Wow. Huh. So. These have been a few days full of surprises for me.
The first, obviously, was logging on to this here board I spend so much goddamn time on with my morning coffee_equivalent, to be greeted with a blank screen and a ban for “hate speech & multiple warnings”.
So that was confusing - I knew exactly which post that was referring to obviously, but equally obviously I had (clumsily) been engaging in exactly the opposite. That is to say, as many of you understood and tried to explain in this thread : point-blanking what I’d - apparently mistakenly - assessed as a coy, oblique way of spouting racist crap without looking like it with the *actual *ugliness lurking beneath. Because fuck me but that crap is all over the internet these days, and it should look as ugly as it fucking well is. If only to shake people out of their complacency for that kind of stuff. Racism & prejudice, no matter how tastefully or weasel-y wrapped, and no matter who it’s targeting, **should **be bloody shocking in this day and age. It **should **be outfuckingrageous. And no, Colibri, it was not gratuitous - I was making a point, and the word was absolutely essential to the gut-punching viscerality of that point.
TL;DR, if anything it was an attempt at hate-speech judo. Turning the hate against itself and all that jazz. I’m not saying it was clever, or opportune, or tasteful or anything of the sort - I’d just hate to have a red KKK on my SDMB jacket over a misunderstanding. I’m not a racist, I don’t even have a single black friend - that’s how secure I am in my colour-blindness :).
(BTW Grotonian, French does have an equivalent word - “nègre”. I don’t believe it’s quite as much of a nuclear word in French usage as it is in US English, certainly not to the point where we’d coin new words to refer to the word without saying it. That would be cuckoo ;). But it’s still a horrible, hateful word that isn’t acceptable at all any more. It’ll certainly cause screeching brakes and needle scratches in conversation, if you follow my meaning. Which makes it as tactically useful as “nigger”.)
But be that as it may, and regardless of the validity or lack thereof of that stunt, I know I shouldn’t have blown up like a claymore mine at that poster ; and honestly I couldn’t tell you quite why I did. Well, I mean, I know why (i.e. anger at perceived bigotry) but not *why *why. Why a two-liner by some guy I don’t know from Adam, and who it turns out was just guilty of cluelessness, got under my skin so bad. This is the Internet. People being wrong, even aggressively and fractally wrong, is expected. Then you have another cup of coffee. Maybe I was triggered by his choice of username - have you guys noticed how people with digits in their handle always turn out to be insufferable assholes ?
I dunno. I guess sometimes the nigh-ubiquitous rank stupidity of this unbearable world manages to sneak past one’s well-honed sardonic sense of humour and cheerfully hopeless existential despair, and when it does it gets you so goddamn pissed off, man, you don’t even know.
In any event, the message that came with the suspension, to whit “try to control your temper when you come back”, was not altogether unwarranted and I don’t begrudge the mods for it, or the warning itself. Which is why I accepted it when it was issued. It was a fair cop, guv.
Getting three whole months of timeout over it did seem a little harsh, and caused quite a bit of distress this side of the screen (funny story, first I thought I’d been banned for good ; then I noticed there was an end date. The end date for the suspension was presumably automagically provided in the French format, that is to say dd/mm/yyyy ; but this being an American board and because there was no separation between said auto-generated date and the mod note I had assumed… yeah), especially since it was so binary. One day you get a warning, the next boom. No sound, no picture no more, without so much as a by your leave. Being restricted from posting is one thing, but reading altogether ?
It’s quite the brutally efficient “fuck off”, I gotta say. Penis ensued.
Which brings me to the biggest surprise of 'em all.
So I couldn’t log on with my computer, but my GF also has an account, even though she doesn’t post very much at all. Which allowed me to try and figure out what the fuck, which led me to this thread and let me follow it some - though I didn’t dare post under her name for fear of getting her kicked on socking charges or somesuch. It was a great, wholly unexpected surprise to read the “outrage” of the first few pages, the kind words y’all had for this semi-anonymous jerkass who heretofore expected all these shenanigans to have barely been a blip on the radar. Very surreal moment, halfway between a Sally Fieldesque “They like me ! They really *like *me !” and ghosting your own funeral, being floored by those who bothered to show up.
So, to whosoever it may concern, thank you **very **much for that gentle strum right on my narcissistic feels, and your spirited defence which evidently had something to do with why I’m allowed back so soon. Not sure I deserve it, ‘cause, you know, I really am kind of an asshole when it comes right down to it. And I’m aware a few of you only did it for the opportunity to get all up in our semirand() jackbooted thugs’ shit (:p). But regardless, if this were a bar, I’d buy you all a twelfth round and slur-speak how much I love you guys, no but no, guys, guys, GUYS, you don’t understand, I said I love you guys.