Ok, so I am reading this article about a dude that gets sprayed in the face with bugspray for packing the bug spray in with some food. I am like “Wow that guy is dumb, and wow the guy that sprayed him is psychotic.”, so given his stance, I am willing to feel sorry for him, even though he is a monumental fool.
I guess he just doesn’t understand how stupid his actions were. I mean certainly getting insecticide sprayed in your face is over the top, but please, you got sprayed because you were a moron not because you are (insert race here), even if the guy was screaming “You’re a stupid fucking (insert racial epithet here)”.
So I don’t know why this guy thought it was racially motivated, it seems pretty clear to me what motivated it. Maybe the guy made some racist remarks when he was angry, but I’d be more likely to believe he was reaching for whatever insult he could find that would hurt his intended victim the most.*
However, the motivation is clearly that the clerk was a Grade A Imbecile.
Erek
*For the BBQ Pit impaired, I leave you with this caveat: I know I wasn’t there, I know there were things said that I didn’t hear, it is quite possible that a psychopath who would spray someone in the face with insecticide is also the kind of person that would blame his problems on (insert race here) now flame away to your heart’s content as I have done. This here ends the portion of this post dedicated to the dumb and easily offended.
What the fuck? The clerk made a slight mistake, perhaps, putting a sealed can of bug spray in with food. No harm done.
The customer went fucking insane and sprayed the poor clerk with it. It’s not the clerk’s fault, and he’s not a “stupid fucking (racial epithet)” or a “grade A imbecile”.
Besides, if someone launches into an insane attack with no real provocation, while screaming racial epithets, I think it’s possible, even likely, that there’s a racial element to their intention.
And I agree with Atticus Finch. Packing bugspray with other groceries isn’t dumb. It’s a mistake, or perhaps one of those things that someone, particularly a nineteen-year-old employee, wouldn’t think was a big deal. Personally, I don’t get why it’s a huge deal considering that 1)the can of bugspray was most certainly contained within its safety seal and 2)the other items were in their own protective wrappings.
People need to take a chill pill every now and again. There are a million more important things to get worked up about.
No harm done until you put the bag in your trunk, a soup can presses up against the spray button, and all the food in that bag is poisoned.
You do not put poison in the same bag as food. Period.
I could see a racial motivation in so far as the attacker may not have done this to a person of a “preferred” race. To be honest, though, I don’t care what the victim claims is or isn’t racially motivated, as long as the prosecutor doesn’t decide to classify it as a hate crime.
I don’t understand. Are you saying that the sprayer may have been screaming racist remarks at the clerk while spraying him, but it’s not truly a “racially motivated” attack because, in this instance, he was only screaming racist things to be mean and hurtful and not because he really meant them?
(I wonder why the clerk is saying it was racially motivated in the first place, as there’s nothing in the article to indicate that it was. Maybe it was; it just doesn’t say that in the article.)
Of course it’s stupid to put poison in with your food. That doesn’t mean you turn around and poison someone else with it.
Look at the ages. the bagger was 19. Ok, a justifiable mistake. Apparently the man told him to put it separately, according to the wife, and he still put it together.
At this point you call in a manager and complain. The man was 48, for Chrissakes!
Exactly it’s not racially motivated it’s stupid motivated. The bagger was Grade A Stupid, and that’s what motivated it. Now the guy spraying was a Grade A Asshole.
I was just pitting the guy because I felt sorry for him as I read the whole story until he said “It was racially motivated”, as though his stupidity had nothing to do with it even though the guy who sprayed him and his wife both say that the motivation was the man’s stupidity.
Hey, no one’s saying the older man is not a psycho. I was just pitting the dumbass kid for diminishing my sympathy for him by pulling the race card, when it’s pretty cut and dry what the motivation was.
Of course I don’t know the people involved at all, I don’t even know what races they are, but somehow I doubt that the outcome was determined by the race. I think the outcome was determined because the dumbass packed poison in with the food after the psycho asked him not to.
The reason for the altercation was that the kid ignored his instructions. A compelling motivation for HOW he reacted may well have been he was a bigot who didn’t like the fact the kid was a different race.
People hate the race card. Why hate on the race card? The card can’t help how the world is.
And if his motivation was due to the pesticide being put in the wrong bag, then why is he screaming racial epithets?
I suppose that to you a lynching wouldn’t have been a hate crime either because some black person had the audacity to look at some virginal white flower; and if they were killed over it then that ws just due to their stupidity and not any racial motivation, correct?
Look, if it’s a pesticide sold in a grocery store, it’s not going to be toxic enough to kill anyone. And if dumbasses like Cheesesteak are really so concerned about the potential toxic effects of said pesticide, why is it going in the same trunk let alone the same car as all of your other groceries? Will this pesticide magically become less toxic when the dumbass 48 YO customer from the store is running around spraying it on june-bugs? This was a clearly criminal overreaction by the customer; what if the bagger had put canned food in with the bread; would a can of pork and beans to the head while said dumbass customer was screamin, “you stupid nigger,” not constitute a hate crime?
Frankly I’m not a fan of hate crime leaws in general because they are unclear, hard to enforce, and more likely to be applied against minorities than white people, but if Florida has decided that they want hate crime legislation, then this seems like an appropriate time to use it.
In my opinion the guy was probably just generally seething with rage. He probably hates a lot of things, and if (insert race here) may be one of those things.
Because we like a world of nuance, where one doesn’t think that everything happened to them because they are (insert race here) and that it would be nice if the kid admitted he got sprayed by the psycho because he was a dumbass. It’s like he gets to abrogate personal responsibility by playing the race card. I don’t like that.
Is it a big deal? No. In fact I mostly pitted it because I thought it was a funny cycle of dumbassery that went round and round, and it seems like no one in the story learned anything from it, based upon the way the article is written of course.
No, the kid got sprayed by the psycho because the psycho was, well, insane. He was not abrogating his personal responsibility for getting sprayed, since he has no personal responsibility for getting sprayed. It was ENTIRELY the fault of some old prick who sprayed poison in a person’s face.
Say I merely bump into someone on the street, and this person savagely beats me up while screaming racial epithets. I have no responsibility for having been beaten up, despite my clumsiness, and I’m likely to see a racial motivation.
ohmygawd. I agree with mswas. The whole article is fine, until the dolt puts his opinion in.
My college hang out was a resturant that had notoriously terrible service. To everyone. A classmate tried to organize a suit because he felt they were racist. His proof was that they gave him bad service. Newsflash buddy, everyone got the same service there. Lousy. But the food was cheap and good and the coffee bottomless, so deal with it. Not everything that happens is racist.
Because people’s sensitivity to racial epithets makes them convenient weapons when one wants to hurt them? If it were racially motivated, he would be hurting the guy BECAUSE he was (insert race here), whereas if you are in a psychotic rage, you will find any way to hurt your victim possible, and if saying something nasty about their genetic heritage will hurt them, then you say something nasty about their genetic heritage. That makes it a tactic, not a motivation.
Examples that tug on the emotions but have nothing to do with the current context, are rarely compelling. This one falls into the common category, and is not one of those rare gems that has anything to do with anything. Again I say he attacked the dude for the reasons explicitly stated in the article. The fact that they were seperate races is incidental.
Spray RAID all over your salad and let me know how you feel in the morning. I believe it was a hate crime, I bet the Psychopath probably HATED the Dumbass when he sprayed him with pesticide. I think the race factor probably was more incidental.
I think that the idea is silly. How is it worse to murder someone you hate for being black than it is to murder someone you hate for fucking your girlfriend? I think the clerk was a Dumbass and the customer was a Psycho, end of story. Playing the race card is racist in and of itself, it perpetuates the cycle of racism. Not everything bad that ever happened to anyone is because they were (insert race here). It seems to me that the customer was a little bundle of rage, and that it probably was focused in every which direction, and I’m willing to believe that other races might be a convenient target for him to blame his problems on, but in this case I think it’s pretty cut and dry, he sprayed him with insecticide because he put the insecticide in with the food. That would annoy me as well, what I would do is bag the insecticide for the kid, and leave it at that, but I’m not either of the men in the story.
Maybe the kid bagged the insecticide in the bag with the food out of a racial motivation, and that’s why he thinks it’s racially motivated.
Basically, people play the race card and have watered it down into utter bullshit. Racism is stupid, pure and simple, hating someone because they are (insert race here) and you don’t know anything about them other than that makes you a moron. We all deal with racism all the time, there is no particular focus, it is less and less a motivation for people’s actions as time goes by, let’s let it go and see what the actual motivations underlying people’s actions are. Do I think it’s a factor? Sure, it probably was. But I doubt it was the motivation.
I just get tired of the race card, it’s peevish. Imagine being white, and male and hungry, and not having any cash to buy food, knowing it’s gonna be a little while before you are gonna get paid again, you are behind on rent, and then having some twat tell you how much privilege you get because you are white. Racism in all forms, no matter who it is focused at is ignorant, it doesn’t tell you much if anything about the person in question, and not all things are racially motivated. I doubt Mr. Psycho in the story went out doing something nasty to every (insert race here) that he met in his life. Maybe he did, I don’t know he’s a character in a three paragraph story I read on Fark this morning.
I just think pulling the race card when you clearly did something really stupid to the wrong psycho, shows me that the kid is probably going to continue on his cycle of dumb because he would rather blame racism than his own dumbassery.
Hmm. While I can see that the guy should have followed the sensible request of the customer, I really don’t understand the “you don’t put poison in with the food” issue several posters have mentioned. Presumably the insecticide is in a sealed container, and there’s a good chance the food items are packaged as well. If you’re worried about something compromising the seals and packaging of one or both of these items, surely it makes little difference whether the two are in separate bags or the same bag?
In any case, I don’t think the OP is justified in criticizing the bagger for his opinion that the attack was racially motivated. There’s not very much information in the article cited, and it’s entirely possible that there is more to the actions or words of the individuals involved that would lead the employee to believe what he does about the motivations of Mr. Carroll.
Do you, or do you not agree that putting pesticide in with someone’s food is a dumb thing to do? When I was 19 and I worked in a grocery store, I thought it was dumb. I never did it, because it was dumb. Now, the second thing that is dumb is not being able to tell that the guy is missing some screws, generally nutbags drop a few cues your way, think of it as the nutbag public service.
Survival ain’t a right. You’ve gotta exceed a certain level of cleverness in order to earn the privilege of survival. This guy is clearly riding the line where survival is not necessarily a given for him. That makes him a dumbass. Some people are wild vicious animals, they are trained well for the most part, but they don’t have a leash, and they bite. The Psycho seems to be one of those people. I find I get along quite well in life because I don’t assume that people are civilized, in fact, I’d say that the vast majority are not civilized. I find that this level of wariness helps me survive, I am not afraid to walk down the street at night. I live in a neighborhood where people I know have been mugged, where my white friends who are sheepish get fucked with. Me, I am wary, I locate who is walking down the street and keep track of all the potentially wild animals in my vicinity and therefore no one has ever shouted at me “Hey White Boy, what are you doing here?”, as I walked down the street, as my friend told me last night happened to him twice in one night the only time he ever came to my aparment.
So, you are welcome to believe that racism is as much of a factor as you want, but I find that in the real world, racism is oftentimes overused to gloss over important details of events, a catchall for the ills that befall some people. I think it’s unnuanced, and irritating. The kid was a dolt, he got sprayed for being a dolt.
I seriously doubt that smart (insert race here) would have been sprayed. Now you can argue that dumb (insert alternate race here) might not have been sprayed, in that case then it would be racially motivated. I don’t think it’s because of the kid’s race, I think that it’s because he was dumb at the wrong place and time, with the wrong person.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think the psycho is any less of a psycho. I don’t think his actions were justified, but I also don’t think that the kid was an innocent victim. I think he could have played his part differently and not had the same outcome, regardless of his race. It’s hardly the same at all from bumping into someone on the street and getting beaten up for being (insert race here).