What on Earth are you talking about?
It’s probably best if you do your own research on over-the-weekend activity in the Pit and ATMB.
Sorry to be so cryptic. But as the Bureau of Made-up Statistics has concluded, 85% of board wars begin with a link to another site that is intended to allow the “Good Guys” to observe and marvel at the bizarre beliefs and behavior of the “Bad Guys.”
If I understand the gist of the new sticky in this forum, that’s no longer possible, as the threads have been removed at the command of the Reader. If you’re interested, blowero, send me an e-mail and I can fill you in with my (very limited) understanding of what’s going on.
Thanks for the heads up on that, Miller. Note to self: read the stickys.
I was in and out over the weekend, and still don’t know what anyone’s talking about. If someone e-mails me with the detes, I’d appreciate it. Otherwise, it’ll just be one more of many things about which I’ve no idea.
No, no … please keep your predjudice about my mom and dad, both of whom are the most tolerant people in the world, as is my brother and his family, all from as deep in the Ozarks as you can get.
I just find it ironic that you rail against “fucking bigotry” in your OP while keeping your own bigotry sacrosanct.
I don’t know either. I mean specificly. But as to kaylasdad’s point that it leads to board wars, well that’s why I didn’t (and won’t) link.
Much as I’d like to sic the SDMB on their sorry asses…no, no, no…won’t go there. Wouldn’t be prudent.
But as you want to know…suffice to say while there was some reaction to his statement…and that he shouldn’t lie…there was a lot more general consensus that Islam is evil. And maybe not all followers are necessarily evil. They might just be deluded. But, hey, better safe than sorry.
Interesting.
I know two people here at work that are from the deep south. Both are pleasant, hard working and neither has a bigoted bone in his body.
I know two people from California, and they are both self-centerd, lazy, bigoted jackasses.
Therefore, in my experience, Southerners are quite open minded and nice while CaliBastards are ignorant, prejudiced monkeysquickers.
You fucking hypocrite.
In other news, my email addy is in my profile.
So if, in my personal experience, all Middle Eastern men I had encountered supported terrorism or actively engaged in it, I would therefore be justified in, say, sending around that e-mail you’re pitting? I mean, I would still be prejudiced, of course. But it would born from experience, after all.
[sub]Note: this post is not meant to be read as an endorsement of said e-mail, or the sentiments expressed therein.[/sub]
I’m not saying that I’m approving of the e-mail, but I just read the text of it by putting “Muslim male extremist between the ages of 17 and 40” into a search engine, and it appears to be commenting on the stupidity of airport screening, based on the final paragraph. The idea is that screening solely Muslims would be considered racial profiling, so random people such as Mother Theresa, Mahatma Gandhi, and Jimmy Carter who would never do anything bad end up being screened while Muslim male extremists between the ages of 17 and 40 slip through the cracks. Although there may be a bit of racism, in my opinion it isn’t as bad as the “Don’t buy the Eid stamp because of the bad stuff Muslims did to our country” e-mail.
We have plenty of them out here in Cali, just like everywhere else. We had them in New York, Texas, Florida, Massachusetss, California, every place I’ve been. Fortunately, they were always in the minority.
Here is a link to the history test so we all know exactly what’s being discussed. If you people are afraid we can no longer post links like this, I don’t know why the hell you’d still want to be a member of this message board anyway.
I’ve received that e-mail before and it doesn’t offend me. For the record, I was brought up muslim and my entire family is muslim (except for me, the infidel). I don’t see it as bigoted at all. Where do you see the “fuck the the sand-niggers” attitude?
I see it as being upset with politcal correctness. I think the author’s message is “We know damn well who we have stepped up airport security for, why do we have to pretend we’re looking for 90 yr old terrorists from Pasadena?” I’m not saying we should or shouldn’t profile; I’m just saying there is truth in that attitude. The governments of the world have stepped up security for the Muhammad Attas of the world, not the Timothy McVeighs.
I don’t think it was written with hate in mind and I don’t think your average forwarder of the message sends it with hate in mind.
Three points:
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Capituation: The comment suggesting that bigotry “belongs” in Southern Missouri was an off-hand idea I thoughtlessly through in to that statement. I was grasping for someplace where that attitude would be prevalent, and my File-O-Fax immediately popped up a location from former experience. Of course, my personal experience is valid–I heard those very words espoused many times–but I can hardly say that every, or even a majority of people in that region share that view, and to suggest that it is so is not just painting with a broad brush but actually dumping a 55 gallon drum of paint over the whole mural, and was further compounded by the fact that I was attempting to speak against bigotry in the first place. As neuroman so succinctly put it, “This attitude belongs no more in the Ozarks than it does in the Sierra Madres.” For me to say otherwise and in effect dismiss an entire region is nothing short of hypocritical.
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Apology: I wish to extend an apology to Brutus, Eutychus, and anybody else who was justifiably offended by that comment and moreso my initial defense of it. I don’t care to apologize to everyone who takes offense at any little thing I say, but in this case the comment was not only thoughtless but disingenuous and intellectually dishonest. In making it, and justifying it, I place myself, if not beside the people I was pitting, along the same axis. In reflection, I’m mortified at my behavior.
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Explaination: (but not an excuse) My experiences in that part of the country, and at that particular time, have lead to an unfortunate and probably inaccurate attitude about the area and everyone in it. While I encountered some astonishing acts of blatant and subversive bigotry–to which I would have thought my previous experience would have innured me, but instead left me amazed in their excess–I went on to irresponsibly class a large group of people into a behavior I saw exhibited only by a tiny sample of the people I was exposed to, and not even uniform within that. No collection of singular incidents, however vile, justifies stamping an entire spectrum of individuals as pariahs. Frankly, the prejudice I exhibited is probably more a by-product of things I had to deal with at the time and the results thereof than anything that was done to me or about me.
I was tempted to offer a much more detailed explaination on why I developed this prejudice but I would guess that the details are really only of interest to me, and would only serve to give the apperance of trying to mitigate my folly, when my intent is to offer an unconditional apology. I would like to thank those posters who refused to suffer the intellectual dishonest of my hypocracy and protested to the contrary.
I’m going to go hide now.
Stranger
Hey, you can’t go hide now, Stranger. Everybody’s about to come along and give you some kudos for the classy post.
And x-ray vision, jftr, I wasn’t warning against the notion of a link to the original glurge, just against linking to other message boards
Ahh, sorry. I shouldn’t have posted that when all I did was scan the thread…
I should just shut the hell up now before I embarass myself more, but I’d like to clarify what caused me to Pit this particular item. It wasn’t that this thing was egregiously offensive in and of itself–on it’s own, it is one of those, “Okay and delete” items to which I wouldn’t give a second thought–but it’s part of a uninterrupted stream of racist garbage, jingoistic propaganda, and general anti-intellectual crap that I receive as a kind of internal spam about a dozen times a day.
Most of it is pretty harmless; appeals to pray for this or that, requests to protest against Planned Parenthood, or vote for candidate X, or a joke that starts “A priest, a rabbi, and an imam walk into a bar,” and ends with some anatomically unlikely resolution for the latter. But then a piece comes along like the e-mail I got a week or so ago, briefly mentioned in the OP; a picture of the aftermath of a suicide bombing (at a wedding, I think) in which Iraqi citizens–non-combatants, non-terrorists, hell, half of them non-adults–strewn around the remains of a building, bloodied and broken, with the caption “Achoo!” and accompanying text to the effect that if we could just encourage them to all blow each other up we wouldn’t have to worry about the situation.
I’m not a person that gets upset at every little thing, and although a lot of things on the news strike me as distrubing, I’m frankly far enough removed that it doesn’t cause me any major loss of sleep (though sometimes I think it should), but something like that e-mail makes me boil. Moreover, it makes me sick to think that the people I work with, the “good Christians” who are always pressing at me to go to one of their bible studies and so on, pass this stuff around without a thought, and respond to any question about its appropriateness with something on the order of “Well, they were asking for it.” It’s not true of everyone I work with, but it’s true of many, and disturbingly, of people who are otherwise compassionate and generous, that it just gets to be too much. This particular item was just icing on the cake after a string of comments this morning.
I could go on (and on, and on), but you get the idea, and honestly, I’m more frustrated with myself to remaining at this place than I am at my oblivious coworkers. It takes a lot less time to hit the delete key, or even set up a filter to dump these e-mails right in the trash, than to Pit the stupid thing, but I’ve just had it.
And then I go and say something bigoted myself. :smack:
Back to lurking.
Stranger
I consider myself so very lucky that I have a blue-collar job that exempts me from office email. I’d likely deal with forwards like that the same way I’ve dealt with them from various well-intentioned but stuck on stupid family members, I’d yell and scream and snopes them into submission.
Somehow I bet that’d be less effective in a professional setting than it is with my nearing 70 mother. I feel for ya, Stranger.
and the bartender says “What is this, a joke?”
Alternately
The rabbi says to the other two “Did ya hear the one about us?”
Thank you, thank you, try the veal, it’s fresher than my jokes!
Gee…I used to go to Pasadena often and never ran across the idiots you are talking about, but maybe they hide by day. And considering San Marino next door to Pasadena is chock full of wealthy immigrants and has one of the best school systems I have ever seen, I am kind of surprised at this behavior in that area. One thing I liked about California was the bigots usually hung together in little packs and were usually quiet as they were outnumbered…well, there is Orange County, but other than that…
I feel somewhat proud to have turned my office around during the last election. For years one loudmouth bigot Republican secretary was sending those kinds of emails and hanging dumb signs and posters of the ilk you are describing all around her desk. Once she made some stupid statement and I called her on it. Suddenly, another secretary joined in with me and in a matter of minutes, every liberal Democrat in the office suddenly popped out of cubicles and offices and just went off.
As of that day, the office has been a lot happier and stupid emails have stopped, no more flag-waving posters have been hung, and I haven’t heard a peep from the Republican bully since then.
Up until that point I thought I was in the minority…so maybe you might not be the only one in your office who thinks like you do. Give it a shot…start sending some real facts and watch them squirm as they try to figure out how to respond to truth.
Gee, you bullied a bully. What an acomplishment. Why don’t you cure racism by legislating inequality between the races and solve the education crisis by removing requirement for students to actually demonstrate knowledge?
Oh, wait, you already said you’re a liberal Democrat. Sorry, I guess the above is completely redundant.