I have started getting RNC popup ads on my computer.
It was bad enough when they placed a banner ad on my webmail sign-in page.
(the one featuring a gesticulating Howard Dean, with the legend, “Democrats Have No Defense”, and which when clicked upon (out of morbid curiosity) appears to indicate that only the Republican Party will defend our great nation during the coming trials, as the Dems apparently plan to replace the military with Beyonce Knowles and a fleet of black helicopters).
Nope, they are now pissing me (and who knows how many other people) off with a pestilential popup ad. This one is even dumber, as it has the gall to trumpet Bush’s achievements in creating new jobs. You know, those vast gazillions of new jobs created during our recent stealth economic surge. All one thousand of them, in a country of maybe 300 million people, jobs dubiously created at the cost of vastly increasing the national debt, the need to finance said debt making less money available to hire other people.
Clue to the dolts who thought this scheme up: Popups are a pain in the ass*. They will not win you friends. Making the ads stupid and sleazy only worsens the situation.
Maybe you could hire Al Gore as your official Internet adviser.
*I have a popup blocker. I may download a better one. I wanna rant anyway.
Excellent! If the Pubbies’s arrogance has led them to thinking pop-up ads are an effective campaign tactic, the overthrow of the Bush regime is assured.
Just out of curiousity: what would your reaction be if it were revealed that the pop-up ads were the work of a Democratic sympathizer, doing a “dirty trick” ?
Well, obviously I can’t speak for all liberals, but for my part I can say that pop ups coming from the Democratic side of the political spectrum would give me a big ol’ boner. We are talking serious wood here. Chances are that I would cream my pants and then be forced to take a sick day so that I could go home and then whack it some more.
Republican pop ups, on the other hand, would cause me to foam at the mouth, bray at the moon and run in little circles gibbering like a chimpanzee that just had a pinecone shoved up its ass. Truly, the only time that I consider pop ups to be a resource-wasting scourge of the net is when they run counter to my own narrow-minded partisan politics.
Shucks, why be hypothetical? Is there indeed a revelation in the offing, or is this just some cruel tease???
For the record: if DNC pop-ups began proliferating on my screen, I would be gushing with gratitude. Yessiree.
Someone needs to up their Paxil dosage.
You should call them and complain! Just keep in mind the RNC is outsourcing their fundraising staff to India (because they care about American jobs), so you might not understand what they are saying.
[sarcasm]
Hey kids! We have a special treat for you today on “Name That Offensive Stereotype”! It’s everyone’s favorite stereotype, “Asians Can’t Talk Good English”! Yay! Those funny little accents are sooo cute, aren’t they? They sound all sing-songy, like that funny little cartoon man who runs the Kwik-E-Mart. Or all broken up, like that Jackie Chan fella or that old guy who teaches the Eye-talian boy that funky kung-fu fighting. Yes, those ignorant wogs and coolies may think they know how to talk 'merican, but really, we all know better don’t we? Some of them lie-beral types may say otherwise, but all they want to do is stop us from having good clean fun at the expense of people who don’t look like reg’lar 'mericans.
Well, that’s all for this week. Tune in next week for our old favorite “Dog-eating Koreans”! Thank you, good night, and gawd bless America!
[/sarcasm]
Count me in the camp that thought Tars was referring to those Indians who do not know English at all (or have at best a rudimentary grasp), and thus would be difficult to understand.
Now that’s just stupid. An Indian, living in India, whose first language is say… Hindi, might very well not speak perfect English. Why the hell would he, if his main usage of the language is in those digital sweatshops known as “call centers”?
Um, most people native to Asia and the Indian subcontient can’t speak good English. 'Cause, you see, they don’t live in a nation where English is the predominent language. Similarly, most people living in the US can’t speak real good Cantonese. That’s not a “stereotype,” that’s pretty much statistical fact.
Incidentally, are you always this stupid, or have you just been drinking heavily today?
I’m confused. I thought we were not supposed to assume everyone in the world speaks English well. Now we are? Or not. Wait, huh?
Here’s my anecdotal study of one incident: When I misunderstood Dell’s use of the phrase “6 months” to mean a period of “6 months” and not some time period less than that, I called their help center. The man who helped me out spoke English just fine, as long as I stuck to the script. Outside of that, he spoke prepared non-sequitor phrases exceedingly well. We had a wonderful conversations, he and I.
By the way, Binarydrone, very very funny. Nicely done!
Where do you get that idea? From the CIA World Factbook:
In the US, call center jobs are undesirable and have low status so that many people who take such jobs don’t have a college education (and I realize that I’m generalizing here). In India, on the other hand, such jobs are very desirable and the call centers are staffed by college graduates.
No, it is a stereotype. It is a stereotype to assume that, just because the call center has been moved to India that all of a sudden you won’t be able to understand the person on the other end of the line. What if instead of India, we said that the call center had been moved to the Compton area of L.A., the Pilsen or Back of the Yards neighborhood in Chicago, Northern Louisiana, or South Boston? After all, those are places where the English that is spoken may not be “of the norm,” either becauase of idiosyncratic forms or heavy accents or both. Hell, the President of the United States and his father were both born in the U.S. and attended Andover and Yale, and neither one is particularly well-known for their command of the spoken English language.
I take offense at this stereotyping because I happen to be Indian. My family happens to be Indian. And my family members in India and in the U.S. speak English just fine. Sometimes with an accent, yes, but so do many Americans, including ostensibly educated ones like the President of the United States. And I generally have an easier time understanding English spoken by Indians who grew up in India than I do understanding most of what comes out of the mouths of a lot of people who grew up here in the U.S. and, presumably, learned to speak English in the U.S. But somehow, I get a lot of people assuming that I can’t speak English, or condescendingly praising me as “so articulate” when I do speak English.
So, yes, “Asians can’t speak English” is a stereotype. Some Asians may not be able to speak English, and I will agree that it is not a native language for most Americans. But there are many, many “Americans” who can’t speak it all that well either, including many who were born, raised, and educated here.
So, are you always a bigoted fuck, or did you just dust it off for this thread?
My experiences with call centers in India is it is a crap shoot on whether you can understand them. So i stand by my claim that you might not be able to understand them. The fact that this is a well documented problem tends to support my side. I wouldn’t give a flying fuck where the call center is located if the people in it were hard to understand, I’d still compalin. i just listed India to make a dig at the Republicans for outsourcing American jobs and because they are the ones who are getting all the phone jobs at the ire of anyone who has to talk to them. I think somebody has been spending too much time at the model minority forums.
My experience in working with people from India is that their English is often strongly accented and can include colloquialisms that we don’t have in the United States. It would be naive to believe that call centers are going to find Indians who speak English in a manner that is easily understood by the average American. This is not bigotry, it’s just the way it is. Regardless of the education level of the person on the line. This borne out in my experiences in reaching Indian Call Centers, which happens more and more often lately.
Additionally I’d like to see evidence that supports the hypothesis that Americans won’t take Call Center jobs. They probably won’t take them at the pay levels that Indians will, but that is a separate contention.
