Potato eating savages would be an ethnic slur in my book. Admittedly on the milder scale but also entirely unnecessary and out of place in a Great Debates thread on American racial disparity. Maybe something you can shrug off in a different context but it’s out of place there.
I’m all for civility in the debate forums, and I’ve even tried to get negative political nicknames banned. I think that drive-by slurs are a bad thing and add nothing to a debate.
However, mild humor like this can lighten things up. I get that it’s a slur, sort of, but it’s such a harmless joke that I don’t understand the warning.
“Potato eating savages” isn’t all that mild. It may have been intended as a joke but it’s equivalent to calling Mexicans “beaners” or someone from India a “curry muncher”.
It was a silly warning, and the moderators likely misunderstood the intention.
As I understood it, it wasn’t intended to imply that Irish were “potato eating savages” (the opposite, if anything). It was an ironic line in the context of the point he was making about low crime rates in Ireland.
That’s the second bogus warning I recall puddleglum getting recently, so I suppose he’s well on his way to being banned for a long pattern of being a jerk. So it goes.
I took it as entirely ironic. If there are any Irish folks out there offended, I’ll defer to them, but I have trouble seeing this as equivalent to slurs that are actually used to dehumanize.
I’ll also note that I get really annoyed with puddleglum’s arguments quite frequently, but I think he’s an honest and good contributor who just so happens to be incredibly, dangerously wrong about politics.
I take it you don’t know any Irish people or know anything about Irish history. I’m an Irish-American, and my great-great grandfather was a refugee from the Great Famine. Considering the centuries of severe repression of the Irish, such offensive slurs should not be tossed around lightly. I found it very offensive.
The poster no doubt meant it ironically, but that’s still no excuse. As e_c_g says it’s in the same category as “beaner,” “currry-muncher,” “greaser,” etc.; adding “savage” made it worse.
One doesn’t need a “cite” to realize that calling any group “savages” is a slur. In bringing “savage” into the description of other people and cultures, we conveniently ignored an ugly history of abuse against Indigenous peoples. It was the standard way of excusing conquest and killing during European imperial expansion.
Right, but in context, he was saying the opposite – they are not savages because, even though their per capita police officer level is similar to the US, their crime rate is much lower.
This is as opposed to slurs like Karen and white trash that are typically used to disparage the target. puddleglum’s usage was explicitly non-disparaging.
Whoa, I didn’t take it that way. Nor did those who reported it.
It was a drive-by slur from someone who’s been here long enough to know better.
And I know my ex-wife’s family - from Ireland (not Irish American) and Irish to the point where they were horrified we gave our youngest a welsh name - would have been up in arms about it. Puggleglum may not, but they sure as shit remember the famine. Not personally, of course, but they’re sensitive about it.
He’s saying that US crime rates are much worse that Ireland’s, even after we’ve had a two-decade decline. So, the Irish are less “savage” than the US.
I hate when people try to probe the boundaries of discourse here and I understand the need for flexibility, but, for example, if France won some battle and someone wrote, “for a bunch of cheese-eating surrender monkeys, they really kicked England’s ass”, I wouldn’t take that as an actual slur against France or French people.
Neither this, or puddleglum’s usage would have pinged my radar at all.
Not really. He was expressing surprise that such “savages” could possibly have gotten something right, when more civilized people couldn’t. It’s like expressing surprise that a black person could possibly graduate from Harvard.
ETA: His phrasing it as “I hate to give the potato eating savages any credit” just confirms the fact that he has disdain for Irish people. I’m astonished that you can’t see how offensive this is.
To me, he was obviously showing fake disdain for the Irish people. Who in America, in the last 50 or 100 years, really have disdain for the Irish? It was clearly irony (or satire?) to me.
That’s a little different. It’s specifically regarding a negative stereotype of the French being cowardly due to their actions and inactions in WWII. I don’t think puddleglum was making his comment based on any known negative stereotype of the Irish. I think he should be given the benefit of the doubt.
I’m confused here. Earlier you said that it was clearly meant ironically, but that was no excuse. What you wrote above suggests you think he meant it literally.