Some of you may already know why I’m asking. The rest of you, read on.
One of the latest scare stories some of my (even more) conservative (than me) friends and relatives regularly deluge me with involves a town in Michigan where a Muslim mayor has allegedly outlawed Christmas.
It sounded like bullshit, so I tried to look it up. Not only is there no documentation, I can’t even find any evidence that there really is a town called Blairsville in Michigan.
So… Is this even a MORE bogus story than I assumed?
The Bridal Society seems to think it is located at 281 D Young Harris Street, Blairsville, MI. But, by some strange coincidence Blairsville Pack & Ship is located at 281D Young Harris Street, Blairsville, GA 30512.
If a place exists, it’s in a gazetteer, and by “place” I’m speaking quite inclusively: Census-Designated Places, or CDPs, which have no legal existence in terms of local government but are used to locate people for census purposes, are in gazetteers, which already makes them so inclusive they couldn’t fail to include Blairsville, Michigan, given that this is allegedly a town or a city with a mayor and, therefore, an established local government.
Finally… towns have businesses, businesses have websites, and Google finds websites. Google finds weird one-offs, like a bridal business which is apparently in Georgia claiming to be in Michigan, for some insane reason. Google couldn’t fail to find whatever restaurants or schools or hospitals or walk-in clinics or post offices or police departments, and before you claim that there are settlements which lack those things, Blairsville, MI, is allegedly large enough to have a mayor.
Long story short, lack of evidence can be pretty damned conclusive in some cases. This is definitely one of them. We don’t have reverse-Nihilartikel towns which, Borges-like, exist while not being in any documentation.
In the UK, we sometimes get over sensitive irreligious councillors who want to change Christmas to Winterfest or some such nonsense on the ground that it might offend someone or other.
This seems to be driven more by white middle-class lefties who want to write religion out of everything rather than adherents of another religion. A bit like Cromwell who did actually ban Christmas.
Reportedly, the twitterverse is circulating a story about a mosque in Houston that is turning away Christians who were seeking sanctuary from the floods. The mosque they named didn’t exist. These right wingnuts will believe anything.
Well, not just ANYTHING. However, any narrative that sounds like victimhood of Christians is ripe for sharing. They do like to think someone is out to get them.
Yeah, they have trouble believing all the reports of Mosques actually helping Christians.
It bugs me to this day how I could have both believed that the majority of the U.S. is Christian and that Christians are persecuted in the U.S. But, somehow, in my teenage years, I did not find these to be contradictory.
I wasn’t at that address on that road. And to be precise, it was two weeks and one day. I was in Blairsville for the same reason that a much larger than normal number of other people were also in Blairsville on that day.
#1- outside of the biggest cities in the state (e.g. Detroit, Warren) most cities use the council-manager or commission-manager form of government. Charter Townships (like Clinton or Shelby Township) use board-supervisor governance which is basically the same as council-manager. In these forms of government the “mayor” is basically a ceremonial title; the mayor may be considered the head of the city council but has no more power to do anything than any other councilperson. The mayor cannot unilaterally “ban” anything. The appointed city manager handles the day-to-day operations of running the city, but ordinances (city-level laws) come from the city council.
#2 towns and villages in Michigan are generally unincorporated, and are subject to the rules of whatever city/township/county they’re located in.
#3 the cities in Michigan with the greatest number of Muslim, Persian, and Arab residents are Dearborn/Dearborn Heights/Westland, Hamtramck, and Sterling Heights. None have a Muslim mayor (unless you think John B. O’Reilly, Karen Majewski, and Michael C. Taylor sound like Muslims.)
#3 is the big one. it was only a couple of years ago when Hamtramck residents voted in a majority of Muslim representatives to city council, and Fox News had to stir up shit and interviewed (mayor) Karen Majewski and asked her if she was “afraid” of that.
Not only that, but what the hell does “outlaw Christmas” even mean? Sure, some government, somewhere, facing a budget crunch might decide not to spend money on holiday lighting or other decorations, but the idea that a mayor, board, council, governor, or even president anywhere in this country would have the power to banish an idea is absurd, and I worry greatly for the state of our country when such total horseshit gains any type of traction.
You went to the outlet mall, then got hungry and went to that Varsity location for some chili dogs, rings, and a FO?
Cool.
Hope you weren’t inconvenienced by that strange dark period in the middle of the afternoon. No idea what that was all about. Got a buddy who watches a lot of tv that says it had something to do with a hollow moon, though.
I worked for the Dearborn newspaper on 9/11, and we were fielding calls from all over the country (including ABC News) asking about the a)100,000+ dead from riots in the city and explosions, b) Muslims taking over City Hall and murdering the city leaders, c) the public schools sending everyone home because the Muslim students had full control of the schools, d) celebrations in the streets, e) etc. The editorial staff drove through the heavily-Arabic east end of town that afternoon, stopped into a couple Arabic restaurants and bakeries, and the Arabs were as freaked and terrified as anyone, probably morso.
Since moving away from Dearborn to west Michigan, when I tell people (relatively intelligent individuals otherwise) where I moved from, I get something along the lines of a knowing nod and a “Oh, do they have Sharia there now?” or “You must’ve been the only Christian, how did you live there?” or “Yeeeeah, I can see why you moved.” :mad:
People think wacky things about Dearborn, which is really just a basic, relatively boring, yet diverse, community. I’d still be there, except for the fact we wanted to live on a couple acres.