You Are Dumb - Racism

Slavery Redux And Other Tales

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 21:20:44 -0500

Racism, 9 July 2008

Memo to Jonah Goldberg, Mike Huckabee, and Jerry Holkins: YOU ARE DUMB.

It's that time again. Time for the semi-weekly roundup of the astonishingly stupid things that spew from the mouths of the general public and the punditocracy. Because IDIOTS SAY THE DAMNDEST THINGS.

"There's a weird irony at work when Barack Obama, the black presidential candidate who will allegedly scrub the stain of racism from the nation, vows to run afoul of the constitutional amendment that abolishes slavery." - Jonah Goldberg, in the LA Times.

Holy shit! Barack Obama is gonna bring back slavery! I don't want to be a slave! I saw like 20 minutes of Roots this one time, and man, Geordie LaForge got his ass kicked. This is gonna suck. I'm voting for McCain, because he's a Republican, just like Abraham Lincoln, who I think was anti-slavery.

Wait, Obama was just giving the "we need national service" speech? The one pretty much every politician gives at some point? And none of them actually institute because, well, if we were the kind of people who wanted national service, we wouldn't need the government to make us do it? And even if they did, that wouldn't actually be slavery? Oh.

Man, it's almost as if Jonah Goldberg was deliberately exaggerating Obama's position in order to make white people more anxious about having a black person run the country. I'm sure that's just a rhetorical accident, and future Jonah Goldberg columns will be filled with more of the reasoned, intellectual discourse that made his "Liberal Fascism" book such a hit.

"The thing that many of us loved and admired about Jesse Helms was that, here was a guy, he didn't care what you thought about his view, but you were going to always know where he stood because he stood for something and he stood clearly. I think we're not seeing that in Barack Obama."- Mike Huckabee, Fox News.

Loving and admiring someone for their consistent stand is all well and good up to a point. When it becomes mind-bogglingly stupid is when that stand was, by all available evidence, that black people are inferior. That's when you're supposed to stop the goddamned love and admiration. Not get away with proclaiming it on national teevee. Now, I'm not saying Mike Huckabee's a racist, I'm just pointing out that he does love and admire racism.

And really? Comparing Obama unfavorably to Jesse Helms? The only acceptable way to compare Obama to Helms is to mention how uncomfortable ol' Jesse would have been using the same water fountain as the senator from Illinois. But that won't get you the Rupert Murdoch dollar, which Mike Huckabee desperately needs after showing the kind of political acumen that screams "I'm less appealing than a plastic Mormon and a doddering nutjob".

"The darkest revelation of modern times was that the game would include no player authorship of tracks. The benefit of this feature really can't be emphasized enough. Habitual readers of the site will know that I don't fully endorse Guitar Hero's method of going about it, but as an American citizen I tend to prefer more freedom over less... If one game has infinite songs, while the other has finite songs, the reckoning is clear.... I am a Harmonix stalwart to the end, but they've been outflanked." - Jerry "Tycho" Holkins, Penny Arcade.

Normally I wouldn't categorize Tycho as an idiot, but when the man is wrong, his is a wrong that dwarfs galaxies. To say that he has a bug up his ass about making music with video games is to do a disservice to the entire field of rectal entomology. Never mind that it's a fetish shared by almost nobody else, and more importantly, almost nobody else with talent.

Here, we have him boldly stating that a piss-poor version of the feature he craves, from the people who thought Battle Mode was a great fucking idea, gives the next Guitar Hero game an insurmountable advantage against the next Rock Band game. Which is true, in a universe consisting entirely of Tycho and this one guy I knew on the Internet once. You don't want to visit that universe.

Tycho says that infinite songs is automatically better than finite songs. By that logic, the comments on YouTube are better reading than Shakespeare, because YouTube features infinite user-created content. These are the ravings of a madman, and I hope he comes to his fucking senses soon.

The White Miracle Of America

Sun, 06 Jul 2008 21:14:45 -0500

Racism, 7 July 2008

Memo to Jesse Helms: YOU ARE DEAD.

I grew up in the 80s, and developed my politics in the 90s, so I have to say, learning of the death of Jesse Helms inspired me to question one of the core fundamental tenets of my knowledge. Namely, that Jesse Helms hadn't already died. That's how it is with people with no redeeming qualities - when they're not actively making life worse for the rest of us, it's as if they've largely ceased to exist. July 4 just made it official. But that's no reason not to look back in anger at some of Jesse Helms' greatest hits:

HATING ART: Jesse Helms is probably most famous for his publicity-garnering struggle against federal arts funding. It was precisely the kind of "common-sense" stupidity that the Republicans love to trade in. Your tax dollars are paying for pictures of a bullwhip handle up a dude's ass! How can anyone defend that? Well, because by defending that, you're defending the underlying principle under attack, which is that if the government is going to be a patron of the arts, the government needs to be a patron for the kind of art that WOULDN'T be commercially viable. There's already an infrastructure in place to fund art that Jesse Helms approves of. It's called QVC. I believe they've got Thomas Kincaid lithographs coming up next hour.

HATING GAYS: Jesse came from a simpler time, a time before loving the sinner and hating the sin became a code phrase for hating the sinner. These days, if you cut out the dog-whistling and the pleasantries and state outright that a lesbian shouldn't be appointed to Housing and Urban Development because she is a lesbian, you might get into a bit of trouble. At the very least, the left would force you to apologize and the right would send you a free copy of the Acceptable Gay-Bashing Thesaurus. But sure enough, in 1993, Helms objected to a Bill Clinton appointment on those very grounds. ACTUAL POSTMORTEM QUOTE TIME!

"I’m not going to put a lesbian in a position like that. If you want to call me a bigot, fine." Yet even though Helms gave his permission, it appears that the majority of the media are bending over backwards to avoid calling him a bigot. Even though he was a bigot. Which, by the way, brings us to our quintessential Helms remembrance:

HATING BLACK PEOPLE: Would you like to know how big a racist Jesse Helms was? I mean, sure, he opposed the Civil Rights act repeatedly. And supported segregationist candidates. And opposed affirmative action. And stirred up fear of affirmative action to defeat his black opponent in the 1990 election. But all of that pales beside this lovely quote from Bob Dole. I was watching CNN, and Dole was on talking about Helms' death without trying to mention the elephant in the middle of the room wearing a very large white hood with a slit for the trunk cut into the front of it.

"Jesse didn't move as quickly. Other Democrats in the South didn't move as quickly. Were these Southerners racist? I don't know. I don't know how you define racist."

Let's dissect the living shit out of that, shall we? First of all, "didn't move as quickly". In other words, Jesse Helms was a charming anachronism. A bit slow, if you will. I'm guessing that means "kept dropping the N-bomb every time we had him over for dinner." Next, Dole mentions Southern Democrats. Any time a Republican mentions Southern Democrats, you know we're talking about racism. Republicans looooove to mention unreconstructed Dixiecrats because it gives them a false equivalency when it comes to racism. Never mind that most of those Dixiecrats ended up as Republicans once the Dems embraced civil rights.

But that last line is the kicker. Bob Dole doesn't know how to define racism. That's incredibly fucking convenient. Here we are, shortly after the death of one of the Senate's all-time great racists, and Bob Dole, whose wife is sitting in that same racist's Senate seat, is suddenly unable to define racism on cable news. That's great. I wonder if he's never known how to define racism, or if it's a side-effect of all that free Viagra he got for doing those commercials? They should put that on the label. "If you have an erection lasting more than four hours, or manage to forget the meaning or racism, consult your doctor."

Of course Bob Dole knows what racism means. And of course Bob Dole knows Jesse Helms was a screaming fucking racist. And so does everybody else. That's what news stories mean when they call him "controversial", and say he "angered liberals." That's what Trent Lott meant when he said "He had a philosophy, had principles he believed in, and he stood and fought for them.". And I can only assume that's what Dubya meant when he said "Jesse Helms was a kind, decent, and humble man and a passionate defender of what he called 'the Miracle of America.' So it is fitting that this great patriot left us on the Fourth of July."

I will say this - in leaving us, Jesse Helms showed us the most important thing about old, white, racist assholes. That when they die, there are fewer of them left.

Jingo All The Way

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 19:50:39 -0500

Racism, 3 July 2008

Memo to Rickie Pitre: YOU ARE DUMB.

And you're a dickhole. A huge dickhole. So huge a dickhole that we could catheterize you with a length of industrial drainage pipe and still have to pack something around the outside to keep it from shifting. There is something deeply and fundamentally wrong with you, and I suggest you dig into your psyche and your past and figure out what the fuck it is before you allow yourself to mingle with polite human society again.

Let's place you, a sane, reasonable person, in a... let's say, hypothetical, situation. You are attending a graduation ceremony. The valedictorian, a Vietnamese girl, includes a line of Vietnamese in her speech, and explains it's advice her parents had given her. Her co-valedictorian and cousin also included some Vietnamese in her speech, thanking her parents, who aren't fluent in English.

As a sane, reasonable person, I'm guessing you would think that's nice. As a sane, reasonable person, I'm sure you wouldn't begrudge an honored student speaking to loved ones during that special moment. As a sane, reasonable person, you would have a very difficult time getting onto, and staying onto, the school board in Terrebonne Parrish, Louisiana. Because right after this happened, board member Rickie Pitre and several of his compatriots called for regulating graduation ceremonies so that they will be only in English.

What, exactly, has to go wrong in your brain to make you do that? How much propaganda do you have to be force-fed by racist, anti-immigrant, reactionary nutjobs with microphones and three-hour slots on AM radio? How deeply do you have to internalize the rabid jingoism and the terror that you're being supplanted and replaced by the Other that a few sentences of Vietnamese at a public ceremony force you to take action? And then try, and fail miserably, to justify your fucked-up worldveiw? ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"As board members, we get to observe the different ceremonies and there’s some inconsistencies I think the board or administration more importantly needs to address... I don’t like them addressing in a foreign language. They should be in English." - Richie "Waste Of Fucking Oxygen" Pitre.

First, the obvious. From his sentence structure and word choice, I'd bet that not only was Richie Pitre never the valedictorian of anything, anywhere, ever, but I suspect this whole mess could have been avoided if someone had told him they WERE speaking English, just fancy smart-person English, and mocked him for not understanding it.

But really? "Inconsistencies"? That's just replacing ignorant racism with insane arrogance. You're telling me the school board should step in, on behalf of Richie Pitre and the dozen or so school officials who have to attend multiple graduation ceremonies, so that these officials aren't thrown or confused by minor differences in the speeches and presentations? It's a graduation ceremony. It's not about some redneck school board member's comfort. A point lost on fellow board member Roger DeHart.

"I’m not trying to discriminate against any other language said. We should all know what’s being said." All right. First of all, you actually are trying to discriminate against, literally, ANY other language. That's what requiring English means, you swamp-sucking alligator-humper. And second of all, it's a graduation ceremony. I've been to a few in my time. These people have been to a lot more. Enough to figure out by now that the range of topics covered therein is even narrower than the average mind in Louisiana.

You give me the text of a high school graduation speech from any language in the world, and I bet I could give you a pretty good translation just by looking up the words "future", "friends", "thank you", "important", and "time". They're the E, T, A, O, and N of the valedictorian Wheel of Fortune.

And, you know, this is in fucking Louisiana, where they just now decided that students' academic freedom is so fucking important that they will suffer greatly if they're not told in science class about the evils of cloning and how Jesus rode a dinosaur. Yet strangely, students' freedom gets tossed right under the short bus the instant some asshole hears a word he doesn't understand. Awesome. Way to uphold that reputation.

But Not A Drop To Think

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 21:58:54 -0500

Racism, 27 June 2008

Memo to Rush Limbaugh and Jeffrey Seyfert: YOU ARE DUMB.

There is no greater tool in the arsenal of the professional dickwad than the false equivalency. I've expounded on this many times in the past. It's when someone with an axe to grind treats two completely different situations as if they were the same. They do this so they can compare the reactions or solutions to the two situations in a way that makes them look good and their enemies look bad. It's a classic dick move.

The way you make it work is through the powerful effect that superficial similarity has on stupid people. Take, as an example, floods. If you're an idiot, a bunch of water is a bunch of water. A basement-full, a field-full, or a city-full, doesn't matter. Its all floods, so its all the same.

Rush Limbaugh knows his audience is stupid. He knows this shit will work on them, especially if it can reinforce their existing worldview and prejudices. So while it wasn't surprising that he'd say this, it's still quite the dickly move. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"I look at Iowa, I look at Illinois—I want to see the murders. I want to see the looting. I want to see all the stuff that happened in New Orleans. I see devastation in Iowa and Illinois that dwarfs what happened in New Orleans. I see people working together. I see people trying to save their property…I don’t see a bunch of people running around waving guns at helicopters, I don’t see a bunch of people running shooting cops. I don’t see a bunch of people raping people on the street. I don’t see a bunch of people doing everything they can…whining and moaning—where’s FEMA, where’s BUSH. I see the heartland of America. When I look at Iowa and when I look at Illinois, I see the backbone of America."

Rush "sees" devastation that dwarfs what happened in New Orleans. He sees it. Now, I hate to minimize the suffering and damage from this year's floods, but I wouldn't have to bring them back down to their actual size if Rush Limbaugh hadn't inflated them so that he could praise Midwestern (white) people and deride Louisiana (black) people. So here we go.

Death Toll (Midwest Floods 2008) - 24
Death Toll (Katrina and Flooding) - 1,836
Damage Estimate (Midwest Floods 2008) - $3 - $4 billion*
Damage Estimate (Katrina and Flooding) - $81 billion

Comparing the size of these floods to Katrina is like comparing the size of Rush Limbaugh's daily Oxycontin dose to Rush Limbaugh himself. Both are troublingly large on their own, but it's clear to everyone except racist fuckholes who want to keep blaming the New Orleans victims for their inability to breathe underwater that one of them is much, much larger than the other. False equivalency.

We know why Rush says it. Because he's a hateful bastard and because his audience needs to hear it. And sure enough, the talking point was picked up loud and clear by Jeffrey Seyfert in a letter that the Star Tribune inexplicably made its "Letter Of The Day" last Sunday.

"Where is Hollywood and why aren't they putting together a telethon to help the victims of the flooding? Where is Kanye West looking into the camera and saying George Bush hates black people... The reason you don't see them is it doesn't fit the template. It doesn't fit the template that the federal government is supposed to be omnipresent in our lives and that self-reliance and self-responsibility are mere clichés of days long ago."

No, you fucking moron, the reason you're not seeing these things is that Hurricane Katrina was somewhere between twenty and seventy-five times worse than this year's floods. What you have done, if you'll allow my true equivalency to get in the way of your false equivalency, is damn an entire nation of paraplegics for their poor stair-climbing ability because you managed it just fine when you were on crutches. And if you're going to be that big of an asshole, at least have the sense, like Rush does, to get PAID for it.

So please. Take your lingering resentment, your simmering racism, and your apparently gnat-like memory of recent history and fuck right off back to your comfortable life in Farmington. Take five minutes out of the three hours a day you spend listening to right-wing talk radio and spend them learning to use Google and a calculator, and maybe, just maybe, you won't publicly humiliate yourself like this again.

*There's no final damage estimate as yet, so I took the average of what I could find, and then I doubled it just to be safe. Double it a couple more times and it's still not even fucking close.

Free At Last

Tue, 13 May 2008 18:17:27 -0500

Racism, 14 May 2008
Memo to America: CONGRATULATIONS!

I admit, I resisted. I didn't believe. But I've come around. Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck have convinced me. And so I'd like to congratulate America on eliminating racism. Yay us!

In fact, let me go one step further and admit I was wrong. As a liberal, I thought for years that the only way to truly eliminate racism was time. Over the years, an increasingly diverse and open culture would educate the young, while old racists would gradually die off. Turns out that's a strategy for patient suckers. All you really need to do is redefine actions so that they're not racist anymore!

And if recent reports are correct, two of the last big racist holdouts just got redefined:

NOT LIKING BLACK PEOPLE

This was always a biggie. There's a lot of gray-area stuff when it comes to racism, but even back in the day, not liking black people was fairly conclusive evidence. But thanks to Barack Obama's historic candidacy, this former benchmark of bigotry is no more. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"They won't go for a black man, that's just it. I don't think it's being racist necessarily, they just don't like black people that well. The arrogance and all that bothers me more than black, but black is a close second. Our generation was back when blacks were the back of the bus, and it's hard to change that outlook. I just feel like I couldn't vote for him." - R.K. Horton, West Virginia.

There you have it. And really, that's the tiny concession a lot of white Americans have been waiting for. And now that they're free to dislike black people in a non-racist way, especially in regards to arrogant black people who won't stay on the back of the bus, I think the healing can finally begin.

CALLING BLACK PEOPLE MONKEYS

This was another one that was difficult to topple. Comparing black people to jungle-dwelling animals - something that looks vaguely human, but is in reality no more than a beast to cage and make dance for our amusement - was for some reason seen as offensive for nearly three decades.

But our long national nightmare is over, thanks to Georgia resident Mike Norman. Norman's establishment, Mulligan's Bar and Grill, has for years been regarded as the Algonquin Round Table of northwest Atlanta outer-ring suburbs thanks to thought-provoking signage like "I wish Hillary had married OJ".

And now, some dare call him a racist, just because he's reselling T-shirts he bought off the Web that have a picture of Curious George above the "Obama '08" slogan. Please. As if there was any racism on the Internet to begin with. But I'll let the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's paraphrase of Norman's defense speak for him.

'Norman said those offended are "hunting for a reason to be mad' and insisted he is 'not a racist.' Norman said he sees nothing wrong with depicting Obama as Curious George. 'Look at him... the hairline, the ears, he looks just like Curious George,' Norman said. He said he did not design the shirts himself but bought them through a Web site. He said he views it as just coincidence that the character on the T-shirt is a monkey."

See? People were literally ready to lynch Norman over a coincidence. Plus, as many enlightened commentors from Atlanta pointed out, since we've spent the last eight years calling Dubya a monkey because he's stupid, it's not racist to call Obama a monkey because he's black.

It's almost ironic. After all, it's right-wing not-racists who've been warning us for decades that the forces of "political correctness" would make it so that the most innocent, innocuous utterances from pale, pink lips would get that speaker thrown in jail as a hate criminal. But not only were those fears completely unfounded, the exact opposite has happened, and it's the black-hating offensive Southern white males who've freed us from the shackles of racism once and for all.

Well, except for Jeremiah Wright. That dude is totally a racist.

Zirkle In The Zand

Wed, 07 May 2008 07:09:13 -0500

Racism, 7 May 2008
Memo to Tony Zirkle: YOU ARE DUMB.

But incredibly useful. Yes, I know Zirkle is old news. The story of the fringe Republican candidate for Congress in Indiana who famously appeared at a celebration of Adolf Hitler's birthday, and claimed afterward that he didn't know they were Nazis, and anyway, he'd speak to anyone.

But really, the Nazi thing is just the icing on the crazy cake that is Frederick Anthony "Tony" Zirkel. A man whose campaign website is so awesome the "Home" link is FOURTH on the menu. That's how many vitally important things Tony Zirkel has to tell you about, folks. And honestly, once you dive into the rabbit hole that is Zirkle's campaign website, which is just one small part of tonyzirkle.com, you'll never want to leave.

Right off the bat, for example, you learn that Tony Zirkle has a plan for energy independence. But it's not just any plan for energy independence. It's a plan for energy independence in ten years, combined with a plan to eliminate the national debt (not deficit) in 25. And the name of this plan? "Operation Yoda".

Why does he call it "Operation Yoda"? I was afraid to find out. And then I was thrilled by the possibility of finding out. And then I was afraid to find out again. But I had to know. For me, and for you. And so I looked. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"America faces a national security risk. Energy independence. We are now facing almost $4 a gallon in gas and we risk sinking our economy if we fail to act. In the Star Wars movies, Yoda told Luke Skywalker, 'Do or do not do. There is no try.' I’m proposing an Operation Yoda to do energy independence in the nation without any ifs, ands or butts." - Tony Zirkle's press release on "Operation Yoda".

That paragraph is the gift that keeps on giving. It's got more mistakes in it than the first half of a John McCain press conference. Yoda only says that in one of the Star Wars movies. Technically, he doesn't say it in ANY o fthe Star Wars movies, because Tony Zirkle, setting a new standard for due diligence, got the money quote wrong. There's extra "do" in it. I can only assume the extra "do" came from the "butts" that shouldn't be there either. And not to question the word choice of the nation's premier inadvertent Nazi sympathizer, but is energy independence really something that you "do"?

That's perhaps the biggest crime of the Bush presidency. It's put the idea into the heads of the Tony Zirkles of the world that a basic command of both the English language* is not a prerequisite for public office. Basic pop culture and grammar errors aside, though, what does Operation Yoda have to offer?

Apparently, we will achieve these goals by building really big highways through porn shops. I shit you not. He calls them SABEs, for "Super Auto-Bon Expressways", an Anglicization which I think spits in the face of the memory of Hitler, who Tony Zirkle accidentally loves. We will then announce to the world that we will begin exporting energy, which we'll be storing on "flash drives" that we can use to power everything, because they're reusable and rechargeable.

Lest you think his plan is entirely magic-based, he also proposes building ten nuclear plants a year, the output of which I presume would be used to fill those flash drives that we can plug into our electric cars and go tooling down the Auto-Bon over the remains of every porn shop Tony Zirkle can identify and direct the highway to crush. Did I mention that Tony Zirkle has a thing against porn? Because he has a thing against porn.

"I’ve been getting a flood of e-mails and phone calls, some of which include death threats, about my attempt to raise awareness of how the great porn dragon inspires Jews into pornography and prostitution and then, like the snake he is, turns the public against the Jews. Some have questioned whether there is any link to Jews and porn-prostitution... Let’s save our Jewish brothers and sisters from this tyrant king porn dragon before we get to another world-wide pogrom."

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, when I think of one group whose representation in the fields of pornography and prostitution is wildly disproportionate and excessive, I think of the Jews. But at least with this Jimmy James double-translated biography of a political philosophy you can make some sense of it. Well, with the help of other Zirkle writings, at least. You see, apparently, Hitler would have been denied one of his biggest propaganda victories against the Jews if the Jews hadn't been such porny whores. In other words, Zirkle defends himself from charges of anti-Semitism by pointing at how they were dressed and telling the Jews they were asking for it.

Awful? Yes. Batshit crazy? Yes. Hilarious? Yes. But that's nothing. Here, in what I guarantee is the single greatest ACTUAL QUOTE TIME of 2008, is what Tony Zirkle sounds like when he gets on a roll:

"What goes around, sometimes comes around, and sometimes a Zulu massacre comes right back in a dot com a few generations later to taunt a people in a new, more efficient destroying form of the same song, different dance hate speech. If addiction prone blanches can't get their act together, then all of us who have a shred of justice in our spine may one day have to debate the idea of giving them what their ancestors gave to the natives, the author or whom is still honored with placement on the $20 bill, and consider for a second, before being publicly scorn-burned to a 33rd degree crisp, the merits of exiling them to a 44 state reservation and consider slavery reparations where the 12%, 6 state FL, GA, SC, MS, AL, & LA South shall rise again under the transformed Bible-to-Gospel belt." - A section from Tony Zirkle's "Internet Porn" policy. Really.

Mocking Tony Zirkle for speaking to Nazis is all well and good, but I think it does Zirkle a disservice. It focuses on one unfortunate campaign event, when his entire campaign is so completely fucking insane, Ron Paul and Alan Keyes would refuse to appear with him on the 700 Club. Although, come to think of it, Tony Zirkle is just the guy to shore up John McCain's support amongst hard-core conservatives. He'd make an excellent running mate. Just tell McCain he's a governor from a battleground state, and the Maverick won't notice until at least late October.

*See also: sanity.

Your Guide To Identity Politics (Standard Edition)

Wed, 12 Mar 2008 21:52:31 -0500

Racism, 13 March 2008
Memo to racist Democrats: VOTE REPUBLICAN.

We've talked about Geraldine Ferraro, but what we haven't talked about is Geraldine Ferraro's constituency. It's an axiom of politics, or at least it should be, that no politician will ever do something until the cost of inaction exceeds the cost of action. Thus far, Hillary Clinton has not acted, unless she was involved in Ferraro's resignation today. A resignation that wasn't even FAKE contrite, and blamed Barack Obama for attacking her. Classy.

This means, therefore, that there's some benefit to the Clinton campaign to have Ferraro out there spreading memes of Obama not being deserving of his position in the race, and playing White Victim to False (not really) Charges of Racism. Which means that somewhere out there, there are people who need to feel reassured that, when they vote for Hillary Clinton because they're uncomfortable with the black dude, that it's OK.

These people exist. They're called "racists". But racism is a spectrum, as we all know. These people would never burn a cross, never scream "nigger" in a crowded theater, and, if asked, would show great admiration for Martin Luther King and equality... in theory. But put any of them on an elevator with Barack Obama for three floors, and they'll be checking their purses and/or wallets when the ride's done.

These are the people that bristle when you point out their racism. You will hear them say things like "just because I don't support Obama doesn't mean I'm racist", and that's true, up to a point. The point being where you're not supporting Obama because HE'S BLACK. Last week, Bloomberg (the news organizations, not the Republican mayor who wants to pretend to be beyond partisanship) found a few of these people. Bloomberg called them "Archie Bunker" voters.

I'm not comfortable with the terminology, because Archie Bunker carries with it connotations of beloved television history, and thus glosses over the fact that even by 1970s standards, anyone who acted like Archie Bunker was a huge fucking racist asshole. By current standards, Archie Bunker might not even keep a career in talk radio. But from the attitudes and background described, it's a pretty accurate description. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"I can't support him. When he talks to you, it's like he's talking down to you. He doesn't have the experience to talk like that." - Richard Dorsch, Chicago, Illinois.

Let's examine that statement with the added benefit of demographics, shall we? Dorsch is 53, a paramedic fire chief. Now, he's from Illinois, but even so, odds are Barack Obama has never talked to him personally. And "talking down"? For Obama to be "talking down", he would have to think he's better than Dorsch, and Dorsch thinks that a sitting Senator and presidential frontrunner doesn't have the "experience" to think he's better than a 53-year-old paramedic chief.

And, you know, as someone who, as a matter of professionalism, needs to know what being condescending sounds like, Obama isn't talking down to people. Hell, neither are Clinton or McCain. Politicians can't get away with proper condescension. Even if they're thinking it, and a lot of them are, they get in trouble when they say it. Dorsch's impressions aren't coming from Obama. They're coming from inside a dude who freely admits his kids call him "Archie Bunker".

The other racist Democrat profiled by Bloomberg, Victoria Mikulski, puts it more bluntly than even Ferraro:

"If Obama gets in, it's going to be a black thing and it's going to be all blacks for blacks. Everything's got to be equal." I love that quote. It's so much bullshit in so small a space. It's a very compact, efficient racism. I can only assume that Mikulski saw "Soul Plane", thought it was a documentary, and came away convinced that a black president would be a lot like a black airline - white people would be mocked or excluded, and someone would give Snoop Dogg a job he clearly isn't qualified for.

Well, all you blue-collar, salt-of-the-earth, Archie Bunker Democrats? Vote for John Fucking McCain in November. Please. Even if Clinton's the nominee. Because whether Hillary realizes it or not, there's a name for a political party that panders to the hurt feelings of racist white people terrified that if you give black people an inch, they'll loot for a mile. It's "Republican". We need to win, but we need to win without you if the win's going to mean a goddamned thing.

MLK V. PGA

Sun, 20 Jan 2008 22:38:58 -0600

Racism, 21 January 2008
Memo to Golf: YOU'RE STILL WHITE.

Traditions can be tricky. Every year, You Are Dumb honors Martin Luther King Day by punching "racism" into Google News and seeing what comes up. But this year, I had to modify the search a smidge. Because the last thing I want to talk about is the Democratic presidential nominees' exciting internecine struggle about racist or awkward language. So instead of "racist", I entered "racist -Obama", and every fucking thing was about golf.

Even if it weren't the most racist sport since the South African flaming tire ring-toss, golf would still suck. I have long maintained that the quality of a sport is directly proportional to the ratio of the size of the ball/puck/object of play to the size of the playing field. This makes bowling the greatest sport of all time, at least until foosball gets recognized by the IOC.

Until the invention of geocaching, this metric made golf the worst sport in the world. Acres upon acres of carefully maintained and groomed and locked away from society so that rich people can wander around looking for their tiny, tiny balls. And on top of that, golf has a glorious history of racism. Some would say that's not strictly golf's fault, but just an unfortunate coincidence, due to all the good golf courses being part of country clubs that just happened to exclude black people through the 80's and 90's, Some people also say slavery was just an economic thing.

But we're making progress. Now, when a golf announcer jokes about the sport's leading black player being "lynched in a back alley" by all the young white golfers he's beating, people actually notice and get upset. Even more impressively, they notice despite it being on The Golf Channel, which I assumed nobody watched. As a non-fan of golf, I slid past the Golf Channel so fast the infrared signal from my remote blinked in surprise. And if you -like- golf? Well, as the Sci-Fi channel and G4 prove, there's nothing more depressing to a fan of X than The X Channel.

But someone was watching when Kelly Tilghman made her unfortunate slip, and she got in trouble, and she apologized, as is the natural course of these things. And that's when, "covering the controversy" like a biology teacher at Liberty University, Golfweek Magazine went with a cover showing a swinging noose. Which, at the time I heard about it, I figured was either inspired, provocative metacommentary or an awful, tone-deaf choice from a guy who spends all his time thinking about golf.

And thanks to a post-getting-his-ass-fired interview with AOL Sports, I know which one Dave Seanor is. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"Not so much that people were offended by the image because they knew where we wanted to go with it. But people raised flags that this could stir something up among a certain element of people who might read it one way or the other, and we tried to mitigate that, we thought, with the headline." - Seanor, in response to a question about whether anyone on staff thought a noose picture might be a bad idea.

Now, he's right about one thing. The right text could, conceivably, mitigate an image of a swinging noose. But it would have to be REALLY GOOD TEXT. So what was the headline Golfweek thought mitigated the image?

CAUGHT IN A NOOSE: Tilghman Slips Up, And Golf Channel Can't Break Free

Clearly I don't need to break this to the unemployed Seanor at this point, but that's not really good text. At all. It strikes me as at the very least a bit sympathetic for all those poor white people at the Golf Channel who are now "caught in a noose". But even if it were neutral, you need more than generic neutrality to when you're tossing a swinging fucking noose into the middle of an incident that, by golf standards, pales in comparison to Fuzzy Zoeller's "tell him not to serve fried chicken next year or collard greens or whatever the hell they serve." From, lest you forget, 1998.

The best thing about the Seanor interview is when the AOL guy asks him "What were you thinking?"* See if you can spot the crucial omission in his answer:

"It's an easy question for someone to ask who has never sat in an editor's chair or worked in journalism. We were thinking, as unbelievable as that might seem to people. Perhaps we overthought it in a way. We weren't trying to be sensational. It's interesting that a lot of the objection, 'Oh, they're just trying to sell magazines.' We're 99 percent subscriptions. We're not even on the newsstand."

Yes, that's right. He never actually said WHAT HE WAS THINKING. He wanted us to know he was thinking. And he wanted us to know that he wasn't thinking about sales. But when you drop the noose-bomb, you need to actually be thinking of what your really good reason is for doing it. Not just "thinking" in a general sense about cover aesthetics and the angle the rope should be caught in mid-swing. Even when you're writing about golf.

*Well, technically, he asks how Seanor would respond to other people who are asking "What were you thinking?", but that's such a ridiculously passive-aggressive form of journalism that I didn't think it deserved being in the actual paragraph.

Whole Lotta Love

Tue, 18 Dec 2007 20:15:59 -0600

Racism, 19 December 2007
Memo to Gordon Smith, Orrin Hatch, and Arlen Specter: YOU ARE DUMB.

We are gathered here today to mourn the passing of a great man. Senator Trent Lott may have been leaving the Senate for lucrative lobbying jobs, but now he's headed to the great K Street in the sky. Wait, what? Trent Lott's not dead? Then why the SWEET FUCK are we starting in on the revisionist history? There's a time and a place to whitewash Lott's record, and that's when his racist fucking corpse is in the racist fucking Mississippi ground. Until then, shut your ancient white yaps.

I don't know why the Senate decided yesterday would be a great day to start pretending in earnest that Trent Lott was the victim of, if you'll pardon the expression, a political lynching when he got in trouble back in '02 for some kind remarks he made to Strom Thurmond at Thurmond's big pre-mummification bash. ACTUAL RETRO QUOTE TIME!

"When Strom Thurmond ran for President, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either." - Which sounds nice as long as you ignore that Strom Thurmond's presidential run was based on segregation the way Rudy Giuliani's is based on 9/11.

Now, you can revise a lot of history, but there's no denying the fact that Strom Thurmond took segregation seriously. He even had separate* penises - one for his white mistresses, and one for his black mistresses. Now, given that Lott's own civil rights record is, shall we say, a few scales short of a Grand Dragon, some extremists interpreted Lott's statement as a little "you scratch my hood, I'll scratch yours" back-patting from one hick to another. Thank goodness, five years later, the United States Senate has stepped forward to set the record straight.

"I watched over international news as his words were misconstrued, words which we had heard him utter many times in his big warm-heartedness trying to make one of our colleagues, Strom Thurmond, feel good at 100 years old. We knew what he meant. But the wolfpack of the press circled around him, sensed blood in the water, and the exigencies of politics caused a great injustice..." - Gordon Smith, R-Oregon.

I can only assume the injustice, caused by political exigencies, to which Smith refers were when Smith was forced, against his will, to condemn Lott openly in interviews at the time. Also, "trying to make Strom Thurmond feel good" is not a defense. It's arguably a more serious crime than just being overly fond of segregation. It's like getting out of your manslaughter charge by plea-bargaining to second-degree murder. In the annals of people who arguably should have felt lousy on their 100th birthday, Strom Thurmond stands proud.

"It was really wrong, and it was really hitting below the belt." - Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, who could be talking about any number of actual injustices that have taken place in the past half-decade, but instead chose to use these words on poor, beleaguered, unjustly-vilified Trent Fucking Lott.

"I have seen many comments blown vastly out of proportion during my tenure in the Senate and before, but never have I seen one blown as much out of proportion as that one was... what Senator Lott said was in no means out of line." - Arlen Specter, R-PA, who is, in this case, technically accurate. Well, not about the amount the comments were blown out of proportion. That's complete bullshit. But Lott's comments weren't out of line... for Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday party.

It's all about context. I mean, within the context of Thurmond's birthday party, they could have brought out a cake with 100 tiny burning crosses on it, and it wouldn't have been "out of line". Possibly in violation of the local fire code, but not out of line. The comments were just out of line for civilized society, where we pretend that some of Trent Lott's best friends are black, even when a lot MORE of his best friends are white Senators who will defend his besmirched honor as he rides off into a sunset just before lobbying reform laws make that sunset a lot less lucrative.

*...but equal!

Twatson and Prick

Sun, 21 Oct 2007 22:59:30 -0500

Science, 22 October 2007
Memo to James Watson and John Ray: YOU ARE DUMB.

I'm sure most of you have heard by now about James Watson, famed discoverer of DNA, and his wonderful comments about genetics, race, and intelligence. I'm not going to go into a ton and a half of detail. But I do want to address one aspect of his apology before I move on. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"I cannot understand how I could have said what I am quoted as having said."

I have a theory, but unfortunately, every single story I've seen paraphrases the full quote. The relevant bit is where Watson says "people who have to deal with black employees find this is not true." The "this" he's referring to is what's paraphrased. The vast majority of stories I found identified "this" as a hope, either expressed by Watson himself or attributed to society as a whole, that all people are equal.

Am I the only one who thinks he was trying to tell a joke? A hideous, unfunny, racist joke? "Oh, sure everyone's equal, but you know how it is, guys. The black interns NEVER get the test tubes clean. It's probably some inherent genetic flaw, am I right? Tip your wait staff, I'll be doddering all week!"

But I don't want to dwell on his actual statements too much. He's 80 fucking years old, he's a dickhead, he's pretty much always been a dickhead, and he's being suitably punished. He's had to cancel lectures, I'm sure the book he was trying to promote will suffer in sales, and most crucially, he's had to endure hundreds upon hundreds of news outlets and bloggers falling back on the lame "Elementary, Dr. Watson" ploy for headlines and opening paragraphs.

His statements were crazy and indefensible, which is why I was surprised to find anyone defending him. Honestly, I was expecting the creationists to paint us all with Watson's racist, eugenics-loving brush because he works with DNA and DNA is where evolution plays out. I wasn't actually expecting someone to step up and take his side. And I certainly wasn't expecting it to be Michelle Malkin.

Unfortunately, for the purposes of high comedy, that second expectation was founded. It wasn't Malkin, but rather one of the lesser, lesser, lesser lights of the right-wing blogosphere. One John Ray, contributer to The Astute Bloggers, who ironically manage to misspell both the "Ass" and the "Toot" in their name in such a way that the average reader is led to believe that they actually consider themselves insightful.

John Ray faced a difficult literary challenge. How to agree with a guy who says black people are genetically inferior while proclaiming your lack of racism and not turning the part of your website's motto about "PROMOTING UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS" into one of the Internet's all-time greatest unintentional jokes. It's a challenge he steps up to with swagger and aplomb - neither of which actually help.

"Cautionary note: People have a tendency to see statements about groups as applying to all members of that group. That is rarely so and is certainly not true in this instance. There is no inconsistency in saying that blacks as a whole are less intelligent while also acknowledging that some individual blacks are very intelligent. What is true of most need not be true of all."

That is some fine, racist hair-splitting right there. It's not inconsistent to say that black people are on -average- dumber than white people, because it allows for the existence of the occasional dark genius. You know, like Urkel. Not inconsistent in the slightest. Racist? Yes. Wrong? Yes. Pigheaded? Fuck yeah. But at least it's not inconsistent.

Ray's disclaimer is almost longer than his argument, which is the kind of thing we leftists usually get yelled at when we use it for global warming and evolution - the science is in, no reputable scientist disagrees with the conclusion that black people are stupid, and Stephen Jay Gould doesn't count because he's a Marxist. Yes, I'm paraphrasing, and no, I'm not actually paraphrasing as much as it may sound like.

It's all a huge pile of Bell Curve Turner Diary bullshit, of course. Fueled by a bunch of people who will never admit it, but have been threatened for decades by what the struggle for equality has taken away from them and their position atop society's food chain. An amount that is way too much for them, yet strangely, not nearly enough for us.

American Sinestros

Thu, 11 Oct 2007 22:41:10 -0500

Racism, 12 October 2007
Memo to the Islamopantshits: YOU ARE DUMB.

Stupid fuckers. If you can coin a word, I can coin a word that sort of sounds like the word you coined. And mine's funnier. And it's more accurate. I mean, they seem to sling Islamofascist at anyone brown they don't like. I'm surprised they haven't called Hugo Chavez one yet. Maybe Tom Tancredo told them Chavez was Mexican.

An Islamopantshit, on the other hand, is simply anyone who craps themselves every time they see a turban. then tries to distract you from the smell with all the bluster they have at their disposal. You can generally spot one by their reaction when confronted with any public realization that Muslims exist in America, and may in fact have a life and a role beyond selling white people kabobs and calling them "boss".

Whether it's a foot bath in a college dorm, a mosque being built down the street, or a copy of the Koran, well, pretty much fucking anywhere, an Islamopantshit will run around in circles, pooping constantly and squawking about how the caliphate is coming. You want to know how irrational these fuckers are? They're scared of GREEN LIGHT.

There are only two reasons to be afraid of green light. First, you're in the woods, and it's pouring out of the underside of an alien saucer vessel. Second, you're Sinestro. In all other situations, when confronted with green light, you can feel free to relax, knowing that you are in fact no less safe from terrorism or Islamic domination than you are under a broader spectrum of illuminating wavelengths.

This advice is, of course, completely lost on Debbie Schlussel and "Jack M." of the Ace of Spades blog, both of whom have been picking corn out of their Hanes since they heard the Empire State Building would be lit up green to commemorate the end of Ramadan. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"Do you think this would happen if Rudy Giuliani were still Mayor? Let me give you a hint, Empire State Building. As far as the islamic nutbars you are bending over for are concerned, your 'green lights' are nothing more than a 'go' signal to hit your building next. This is a disgrace. Have you capitulated to the Caliphate already, New York? Is the Big Apple now to be known as the Big Fig?"

It's like he's got a checklist. Giuliani worship, anal sex reference, hope for another terrorist strike on American soil, reference to America being under Islamic rule, culturally insensitive and unfunny pun based on a limited knowledge of Middle East produce.

Jake may not realize that Ramadan has been celebrated for hundreds of years, and is not a monthlong festival designed to celebrate the toppling of the World Trade Center. Americans have been fasting for that month since long before Jake M. knew what "caliphate" meant. Actually, let me change that, because he still doesn't know that. Since long before he knew what "hint" meant.

Of course, the Empire State Building gets lit up all sorts of different colors, for all sorts of stuff. I'm sure if Jake asked, they could light it up in pink if he ever gets laid. It's a New York tradition. A tradition that Debbie Schlussel, obviously irritated at Malkin shooting past her in the Guano Loco competition (Female Blogger Division), manages to take credit for and denounce in the space of a few paragraphs.

According to Schlussel, who is about as reliable a witness as the guy who signed the Tommy Flanagan / Morgan Fairchild wedding certificate, it was her cousin Mallory who, as a child, got the Empire State Building to change its red and green Christmas lights to blue and white Hanukkah lights for one night. Thereby RUINING EVERYTHING FOR EVERYBODY.

"That's why I'm not so sure--even though we were all proud of Cousin Mallory then--that her idea about making a non-major Jewish holiday get equal booking with Christmas, the most important of Christmas holidays in what is has always been and remains for now, thankfully, a Christian country. Because of that, now the religion of hijackers wants its equal footing atop one of America's tallest buildings, too. But, in fact, that religion already lit up two of America's tallest towers, already. And that's the only chance it should have gotten."

I have to say, when it comes to terrified racist rhetoric, Schlussel does not lack in the skills department. "Religion of hijackers"? That's a special kind of talent. In three words, she not only trivialized millions of Muslims, the vast majority of whom haven't even hijacked a conversation; she actually trivialized the ACT OF HIJACKING. Which has a long and storied history that Islam has only contributed a fraction to.

By the way, I hope you liked Schlussel's "light up the buildings" bit. Because she certainly did. She used it THREE MORE TIMES. Once using a picture. I wonder if she's secretly thankful for 9/11 every time she hits "post". I mean, sure, we lost two buildings and thousands of lives, but in return, she got a rhetorical well that never runs dry, no matter how many times she dips into it. Emphasis on the "dips".

Racebating

Mon, 02 Jul 2007 19:37:37 -0500

Main Column, 3 July 2007
Memo to the Roberts/Alito Court: THANK YOU IN ADVANCE.

Now, if you're one of those knee-jerk, moonbat, leftist, limousine, lipstick liberals who I hear control the media, you're probably aghast at the Supreme Court's 5-4 decision next week with dismay. "Oh noes!" you are proclaiming on your Daily Koses... Kosi... Ki? "The dark days of segregation are back!"

And really, that's just racist. Why do they have to be the DARK days of segregation? Allow me to posit instead that the 5-4 decision has, instead, ushered in the LIGHT days of segregation.

Here's the thing. I'm not a legal scholar, so I have to assume that when I hear the majority decided that race couldn't be used as a factor for improving the diversity of schools, I'm the one that's missing something. I mean, sure, to my layman's ears it seems insane that attempts to increase racial diversity would locate students based on anything OTHER than race, but everything I know about the legal system I gleaned from Matlock parodies, so I'm guessing the keen legal minds on the highest court in the land would scoff at my naive, oversimplified "logic".

I mean, sure, when I hear Chief Justice Roberts, in his majority opinion, actually say "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race," my initial reaction was probably the same as yours. Because it certainly SOUNDS like the kind of bullshit homily that would spew from the mouth of a privileged white male right-winger who conveniently ignores power dynamics and social context in order to project his version of equality on a fundamentally unequal situation.

But someone like that wouldn't be the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, breezing through confirmation hearings while noncombative Democrats smiled and pretended to ask tough questions. No, there must be something else at play. And then I realized what it was. The Roberts Court is actually FORWARD-THINKING, and are trying to pre-emptively solve our future Jenas before they happen.

If you don't know about Jena, you should. The short version - a Louisiana school. A "whites only" tree that white students hung out under. Black student sits under tree. Nooses are hung from tree. Fights break out. White kids beat up black kids. Black kids beat up white kids. Black kids get charged with attempted murder.

It's an ugly, ugly situation, and as Roberts and his four cohorts understand all too well, the fault can be lain squarely at the feet of the race-based determination of tree diversity. I mean, the town's population is only 12% black. In a truly equal society, the white kids would get a tree, and the black kids would get 12% of a tree. You know, a bush or a shrub or something. But instead, they tried to achieve a stated diversity goal, and ended up provoking rural white Louisianans to respond in the only way they knew how - intimations of lynching.

Thanks to the Roberts/Alito Supreme Court though, ugliness like this will soon be a thing of the past. Once people stop encountering different people long enough, eventually they'll forget they hate them. And Martin Luther King's dream can finally be achieved. Thanks, Supremes!

Infrastructure Matters

Mon, 28 May 2007 22:07:56 -0500

Religion, 29 May 2007
Memo to Tom Kaye: YOU ARE DUMB.

And you're a fucking cog. I bet you don't feel like a cog, but oh, what a cog you are. You're part of the stupidity infrastructure, and you reminded me why the stupidity infrastructure pisses me off so much.

The stupidity infrastructure is an inevitable outcome of free-market capitalism, you see. There are a huge number of stupid people. Being stupid, they like to listen to stupid things. Ergo, there is a market for saying stupid things, so some stupid people get paid good money to say stupid things to the vast hordes of stupid people out there, so that marketing departments can sell the stupid people boner pills and ranch dressing.

Tom Kaye is a cog in that machine. He listens to stupid people, then, of his own free will, without even due compensation, he rebroadcasts that stupidity to the readers of the Star Tribune letters to the editor page.

The subject of Kaye's stupidity is the recent Pew poll examining the attitudes of American Muslims. In context, the results are actually perfectly reasonable. However, the people at the top of the retarded food chain tweaked the numbers and started yelling about how a quarter of young Muslims want to blow up their fellow Americans. It's not true, of course, but it didn't stop Tom Kaye from pulling out all the hoary old racist bullshit. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"That adherents of a religion claiming to be a "religion of peace" would support the death of innocents as a noble cause is disturbing. Where is the voice of reason within the leadership of this faith that should be calling for the stop of such things? It is sad that my son is in Iraq, fighting for our freedom, while we here at home are forced to allow such defaming rhetoric. This tells me that our country is under attack from within. Why don't Islam's religious leaders take a stand and truly preach the way of peace and tolerance for all?

First, I'm going to go out on a limb here and state boldly that the total number of times Tom Kaye of Eagan, MN has listened to the "religious leaders" of Islam in America preach anything is zero.

Now, when I first heard about the Pew poll, and its finding that 13% of American Muslims said that attacks on civilians could be justified in some circumstances, I was relieved. Look at the wording. Could be justified. In some circumstances. Hell, in any population, the number of sophists who could argue that ANYTHING might be justifiable under SOME circumstances is probably five to ten percent.

Not to mention that we'd just come out of a Republican presidential debate where NINETY PERCENT of the candidates spent most of the time trying to one-up each other and find circumstances under which they could justify torture. Oh, and we've had TWO Christian bomb threats foiled in the past month - one at an abortion clinic, and one targeting Fred Phelps at Jerry Falwell's funeral*.

Because I'm not part of the stupid infrastructure, I saw the 13% number, and even the slightly higher number from the "young" breakdown, as no big deal. Instinctively, I knew that any similar poll of other religious groups was likely to provide similar results. And then I found out from Glenn Greenwald, who is also not part of the stupid infrastructure, that similar polls HAVE in fact been conducted. Recently. And they make Tom Kaye look REALLY stupid.

You know what percentage of Americans believe attacks intentionally aimed at civilians are "often" or "sometimes" justified? 24%. Another 27% think attacks on civilians are "rarely" justified. A MINORITY OF AMERICANS (46%) thinks attacks on civilians are "never" justified. But in the Pew poll, 80% of American Muslims rejected attacks on civlians completely.

That the majority of a country claiming to be a "nation of peace" would support the death of innocents as a noble cause is disturbing. Where is the voice of reason within the leadership of this country that should be calling for the stop of such things? This tells me that our country is under attack from within. Why don't America's political and religious leaders take a stand and truly preach the way of peace and tolerance for all?

I'll tell you why. Because douchebags like Tom Kaye don't VOTE for peace and tolerance. They vote for rah rah kill the swarthies clash of civilizations follow us home, because Michelle Malkin and her ilk told them to. Goddamn infrastructure.

*Speaking of potentially justified under some circumstances...

High Five

Wed, 18 Apr 2007 06:52:37 -0500

Racism, 18 April 2007
Memo to Debbie Schlussel: HIGH FIVE!

And when I say "High Five", I'm not suggesting that I slap your hand with my hand in a gesture acknowledging your achievements. While I'm sure your actions are deserving of some slapping, that's not what I meant.

No, when I say High Five, I'm just pointing out your position on the Maddox Scale from yesterday. It worked out rather nicely, actually. I wrote the Maddox Scale on Sunday and posted it on Tuesday morning. You spent the vast majority of the intervening time being mind-bogglingly stupid and racist. I mean, more so than usual. To the level of a very high five.

The stimulus to her retarded response was, of course, the shooting at Virginia Tech. A horrible event that's already spawning a cloud of stupidity like an algae bloom in a fetid lake. We live in an age where information travels at the speed of light, but knowledge is still hitchhiking on an empty road. And as we see with any breaking news event, that means the Information Age has given way to the Speculation Age.

Everyone wants to figure out what happened RIGHT AWAY. You see it on cable news, around the water cooler, and most of all around the global water cooler of the blogosphere. Add one Schlussellian bugfuck microcortex to the mix, and you have a textbook example of crazy racist speculation in action. Here I give you the actual quotes from Debbie Schlussel's blog, presented in chronological order. First, excerpts from her original blog post:

The murderer has been identified by law enforcement and media reports as "a young Asian male... The Virginia Tech campus has a very large Muslim community, many of which are from Pakistan... Pakis are considered 'Asian.'... was this a coordinated terrorist attack?"

"So who is the shooter? What is the shooter's nationality? What is the shooter's religion? Waiting to find out. And wondering why the police and media are referring to the shooter as "Asian" and not by specific nationality."

"Why am I speculating that the "Asian" gunman is a Pakistani Muslim? Because law enforcement and the media strangely won't tell us more specifically who the gunman is. Why?"

"Even if it does not turn out that the shooter is Muslim, this is a demonstration to Muslim jihadists all over that it is extremely easy to shoot and kill multiple American college students."

I love this for so many reasons. I love it because it starts with the exact opposite of my initial reaction. I was hoping it wouldn't turn out to be someone from the Middle East, precisely because of what it would set off in high fives like Schlussel. Schlussel was hoping the exact opposite, because that way all those students' corpses would at least be helping to support her worldview. And I love it because it's concrete proof, if such was necessary, that Debbie Schlussel is an awful, awful human being on every conceivable level.

But most of all, I love it for the subsequent updates.

"UPDATE: Shootings appear professional, says expert." - Yay! More support for crazy right-wing worldview, coming from... crazy right-wing expert! Who ended up being completely wrong!"UPDATE #2: The shooter has now been identified as a Chinese national here on a student visa. Lovely. Yet another reason to stop letting in so many foreign students." - So, it turns out the police identified him as "Asian" because... he was "Asian". Notice how she immediately, almost on instinct, finds another right-wing cause the tragedy can prop up - dirty foreigners coming here to steal our learning!

"UPDATE #3: The shooter has now been identified as a South Korean national." - And now... she's got nothing. To a high five like Schlussel, South Koreans are almost as good as white allies, because they're threatened by the evil North Koreans.

The whole spectacle is simultaneously hilarious, depressing, and terrifying. Hilarious because she started off very wrong and just kept getting wronger every time the news updated. Depressing because someone could be that wrong and still be listened to. And terrifying because imagine if she'd been right? Not in the particulars - obviously the idea that this was actually a professional hit squad of Muslim terrorists and the cops were covering it up to promote liberal multiculturalism is pure tinfoil hat territory.

But if the kid who'd snapped had been a different shade of brown, from a different part of the world, just imagine what these people would be saying and doing today. Because like Schlussel, they were already getting warmed up and ready to go.

The Maddox Scale

Sun, 15 Apr 2007 22:51:21 -0500

Racism, 17 April 2007
Memo to Racists: COUNT TO TEN.

For someone who really hasn't wanted to address the Imus thing, I'm now mentioning it in three separate columns. Oh well. That's what happens when something like this consumes the public consciousness. Nobody's talking about anything else.

More importantly, though, the Imus deal crystallized something I really think we need in the public discourse - a Kinsey scale for racism. Because when it comes right down to it, being racist or not is a lot like being straight or not. Only a very few people in this world are 100% one or the other. The Kinsey scale rates you from zero to six, with zero being totally straight, six being totally gay, and three being a female sophomore at an East coast liberal arts college. Similarly, racism covers a vast spectrum of attitudes and behaviors.

The reason we don't have a Kinsey scale for racism is simple. All the sociologists know that whoever comes up with one is going to have their name attached to it. And I have to admit, I'd hate to see some redneck fucker arrested for dragging someone behind his truck described on the news as a ten on the Lambert scale. But we need it. We can't discuss stuff like the Imus incident with "racist" or "not racist", because both positions can cherry-pick actions and evidence to build a case. With a scale, you can take calling people "hook-nosed Jews", factor in support for underprivileged kids, and round to the nearest whole number. Math. Is there any problem it can't solve?

But I still don't want my name attached to it, so I've decided to call it the Maddox Scale, after Georgia governor and noted segregationist asshole Lester Maddox. Here, for your benefit and future use, are the various points on the Maddox Scale:

ZERO: Without even the slightest inkling of racist thought. The ideal we all allegedly strive for, a sort of Fred-Rogers-meets-Benetton-ad ideal.

ONE: Ones understand that our society is built on racism, and that we've all had certain aspects of that instilled in us despite how we've been told things should be. But rarely do they allow their reactions to translate into actions.

TWO: Well-meaning but patronizing. Sees "otherness" as "special", and as a result treats their fellow human beings like zoo exhibits, asking them to represent and explain their exotic culture and strange, ineffable ways. Highly irritating, but rarely dangerous.

THREE: Your typical suburban middle-class white. In a nutshell, some of their best friends and co-workers are... "those people". Made uncomfortable by loud hip-hop coming from nearby cars, and wonders why those at-risk urban inner city youths don't just shape up and make something of themselves.

FOUR: Here, for those of you wondering, is where Don Imus sits. While a Maddox 3 feels superior to other skin tones, they can't really do anything about it. Maddox 4s have some measure of power, and exercise that power to try to maintain the status quo where they're on top. Obviously, even within this scale, each point represents a bit of a range - I'd say your 3s stretch from Don Imus to Tom Tancredo.

FIVE:Racists. Confederate-flag wielders. Barely-reconstructed old segregationists. Your Thurmonds and your Fuhrmans. The cop in Alabama you pray doesn't pull your non-Caucasian ass over.
SIX: The Klan. Nazis.

There are two rules to remember when dealing with the Maddox scale:

RULE THE FIRST: The potential for harm caused by an individual increases as you move up the scale, but the potential for harm caused by the group as a whole increases as you approach the middle of the scale, because demographically, that's where the numbers have been shifting in the past few decades.

RULE THE SECOND: No matter where you are on the scale, in your eyes, everyone above you on it is a racist, and everyone equal to or below you on the scale is not a racist. Which is the main reason there's so much trouble every time this comes up.