Tag: Muhammad Ali

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The movement to “decolonize the curriculum” has become something of an orthodoxy in Western universities. Its proponents argue that the academy has been shaped by Eurocentric assumptions, and that non-Western knowledge traditions deserve greater prominence. Yet the movement’s loudest advocates display a curious blind spot: they appear wholly impervious to the remarkable, and largely unthanked, role that Western scholars played in recovering, preserving, and transmitting much of the very non-Western knowledge they now wish to celebrate. (more…)

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Muhammad Ali, widely regarded as the world’s most famous man, died in June 2016 at age 74. Born Cassius Marcellus Clay, he was a titan both as a boxer and a provocateur.

Because we live in an era much weaker and more sensitive than it was during Ali’s prime, his death is being eulogized with the sort of solemn, sanctimony-addled, weak-tea, low-T, hagiographic twaddle we’ve come to expect from neutered zombie bloggers on antidepressants. (more…)

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The white race has been losing ground in a lot of areas over the last several decades, but there is one area where there has been stunning progress, and it’s one that nobody would have guessed 50 years ago: heavyweight boxing. Three of the four major heavyweight boxing titles — World Boxing Association, World Boxing Organization, and International Boxing Federation — are currently held by a white guy, (more…)

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As Black History Month slowly creeps up on us like four straight weeks of rape and basketball, I find it incumbent to remind everyone that since a strict definition of “history” means “events that were recorded” rather than simply “events that happened,” there is very little actual history from sub-Saharan Africa because its denizens were so hopelessly backwards, they never got around to inventing simple things such as written languages with which to record the things that were happening around them. (more…)

Hunter passed out drunk while covering an event as a journalist circa 1960.

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Part 3 of 7 (Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 4 here)

3. Gonzo: What Happened? — Decline and Fall of Gonzo

As Thompson charts Hemingway’s road from literary brilliance to failure and suicide, he maps out his own path for the future. (more…)

Don Rickles. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia  Commons

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The 1970s and 1980s was an odd time for stand-up comedy. During this 20-year period, we saw the rise and glory years of what I would call racial humor. I define racial humor in this sense as jokes told by a racially aware comic that play upon or make fun of racial stereotypes. A comic can make fun of his own race just as easily as any other, but in all cases impresses upon the audience that his own race is one reason why the joke is funny to begin with. (more…)

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Mayo Monkeys, Your Time is Up

In a possibly apocryphal quote, Muhammad Ali allegedly explained why he refused to be drafted into the US Armed Forces to fight in Vietnam: “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong. No Viet Cong ever called me nigger.”

Okay, but had he ever spent any time around the Viet Cong? (more…)