “The Rainbow Coalition”.

He had started young, in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) as a teenager. From a community of 27,000, he managed to pull together a youth group of 500, working to achieve meaningful change with nonviolent activism and community organization.

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An Article I Hope I Don't Come To Regret

by Wholesome Rage | 31 May 2018

I recently got back into contact with an old friend of mine from highschool, to find he’d gone completely off the alt-right deepend. 

This started with the usual debate about prejudice. Aboriginals in Australia, blacks in the US, he stated that while they were disproportionately incarcerated relative to the general population, it was directly correlated to where you’d expect them to be relative to the crimes committed, and that most crime was minority-on-minority. It wasn’t prejudice, just reality the left found it inconvenient to admit to. You couldn’t say these things not because it wasn’t true, but because it wasn’t politically correct.

These might be arguments you’ve heard before or believe yourself. I freely admit that, when I was younger and growing up in a conservative-leaning family in some ways, I believed it myself. 

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On Britain

by Wholesome Rage | 23 May 2018

Britain and the United States are looked at very fondly by a lot of Australians I know. We feel like we’re sort of sandwiched, culturally, between Britain and the United States. In a lot of ways we are unable to come out of the shadow of either, our culture can often just appear to be a synthesis blend of those two larger nations.

It’s far more common to criticize the US these days. They’re the big, flashy, showy catastrophe right now, with Donald Trump pulling the biggest Leeroy Jenkins seen in the first world. But just because the United States is exploding spectacularly doesn’t mean that the rest of the world isn’t also succumbing to its own insidious internal collapses.

I think, as an Australian, I’m of a unique nationality to point to the seeds of the United States current downfall in Britain, where we share our colonial roots. To have an appreciation of British culture, and see the same seeds in my own nation, without being too immersed or sentimental towards it.

So when I say Britain is insidiously succumbing to internal problems, what do I mean by that, what can I point to as examples, and what can we learn from it?

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