Change your lending criteria.
If I lend money, it’s to someone I trust to pay it back. I don’t care if it’s a neanderthal looking for some help, so long as I get my money back.
That said, most of the time I consider it a hand-out rather than a loan and half no expectations of getting the money back.
You seem to be fishing for others who share your views. Answering a question like this, even in the hypothetical, is tantamount to exposing oneself as a bigot, even if that is not the intention. It’s a stupid question from someone who has apparently taken one too many shots to the head.
I hear Stormfront is full of useful advice for lenders.
Where the heck is the OP from? As a Southerner, none of this is comprehensible to me at all. It’s like he’s asking “Would you rather lend money to a Lapp or a Hmong?”
It’s a racial Mad Lib!
Well… I could sell the Negro if he refused to pay me back and see a tidy profit, assuming he doesn’t have the malarial ague as is common in that breed. With the Chinaman I have no recourse other than a sound thrashing and lopping off his pigtail.
Somebody’s gotta do it…Ba-Dum-BOOM! Thank you, and try the veal…
And on a serious note…some of you say you’d rather lend money to someone you know, but I’m of the opinion that that can cloud your judgement sometimes. It’s better to only loan money to someone who is credit-worthy. Of course, folks you know may be entirely credit-worthy, but not always, of course. [/Obvious Man]
Isn’t it usually the Jews doing the moneylending?
d&r
It helps the experiment if the thoughts aren’t retarded.
Yeah, well, a thought experiment is limited by the capabilities of the thinker.
How many Roma and Jews are asking you to lend them money? Really so many that you have to do this kind of thought experiment?
Also, talk about some backhanded anti-semitism.
June 2010. I would have guessed August 2010.
Who says?
Race is in the eye of the beholder; it’s a sociological distinction, not a biological one. If Group A thinks the Roma are an ethnically distinct group, and treats them poorly as a result, then within that context the Roma are a race, and the behaviour is racist.
You don’t think the Hutu and Tutsi thought of each other as different races?
No, the OP’s been starting these kinds of threads for a while. I’m surprised you didn’t notice them. Usually they were about why Africa is “backward”.
This, though, I do not understand. What is a “race”, after all? To me, “racist” is an accurate term for someone who makes assumptions about a person based mostly on that person’s ethnic or national identification. “Race”, after all, is an old-fashioned term for ethnicity or nationality.
ETA: Oh, and some of the posts in this thread have been cracking me up. Congratulations especially to silenus, Shodan, Giraffe and Ogre!
Did no one else note the irony of the username/post combo in the OP?
As a Jew, I’d prefer that you lend money to me.
Race is a cultural term, not a biologcal term, so, perhaps I spoke too strongly, but it is not true that “ethnicity” and “race” are synonymous terms. “Korean” is not generally considered a race, but “Asian” generally is. “Asian” as a race encompasses several different ethnicities that historically enjoyed conquering each other. In the 1700s “races” as we currently describe them were formalized, primarily on the basis of things like skin color, hair color and texture, and facial characteristics, NOT on the basis of culture. Carolus Linnaeus, that great categorizer, described the 4 races as “White European, Red American, Dark Asiatic and Black Negro” in 1735
Typically “Jewish” is not considered a race, as far as anyone considers the race of a Jew it is tied to whatever their underlying race is (ie, Jews from Sweden are White, Jews from Ethiopia are Black), but most American Jews are descendents of Europeans and thus “White,” while the race of Jews worldwide varies. I don’t know that much about the Roma in terms of their origins or the history of how they are considered as a racial group, so I couldn’t say there.
But I suppose you are right, if the OP considers Jewish a race, then he is a racist.
Hey, OP, can I borrow some money?
-Alice The Goonstein
In my experience, most Roma are very, very poor, and have few economic options. There are mahalas with unemployment rates of 100%. Jews, also in my experience, tend to be better off. I mean, I’m a Jew and I’m broke as fuck right now, but in general, most Jews are better off than most Roma.
So if I were making a choice based purely on economics and the likelihood of getting my money back, and could loan it to one of two people, one Roma and one Jew, I’d loan it to the Jew.
If I were making my decision based on altruism, I’d probably lend it to the Rom. Jews generally have more economic opportunities. Being a Jew doesn’t really hold me back. OTOH, if I were Roma, people would be stereotyping me all day long as a dirty gypsy. (You guys. You would not believe the things people said to me about Roma when I lived in Eastern Europe. In America, I don’t associate with people who say racist things, but if I did that in Bulgaria, I wouldn’t have had anyone to hang out with anymore. It was exhausting.)
ETA: btw, the Roma are descended from migrants from India. They very much resemble Indians. I knew one Indian-American Peace Corps Volunteer in Bulgaria; she quit shortly into it. I knew a few Latino volunteers that also got a LOT of shit from people who assumed they were gypsies.
The Gypsy, of course!
What’s the Jew gonna do to me? He’s already using me in his warfare against God-Fearin’ Christian White Americans. He needs me, the ignorant bestial negro, to do all the killing for him. You know, for the inevitable race war.
The Gypsy will put some spell on me or something if I don’t give him some money. I don’t care about getting the money back or not; I just don’t want to turn out like that guy in Thinner. That was messed up.
scamartistry - If you’re using ethnicity as your criteria for lending money, I’ve got the perfect list of borrowers for you:
Eliyahu Weinstein
Lou Pearlman
Bernie Madoff
Tzvi Erez
Not to suggest that Jews are any less trustworthy than other borrowers, just that ethnicity is a very poor substitute for due diligence.