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An Open Letter to the White Right, On the Occasion of Your Recent, Successful Temper Tantrum (2010)
Tim Wise's blog ^ | November 3, 2010 | Tim Wise

Posted on 05/08/2014 1:47:38 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet

*NOTE: PLEASE RE-READ THE TITLE OF THIS ESSAY BEFORE GOING FURTHER. NOTICE, IT IS AIMED AT THE WHITE RIGHT. NOT ALL WHITE PEOPLE. ANYONE WHO THINKS THIS ESSAY IS “ANTI-WHITE PEOPLE,” AS OPPOSED TO THAT SEGMENT OF THE WHITE COMMUNITY THAT IS RIGHT WING, CANNOT READ PLAIN ENGLISH. PLEASE TRY AGAIN.* _____

For all y’all rich folks, enjoy that champagne, or whatever fancy @$$ Scotch you drink.

And for y’all a bit lower on the economic scale, enjoy your Pabst Blue Ribbon, or whatever sh***y @$$ beer you favor.

Whatever the case, and whatever your economic station, know this…

You need to drink up.

And quickly.

And heavily.

Because your time is limited.

Real damned limited.

So party while you can, but mind the increasingly loud clock ticking away in the corners of your consciousness.

The clock that reminds you how little time you and yours have left.

Not much more now.

Tick, tock.

Tick, tock.

Tick.

Tock.

I know, you think you’ve taken “your country back” with this election — and of course you have always thought it was yours for the taking, cuz that’s what we white folks are bred to believe, that it’s ours, and how dare anyone else say otherwise — but you are wrong.

You have won a small battle in a larger war the meaning of which you do not remotely understand.

‘Cuz there is nothing even slightly original about you.

There have always been those who wanted to take the country back.

There were those who, in past years, wanted to take the country back to a time of enslavement and indentured servitude.

But they lost.

There were those who wanted to take us back to a time when children could be made to work in mines and factories, when workers had no legal rights to speak of, when the skies in every major city were heavy with industrial soot that would gather on sidewalks and windowsills like volcanic ash.

But they lost.

There were those who wanted to take us back to a time when women could not vote, or attend any but a few colleges, or get loans in their own names, or start their own businesses.

But they lost.

There were those who wanted to take us back to a time when blacks “had no rights that the white man was bound to respect,” – this being the official opinion of the Supreme Court before those awful days of judicial activism, now decried by the likes of you – and when people of color could legally be kept from voting solely because of race, or holding certain jobs, or living in certain neighborhoods, or run out of other towns altogether when the sun would go down, or be strung up from trees.

But they lost.

And you will lose.

So make a note of it.

Tweet it to yourself.

Put it on your Facebook wall and leave it there so you’ll remember that I told you so.

It is coming, and soon.

This isn’t hubris. It isn’t ideology. It is not wishful thinking.

It is math.

Not even advanced math. Just simple, basic, like 3rd grade math.

The kind of math that proves how your kind — mostly older white folks beholden to an absurd, inaccurate, nostalgic fantasy of what America used to be like — are dying.

You’re like the bad guy in every horror movie ever made, who gets shot five times, or stabbed ten, or blown up twice, and who will eventually pass — even if it takes four sequels to make it happen — but who in the meantime keeps coming back around, grabbing at our ankles as we walk by, we having been mistakenly convinced that you were finally dead this time.

Fair enough, and have at it. But remember how this movie ends.

Our ankles survive.

You do not.

Michael Meyers, Freddie Kreuger, Jason, and that @$$hole husband in that movie with Julia Roberts who tracks her down after she runs away and changes her identity–they are all done. Even that crazy f***** in Saw is about to be finished off for good. Granted, he’s gonna be popping out in 3-D to scare the kiddies, so he isn’t going quietly. But he’s going, as all bad guys eventually do.

And in the pantheon of American history, conservative old white people have pretty much always been the bad guys, the keepers of the hegemonic and reactionary flame, the folks unwilling to share the category of American with others on equal terms.

Fine, keep it up. It doesn’t matter.

Because you’re on the endangered list.

And unlike, say, the bald eagle or some exotic species of muskrat, you are not worth saving.

In forty years or so, maybe fewer, there won’t be any more white people around who actually remember that Leave it to Beaver, Father Knows Best, Opie-Taylor-Down-at-the-Fishing Hole cornpone bull**** that you hold so near and dear to your heart.

There won’t be any more white folks around who think the 1950s were the good old days, because there won’t be any more white folks around who actually remember them, and so therefore, we’ll be able to teach about them accurately and honestly, without hurting your precious feelings, or those of the so-called “greatest generation” — a bunch whose white contingent was top-heavy with ethical miscreants who helped save the world from fascism only to return home and oppose the ending of it here, by doing nothing to lift a finger on behalf of the civil rights struggle.

It’s OK. Because in about forty years, half the country will be black or brown. And there is nothing you can do about it.

Nothing, Senõr Tancredo.

Nothing, Senõra Angle, or Senõra Brewer, or Senõr Beck.

Loy tiene muy mal, hijo de Puta.

And by then you will have gone all in as a white nationalist movement — hell you’ve all but done that now — thus guaranteeing that the folks of color, and even a decent size minority of us white folks will be able to crush you, election after election, from the Presidency on down to the 8th grade student council.

Like I said, this is math. And numbers don’t lie.

Bottom line, this too shall pass.

So enjoy your tax cuts a while longer.

Go buy whatever you people buy when your taxes get cut: a new car or two, a bigger house, an island. Whatever.

Go back to trading your derivatives, engaging in rampant financial speculation that produces nothing of value, that turns the whole world into your personal casino. Whatever.

Play your hand, and for the love of God play it big. Real big. As in, shoot for the moon big. As in, try to privatize Social Security, and health care, and everything else. Whatever.

At least that way everyone will be able to see what you’re really about.

We’ve been trying to tell them, but nothing beats seeing it with your own eyes, so “Go big or go home,” Bubba.

“Git ‘er Done.”

“Cowboy up,” or whatever other stupid catch phrase strikes your fancy.

Just promise you’ll do more than talk this time.

Please, or as one of your celluloid heroes might put it, “make my day.”

Do whatever you gotta do, but remember that those who are the victims of your greed and indifference take the long view.

They know, but you do not, that justice is not for the sprinters, but rather for the long distance runners who will be hitting their second wind, right about the time that you collapse from exhaustion.

They are like the tortoise to your hare.

They are like the San Francisco Giants, to your New York Yankees: a bunch that loses year after year after year, until they finally win.

You have had this confidence before, remember?

You thought you had secured your position permanently after the overthrow of reconstruction in the wake of the civil war, after the elimination of the New Deal, after the Reagan revolution, after the Republican electoral victory of 1994. And yet, those you thought you had cowed and defeated are still here.

Because those who have lived on the margins, who have been abused, maligned, targeted by austerity measures and budget cuts, subjected to racism, classism, sexism, straight supremacy and every other form of oppression always know more about their abusers than the abusers know about their victims.

They have to study you, to pay careful attention, to adjust their body armor accordingly, and to memorize your sleep patterns.

You, on the other hand, need know nothing whatsoever about them. And this, will surely prove politically fatal to you in the end. For it means you will not know their resolve. Will not fear it, as you should.

It means you will take their greatest strength — perseverance — and make of it a weakness, called losing.

But what you forget, or more to the point never knew, is that those who lose know how to lose, which is to say they know how to lose with dignity.

And those who suffer know how to suffer, which is to say they know how to survive: a skill that is in short supply amid the likes of you.

You, who could not survive the thought of minimal health care reform, or financial regulation, or a marginal tax rate equal to that which you paid just 10 years earlier, perhaps are under the illusion that everyone is as weak as you, as soft as you, as akin to petulant children as you are, as unable to cope with the smallest setback, the slightest challenge to the way you think your country should look and feel, and operate.

But they are not.

And they know how to regroup, and plot, and plan, and they are planning even now — we are — your destruction.

And I do not mean by that your physical destruction. We don’t play those games. We’re not into the whole “Second Amendment remedies, militia, armed resistance” bull**** that your side fetishizes, cuz, see, we don’t have to be. We don’t need guns.

We just have to be patient.

And wait for you to pass into that good night, first politically, and then, well…

Do you hear it?

The sound of your empire dying? Your nation, as you knew it, ending, permanently?

Because I do, and the sound of its demise is beautiful.

So know this.

If you thought this election was payback for 2008, remember…

Payback, thy name is…

Temporary.


TOPICS: Conspiracy; Government; Politics; Society
KEYWORDS: 2010; demographics; racebaiting; racism
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

i thought he was black


41 posted on 05/08/2014 2:12:25 PM PDT by teeman8r (Armageddon won't be pretty, but it's not like it's the end of the world.)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet
Sounds like the rantings of a mass-murderer.
42 posted on 05/08/2014 2:13:17 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum ("The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the government." --Tacitus)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

*yawn*


43 posted on 05/08/2014 2:14:25 PM PDT by sauropod (Fat Bottomed Girl: "What difference, at this point, does it make?")
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

Poor fella is gonna jump out a window come November when Americans of all races & creed reject him & his party.


44 posted on 05/08/2014 2:22:12 PM PDT by TexasCajun
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

Tim Wise, who has made a name for himself as an anti-racism activist and author (and appeared on The Stream on Al Jazeera English), has drawn criticism for a Facebook rant that many say reflects his own white privilege.

“And this is what’s funny...every second that fools troll my site, complaining about how I take up all the antiracist space so they can’t be heard, is a moment they aren’t setting up their own website, blog, or writing their own book...but they wanna blame me for why no one knows who they are...it’s not on me sweetheart..plenty of people of color get book deals and speaking gigs each year...if u di...dn’t its not on me...it’s cuz u havent said anything that anyone finds valuable...deal with that rather than wasting time trolling...Maybe another POC blew up your spot rather than me...ever think of that? No, of course not...cuz that would require critical thought rather than simplistic hater bs and stuff u can put on tumblr...seriously, it’s time for people to be told to step off...feel free to jump off the page trolls....or I can bounce you...and would love to...trust me, u will lose this beef..badly...”

“Here’s what...if you’re spending time trolling my page, arguing about my role in the work, u are not doing the work yourself...u r living off the words of others...that’s parasitical behavior, and if u r letting me bother u by saying this, then u r losing the battle to have your voice heard...ever think about writing something yourself? I mean, something that wasn’t about critiquing me or others u don’t like? Oh, and did u ever think about maybe using one font size and color for your homepage? That might help people take u seriously (if u r the individual for whom this statement is intended, I’m pretty sure you’ll know it...kisses)...”

“...and no, let’s be clear, I haven’t been hacked...I’m just tired of trolls who do nothing but attack 24/7 because they think that’s activism...”

http://america.aljazeera.com/watch/shows/the-stream/the-stream-officialblog/2013/9/17/anti-racism-activistgetsbacklashoverrant.html


45 posted on 05/08/2014 2:22:52 PM PDT by kcvl
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

I didn’t know that you could make a living turning left wing racial self hatred into bad prose.


46 posted on 05/08/2014 2:23:14 PM PDT by Mike Darancette (Do The Math)
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To: qam1
" Liberals will be trapped and white Liberals will get the same treatment white Liberals now get in Zimbabwe or South Africa."

Liberal white girl bleed a lot.

47 posted on 05/08/2014 2:23:33 PM PDT by Godebert
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

I Don’t Want Tim Wise As An Ally. No Thanks.

Tim Wise had some sort of meltdown on Facebook recently, for which he later apologized. But this meltdown reveals more than someone angry at critics. Look, if he spouted the rhetoric that he does in a different context, not one where he is paid to be some sort of anti-racism educator and speaker, then I would still critique the White supremacy and White privilege and at times racism that shapes his responses to criticism. But he isn’t some random banker or right wing pundit or someone I critique but realize that the context of their espoused ideology is distant from mine. This is a person who claims expertise on that which he does not live yet rejects criticism. But rejecting criticism when you’re in a place of privilege is very dangerous especially when you do justice work.

This is a part of what he recently wrote on Facebook. How someone can claim to be anti-racism yet writes this is beyond me:

http://www.gradientlair.com/post/61521224722/i-dont-need-tim-wise-as-an-ally


48 posted on 05/08/2014 2:24:38 PM PDT by kcvl
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To: 2ndDivisionVet
Regardless of how much this writer acts like one it must suck to know that you are never going to be smarter than a fifth grader.
49 posted on 05/08/2014 2:25:53 PM PDT by crazyhorse691 (Obama is just the symptom of what is destroying the U.S.)
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To: qam1
Los Angles, San Antonio and Miami will never have anything but a Hispanic Mayor.

Los Angeles had exactly one Hispanic Mayor in modern times (Villaraigosa). His replacement is not Hispanic (actually, Garcetti claims to be 1/4 Hispanic, 1/4 Italian and 1/2 Jewish, but his electoral base is not Hispanics.)

50 posted on 05/08/2014 2:28:28 PM PDT by Lurking Libertarian (Non sub homine, sed sub Deo et lege)
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To: Sans-Culotte

You made me spit my coffee!!


51 posted on 05/08/2014 2:28:59 PM PDT by PhiloBedo (You gotta roll with the punches and get with what's real.)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet
I didn't have to see a picture to know that his front teeth are wayyyyy too good for someone of his ilk.

Either that, or they've already been replaced.....at least once.

52 posted on 05/08/2014 2:32:53 PM PDT by Mygirlsmom (No Mo (zilla). I'm going to the Opera instead.)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

www.DiscoverTheNetwork.org Date: 5/8/2014 4:27:59 PM

TIM WISE

•Self-described “antiracist essayist”
•Views the United States as a nation rife with white racism
•Lectures across the United States about the need to “combat institutional racism, gender bias, and the growing gap between rich and poor in the U.S.”

Tim Wise is a self-described “antiracist essayist” whose career is devoted to condemning the “white racism” and “white privilege” which, in his view, infest America. He also serves as a Board of Advisors member for Grassroots International.

Wise was born in Nashville, Tennessee in October 1968. He attended Tulane University, where he served as a leader of the campus’ anti-apartheid movement, pressuring the school to divest its assets from U.S. companies that conducted any business with the South African government. When Tulane failed to comply, Wise in 1988 persuaded Archbishop Desmond Tutu to turn down an honorary degree which the university was planning to award him. Wise graduated in 1990 with a B.A. in Political Science and a minor in Latin American Studies.

In the early 1990s, Wise received training as an antiracist activist from the New Orleans-based People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond (PISB). Challenging its trainees “to analyze the structures of power and privilege that hinder social equity,” PISB contends that racism “is the single most critical barrier to building effective coalitions for social change.”

Wise’s first job in the field came as the youth coordinator for the Louisiana Coalition Against Racism and Nazism, which was originally founded to help defeat the political ambitions of Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard, David Duke. From 1999 to 2003, Wise served as an advisor to the Fisk University Race Relations Institute.

In January 2002, Wise endorsed War Times, an anti-Iraq War newspaper produced by a group of San Francisco leftists, most of whom were affiliated with the radical organizations STORM and the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS). At a CCDS national convention six months later, Wise spoke on the topic, “Racism in the Present Era.”

Though he held no graduate degree of any kind, in 2005 Wise served as an adjunct faculty member at the Smith College School for Social Work, where he co-taught a Master’s-level class on racism in the United States.

Wise is the founder and director of the Association for White Anti-Racist Education (AWARE). Based in Brentwood, Tennessee, AWARE’s mission is “to educate white Americans about ongoing institutional racism in society; to raise awareness among whites to the harmful effects racism has on people of color and themselves; and to provide the tools for whites to support equity and justice.”

Wise has parlayed his racial angst into a speaking career that has included stops at more than 350 college campuses across the United States, where he lectures about the need to “combat institutional racism, gender bias, and the growing gap between rich and poor in the U.S.” Viewing America as a nation overrun by white racists ever-eager to ambush blacks and other minorities, Wise defines the American experience as an exercise in white privilege which can be countered only by an enlightened vanguard of antiracist whites such as himself.

Regularly posting his columns and opinion pieces on Z-Mag, Wise claims that the ever-increasing prosperity of the black middle class since the 1980s is essentially a meaningless statistical trick, and that blacks should receive preferential treatment in employment and academia.

Wise charges that U.S. troops in Iraq are in violation of Article 54 of the Geneva Convention, by which “[i]t is prohibited to attack, destroy, remove or render useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population,” such as food, water, or livestock.

Wise has made evident his rabid anti-Catholicism, manifest in sardonic criticisms of the pope, of the Church’s position on abortion, and of the pedophilia scandal that rocked the Church.

Wise has compared America’s founding fathers to the Mujahadeen of Afghanistan

Wise is an incessant critic of Israel, which he views as a racist colonizer of Palestine; he alleges that Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons should be considered no more acceptable than the potential acquisition of such an arsenal by the mullahs of Iran.

Wise loathes capitalism; he finds the U.S. prison system racist; he urges a complete overhaul of the criminal-justice system; and he advocates reparations not only to the descendants of slaves, but to all “people of color.”

Preceding the 2004 presidential election, Wise was a signatory to “Bush Can Be Stopped: A Letter to the Left,” which aimed to prevent the re-election of George W. Bush. The letter also appealed for public support for such organizations as MoveOn, U.S. Labor Against War, United for Peace and Justice, and Win Without War. Wise’s fellow signers included Leslie Cagan, Noam Chomsky, Carl Davidson, Angela Davis, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Manning Marable, Robert Meeropol, Michael Ratner, and Pete Seeger.

Wise characterized the American government’s allegedly slow response to Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the heavily black city of New Orleans in 2005, as follows:

“...[I]n the wake of Hurricane Katrina, government at all levels and across party lines has engaged in ethnic cleansing in New Orleans, failing to provide rental assistance to the mostly black tenant base for over a year, plotting to tear down 5,000 perfectly usable units of public housing, failing to restart the city’s public health care infrastructure, and even ordering the Red Cross not to provide relief in the first few days after the city flooded in September 2005, so as to force evacuation and empty out the city …”

In 2008, Wise maintained that the nomination of Senator Barack Obama as the Democrat presidential candidate could not be interpreted as evidence that America had become a land of opportunity for blacks as well as whites. Rather, pointing to the fact that Obama had largely avoided focusing on race-related issues in his campaign, Wise concluded that racism was in fact more prevalent than ever. In a March 2008 essay titled “Uh-Obama: Racism, White Voters and the Myth of Color-Blindness,” Wise wrote:

“Surely, that Obama is constrained in his ability to focus any real attention on these matters, suggests that whatever his success may say about America and race, one thing it utterly fails to say is that we have conquered the racial demons that have so long bedeviled us. And to the extent he must remain relatively silent about these issues, lest he find his political ascent headed in a decidedly different direction, it is true, however ironic, that his success actually confirms the salience of white power. If, in order to be elected, a man of color has to pander to white folks, in ways that no white politician would ever have to do to people who were black or brown, then white privilege and white power remain operative realities ... His success, far from disproving white power and privilege, confirms it with a vengeance.”

In an October 11, 2008 blog entry, Wise warned that an age of fascism would arise if Republican candidate John McCain were to be elected President in the upcoming election. Wrote Wise:

“If fascism comes, it will spring from the soil of middle America, from people known as values voters but whose values are toxic, from simple folk whose simplicity, far from being admirable, is better labeled ignorance, from ‘all-American’ types whose patriotism is a dagger pointed at the very heart of the national interest ... If fascism comes, it will be ushered in by tailgaters at the big football game, by Joe Six Pack ... If fascism comes it will dress like a hockey mom, or a NASCAR dad ... If fascism comes it will have a pajama party at Ann Coulter’s house, pop pills with Rush Limbaugh, and go gay-bashing with Michael Savage, all in the same weekend.”

In 2009, Wise was affiliated with Progressives for Obama, which later changed its name to Progressive America Rising.

Wise is the author of three books: White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son (2005); Affirmative Action: Racial Preference in Black and White (2005); and Speaking Treason Fluently: Anti-Racist Reflections From an Angry White Male (2008). He has also contributed to an anthology titled White Privilege: Essential Readings on the Other Side of Racism (2001).

Wise received the 2001 British Diversity Award and the 2002 National Youth Advocacy Coalition’s Social Justice Impact Award. Michael Eric Dyson has called him “one of the most brilliant, articulate and courageous critics of white privilege in the nation.”

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/printindividualProfile.asp?indid=1874


53 posted on 05/08/2014 2:36:22 PM PDT by kcvl
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To: GeronL

The white guilt is too much for him.


54 posted on 05/08/2014 2:40:52 PM PDT by Delta Dawn (Fluent in two languages: English and cursive.)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet
 photo pepper_cpstaff_zpsbb81fb54.jpg
55 posted on 05/08/2014 2:41:20 PM PDT by februus
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

I'm like, so gay. You listen to me, I'm an expert.

56 posted on 05/08/2014 2:41:24 PM PDT by kcvl
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To: nascarnation
I can infer that not many future Republicans are being born, and the existing Republicans are paying the bill for most of the future Democrats being born.

and that the over-whelming majority of Republicans or better yet, Conservatives, sends their Republican-born or Conservative-born children to government school makes it even worse... many of those Republican-born or Conservative-born children grow up to be Democrat/Liberal voting adults after all those years of indoctrination...

57 posted on 05/08/2014 2:46:27 PM PDT by latina4dubya (when i have money i buy books... if i have anything left, i buy 6-inch heels and a bottle of wine...)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

I remember my first beer.


58 posted on 05/08/2014 2:49:25 PM PDT by Talisker (One who commands, must obey.)
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To: Jim Robinson
Freedom works for everyone.

Except Muslims, apparently.

59 posted on 05/08/2014 2:50:22 PM PDT by Maceman
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

His figures have been shown to be wrong, repeatedly. The birth rate among Hispanics is dropping, and the blacks are aborting their babies in record numbers.
The baby boomer generation may be dying off, and the young people may be voting democrat, although even that tide is currently turning, but young whites aren’t having brown babies.
And no, we never wanted to put children back in factories or any of the other outlandish charges he levels at us. All we want to do is defeat communism.


60 posted on 05/08/2014 2:56:49 PM PDT by Wiser now (Socialism does not eliminate poverty, it guarantees it.)
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