You heard it here first, folks: there’s going to be an announcement by a prominent terrorist, and nobody’s going to notice. There will be resounding apathy and people will wonder if the McCain people are behind it.
The McCain campaign really has turned into the Boy Who Cried Wolfowitz.
Good one.
I have to go to a Halloween party tonight with my gf. I almost have her convinced to go as Ashley Todd. 
“It’ll be perfect, sweetie! I’ll go as the mugger, and grope your breasts at every opportunity!”
Yeah, and all that discussion of subtext that we had in English class when we were reading “To Kill a Mockingbird” was all horseshit.
Oh you are asking for it! Don’t you know how inappropriate it is to make light of made-up allegations of sexual assault? You’re making fun of sexual assault!
Hmm.
I guess I can see where you took my post which, in summary, says, “while issues of racist subtext deeply concern me on a regular basis to the degree where even this place is often too racist for me, and I can see where the initial reaction to this event is to call it racist, I have some questions about whether the racism is working in a deeper and more subtle way” and turned it into “HAY THIS IS BOOLSHEET YOO GUYS!” so you could make this “clever” (note: clever is not the same as smart) retort.
Mostly, you would do that by only reading one or two words I wrote and gleefully discarding the rest (and being completely unaware of anything I’ve posted in the last five years, but that’s understandable, it’s a big board). If you’d like to apologize for being a knee-jerky asshole, I’d be happy to accept.
Does anyone have a comment on my question about whether it’s more of a remnant to automatically assign the concept of “big black guy” to the category of racist fiction?
Ensign, you don’t see where
amounts to racism?
The only place where it makes sense that an Obama supporter would be black is in the minds of a racist. Or someone really, excruciatingly bad at math. To spell it out, since blacks amount to less than 15% of America, if Obama supporters were black, he would have withdrawn from the race quite some time ago. If the majority of Obama supporters were black, he would be losing handily. The majority of Obama supporters are not black.
Did Todd have a hallucination? We don’t know. Did she think that everyone around her would believe her if she said a blackety-black man attacked her for being a McCain supporter? Yes.
The key word is imaginary. No, I don’t see that it automatically amounts to racism for an uninformed, mentally ill McCain supporter to think that black people support Obama. Your point about her assuming that she’d be believed if she invented a black assailant has some merit, but there seem to be indications that she’s just fucking crazy and didn’t put any thought into getting away with it. Can we really call people’s involuntary delusions racist? If someone with Tourette’s can’t help but start shouting the n-word, is that racist?
Perhaps it’s a remnant of a society in which ‘passive’ racism is deeply rooted in all aspects of life. That might be what’s bothering me; so very many posters here will vigorously attack any suggestion that racism is entrenched in this culture, but everybody seems happy for once to make one obviously sick person a scapegoat for all the white nervousness over the cartoonish Scary Black Guy which at one point, even just ten years ago perhaps, would have also been defended on this board as being a realistic fear.
If the story were about a black person claiming a white person attacked her, I strongly suspect a lot of posters here would be fighting vigorously to pick apart any claims of racism from the black person, as usual.
Do we have evidence that this gal is mentally ill, or is this just a convenient, mitigating excuse which can be trotted out whenever someone does something really nasty?
Yes, she has a history of mental illness, as has been stated in every single article about this. Furthermore, she made no effort to support her story or conceal her lies. She made very easily disproved statements with no sign of awareness that reality existed and would soon crash the party. This is a strong sign that she’s just crazy and had no plan to actually get away with any of it. She showed less mental organization than frickin’ Andrea Yates for crying out loud.
i believe we have officially seen the start of what sen. obama called “the silly season” in politics.
beware of flying sinks!!
I’m not sure whether she does or not, but we should be clear that she told the police she has a history of mental illness. It’s not established that she actually does.
She didn’t? What was that black eye? I also wonder what the heck the police were talking about for six hours with her.
Again, I don’t know one way or the other, but this behavior could just as easily be the result of “stupid” as it could be “mentally ill.” In fact, painting that shiner on her face probably took quite a while, and that argues more for stupid than for mentally ill.
Really? No, not really. That last bit is sheer nonsense.
Adding a whole prelude to an ignorant comment doesn’t make it any less ignorant. When people say, “I’m not a racist, but…” it doesn’t render their next comment non-racist. Similarly, saying “Some of my best friends are black” does not magically confer non-racist status on one’s opinions.
Note: I’m not saying that your question makes you a racist. It’s a fine question in that sense. It’s just a very silly one that is not mitigated by your fine self-assessed history of being overcome by racial issues, and one that you apparently recognized when you were composing your post. So why you are all in a tizzy with me for also recognizing that, I don’t know.
I’m having some trouble parsing this sentence, but yeah, invoking the blackety-black boogie man when fabricating a crime is pretty much a hallmark racist act, with a long and torturous American history that my “clever” comment was intended to allude to.
Okay, so in the positive column we have claims of mental illness the police believed enough to repeat to the press. What evidence do you have in your column which supports the version where she’s just lying?
Delusional people can easily do stuff like that without any conscious intent to deceive. It’s also possible it was a real bruise from something else, though I also thought it looked fake and might have missed if verification that it was has been found.
It could also be a brain tumor or an alien mind control ray. Somebody from the McCain campaign could have hired her. You’re right: there are possibilities. But before we seize on them, perhaps we should have some kind of evidence, or at least some kind of refutation of the counter-evidence we already have. Also, six hours is a pretty short time to spend with the cops. Have you ever given a statement? There’s a lot of sitting around and waiting involved, and the actual process of being questioned can go on and on and on even in simple cases.
Quite really. Andrea Yates planned to kill her children and carefully waited until no one was around to stop her, then called the police as soon as she was done. She was undeniably crazy, hospitalized many times, suddenly yanked off addictive meds the week before, and she still managed to put together a reasonable plan of action that got her goal accomplished.
Ms. Todd just dove headfirst into her delusion, including details that even stupid people would realize were stupid, like saying she was at an ATM which everyone above the mental age of five knows have cameras.
Saying it’s a silly question doesn’t make it so. It just makes you unwilling to look past your knee-jerk response. I outlined my usual reaction to claims of racism because I’m keenly aware of the contingent of posters who show up to deny every single race-related claim and it’s important to me that I never be mistaken for one of them. If I saw someone else saying this event wasn’t racist and didn’t myself agree, I would probably assume they were just one of those who always denies racism exists, so I took pains to make sure it was clear my questioning was not coming from a basic denier position.
You’re not making a lot of sense. Bringing up blatant examples of subtextual racism as if to refute my entire position clearly indicates that despite what you typed above, you do believe my position is that the Big Scary Black imagery is never racist and my overall claim is that such subtextual racism is not real. In other words, the very argument the personal notes you chided me for providing were intended to deflect.
Could you point out that diagnosis in the DSM IV TR?
Todd’s hypothetical assailant was “just black”, and now we should uncritically replace that thought with the thought that Todd herself was “just crazy”?
Her boss in the College National Republican Committee seems to think she was a pretty effective recruiter:
Is that also a sign of her craziness?
Are you aware that crazy people can suffer episodically, and that some of them don’t spend their lives wandering the streets in ashes and sack-cloth screaming about sperm, revelations and gravity?
No, I don’t know her diagnosis, which the press and police didn’t see fit to include in the coverage. I don’t see what that has to do with whether a layman can decide if a person’s actions indicate a lack of mental wellness. It’s not like I’m inventing the idea that she’s crazy like some people are inventing the idea that she intentionally acted to stir up racial discord.
I think blatant subtext is a contradiction in terms, although I really don’t want to derail this argument further by arguing about it. Suffice to say that whether it was created by calculation or psychosis, the size, color, and brutality of the “Obama supporter” were no accident.
Hah, you’re right, “blatant subtext” is a funny phrase to invoke. All right, make it “easily uncovered subtext”. And I agree – I was never saying it was an accident, just that holding one mentally ill person accountable makes me suspect that a lot of people would prefer easy scapegoats for entrenched societal racism.