Now, I don’t want to say GENE STONER is a lying sack of shit…oh, wait, I do want to say that.
If you want to start an abortion debate, fuck, start an abortion debate. Why are you lying about it? I mean, it’s been done before, but what the fuck, maybe it will crowd out some of the creationism debates.
While I’m here, I also don’t want to say that GENE STONER is an ignorant bigot–oh, no, wait, I do want to say that. And, since you are a racist who accuses other people of being racists, I guess I don’t want to call you–I mean, I do want to call you–a hypocrite, too.
I particularly liked the way that grammatical inability/unwillingness was linked to pro-choice ideals.
“I am pro-choice, and I am unable/unwilling to finish a sentence, and therefore I must be stupid and uneducated or trying to hide about what abortions are all about.”
well, i noticed right away that the fellow in question referred to california as ‘north mexico.’ that qualifies him for instant asshole status in my book.
Well, there is a state in northern Mexico called Baja California. Maybe that’s what he was referring to?
Seriously, as a Californian, I am proud of our history as a Mexican territory, and our current close relationship with the beautiful country to the south. I am not frightened of bilinguality. If he’s trying to be offensive, it’s not working.
That’s entirely retarded. Maybe I’m not getting something (very possible), but what is the “K” supposed to indicate? You’d think he’d be trying to make it sound Spanishy, but a. California is already a Spanish word and b. K isn’t a letter used in Spanish. So, uh, what’s the point? I saw that when he wrote it originally and it seemed nonsenical then.
Like the related usage “Amerika”, it’s supposed to sound all scary and Nazi-like and/or Communistic–in German, America is spelled “Amerika” and California is spelled “Kalifornien”. There was also the 1980’s miniseries “Amerika” (with a backwards “R”) about the Commies taking over. (In Cyrillic, the letter that looks like a “C” is of course pronounced the same as our “S”, so they spell “America” with the Cyrillic letter that looks like our “K”, which is just as well because “Amerissa” sounds kind of sissified.) “Amerika” and similar deliberate misspellings are used by nitwits of various political backgrounds, including some “leftists” as well as some “right-wingers”.
Just in case y’all haven’t already figured it out from the thread MEBuckner linked to, the “k” spelling variant indicates that the speaker thinks of the region in question as either outright communist or headed in the direction of socialism.
The convention started thanks to a TV miniseries in the 1980s called Amerika. The plot, such as it was, was that the Soviet Union had moved in and taken over the (former) U.S.A… How had they accomplished this daunting feat? By letting the U.S. get complacent and apathetic. (And, it is supposed, by getting some help from no-good Commie sympathizers within the former U.S.) Because the U.S. was now under Soviet control, Russian became the official language – and so, the country’s name assumed its Russian spelling: “Amerika.”
Apparently, right-wing paranoids just adored this miniseries, because the “k” spelling convention became a household word for anything that wasn’t right-wing enough for them. Spelling Clinton as “Klinton” became almost universal. Those who thought that way about Corporate America – once the love-child of the Republican Party but now just too darn snuggle-bunny with those Evil Pinko Democrats – talked about “Korporate” influence. So, a phrase like “The People’s Republik of Kalifornia” fits right in to that mindset.
Oh, and since this is the BBQ Pit: shit fuck piss cunt cocksucker motherfucker and tits
In Spanish the same thing is sometimes done to make words like “anarkia” or “radikal” look ‘edgy’. Probably French and Italian have the same feature too. “K” makes us think of Germanic or Slavic languages - and in Spain itself - it is used as a marker of Basque ethnic pride, since that language uses K extensively. (Ignacio becomes Iñaki…etc.)
Am I the only person who sees this and imagines Kodos and Kang running for president? “We must go forward, not backward, upwards, not sideways, and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom!” That’s a great Halloween episode.
And now back to your regularly scheduled Pit thread…
Spelling Amerika with a K predates the show. I used to write for a lefty paper in Bloomington, Illinois called the Post Amerikan. It was/is one of the oldest continuously published radical papers in the country, having been started in the 60s. Obviously I wasn’t around when the name was chosen but as it was explained to me the name was an allusion to a time after the “revolution,” when the political system under which America would become “Amerika” had also passed into history. Supposedly there’s a Kafka story from which this idea is drawn but I’ve never bothered to track it down. Bear in mind that I was told this some ten years ago and I may have been intoxicated at the time. The usage may have become more common after the show but it didn’t originate with it.
