Your post made me crave n’dole something fierce! Where’s my n’dole!? Where’s my plaintains frite!?
I’m glad people are finally getting what they have to say off their chests.
I know X amount of people are going to find what I say fascinating and Y amount of people are going to be annoyed to hell. Since all that’s being spent here is bytes, I figure the value to the people who find it interesting outweighs the ten seconds the people who find it annoying spend on my posts.
I guess it’s true that my rage wasn’t really entirely at dear lezlers, although she has quite beautifully illustrated how ridiculously easily butthurt she gets. I felt like if there is some big mass of resentment against me, might as well get it out there!
And kidneyfailure? Will you tell us one day who is paying you?
Don’t apologize; you’re not disappointing anyone. You’re providing people with information they didn’t have before. I knew you weren’t a lesbian the minute I read the OP in the other thread, when you mentioned your husband.
I just think you need to get your facts straight and stop passing your opinion off as if it was holy writ that must be true. And apparently I’m not alone in thinking that.
Aw, c’mon; if there’s ever been a harmonious society (and I’m not sayng there has, mind you), it’s gotta be here on the Dope. Smartest, hippest people on the planet, remember?
Speaking of lesbians, I guess it’s your party, and you can cry if you want to. And by cry, I mean that you can bitch and moan about how mean people are while taking potshots at the “mean people” and their dead horses. That horse was my fucking friend, you goddamned bitch! How dare you make light of my my dead pets?
And really, if you’re so offended by a wee bit o’ the rough and tumble, quit reading and participating in the thread, you douchey abortion.
(P.S.: the whole “I was like, bi for a several months, so obviously I love the gays” thing? Attention whore ahoy!
Uh, no. I do, however, believe that most Chinese people are good people and aren’t vitriolic racists working for the genocidal destruction of all non-Han. And they aren’t, even in Tibet. Don’t even try and claim that you didn’t say that, because you did. You said China was “Manifest Destiny” America, you said that no Chinese would ever except a Tibetan as a true Chinese, both stupid statements and both about as inaccurate as could be.
Y’see even_sven, I’ve met alot of foreigners in the years I’ve lived here. Many of them were as you seem to be: arrogant Westerners who knew little to nothing about China before they came here other than what they heard on TV. Therefore, they already had their minds made up about this place and then, subconsciously perhaps, while in China sought out “proof” that would make their confirmation bias seem true to them. After they managed to find some racist moron somewhere who they could point to and go “OMG, RACISM,” they then applied it to the whole of China. That’s what you did and what you continue to do. I’ve heard it a million times from others and you’re just another groove in that broken record. You’re just another one of those foreigners who comes to China and has the gall to think that they know this country and what’s best for it better than the people who have spent their entire lives here.
Now, you may be asking yourself why I care so much about this. Fair question. Why do I care when people shittalk China and slander it with bullshit lies? Because China is my home now and has been for quite a while. I have a family here, a career here, I own property here, I have a life here and I’ll still be here long after you’ve left and forgotten all about this place. This is my HOME and I don’t have much patience for people who come here for 24 months and then feel like they’re entitled to open their mouths about this place. This is the same feeling I feel when I hear Chinese people say ignorant, stupid things about America (which is also my country). I once had a student tell me that “All white people in America hate blacks.” I straightened her out about that. So, naturally, when I read some tool say that “Chinese would never consider Tibetans to be real Chinese” I’m also going to straighten that out because I know both of those statements to be totally false.
Another thing that bothers me about people like you is that you bring your arrogance here and piss off Chinese people with your moralizing which leads them, in turn, to think that we’re all like that: all people who just want to tell the Chinese how to deal with Tibet, with Xinjiang, with Taiwan, and all that other bullshit. That might not mean anything to YOU because you’ll leave someday and you wont care anymore. On the other hand, those of us who have settled here, who have tried hard to assimiliate and build nice lives for ourselves, who will be here after the novelty of living in China wears off for people like you, will have to deal with the mess people like you made for other foreigners in China.
So, do me a favor, ok? Just stop trying to pass your opinion off as fact. At first I thought I was just being hard on you and that maybe it was all in my head that you were trying to make yourself sound like an authority on all matters Cameroonian and Chinese. Until I read this thread, of course, and realized that other people thought the same way.
Ah, the “appeal to my own authority” fallacy. Love it.
Perhaps you can explain to me why non-orientals were the only people who had to fill in an AIDS declaration at the border between Hong Kong and Shenzhen when I used to pass through it in the 1990s? Koreans, Japanese, even American- and British-born Chinese, passports in hand, were allowed to pass through unhindered. Blacks, south-Asians and Whites were herded into a separate room to complete the form*. This happened to me multiple times, so it wasn’t just an isolated racist border guard.
The incident above is pure, unadulterated, state sponsored racism and ignorance. I had never seen the like. I had no preconception about Chinese racism, of the sort that you condescendingly mention above. I didn’t know Chinese racism existed until I saw it writ large.
kidneyfailure, I have spent a lot of time in China too over the past fifteen years, though clearly nowhere near as much as you. I have seen many of the less than savory aspects of the country, as well as the many positives. I have many opinions, based on observation, some of which I like to, and shall, express.
One of the observations I have is that racism appears to be endemic, at a social and at an institutional level. That you’ve heard “millions” of non-Chinese in country expressing horror at the phenomenon might not be because of these preconceptions (that I had never personally heard of), and just might be because it is in fact readily observable. While I would not necessarily suggest such attitudes are common to the majority of Chinese citizens, I will state my opinion as a fact: to anyone who’s spent more than a few days there, it’s quite obviously acceptable in most strata of Chinese society for Chinese people to be overtly racist.
You can whine as much as you like about people expressing opinion, making observations and extrapolating things from them, and even being critical based on those observations because they’re not as experienced as you, but you’d be wrong to do so. By your own logic, how on earth can you make your extrapolations of positivity by those criteria?
Further, if I were to make a positive extrapolation from my experiences - “the majority of Chinese people I met in China were charming, generous and friendly, and therefore I determine that most Chinese people are charming, generous and friendly,” (an opinion I genuinely hold) would you be so quick to slap me down?
Go ahead and defend the country - there is a lot of ignorance out there and it does need to be fought. Clearly, as it is your “HOME” you have a vested interest in doing so, but do bear in mind that some of the time when you do so, you sound like nothing more than a state propagandist.
*I once filled in the form saying I was Bill Clinton and I did indeed have AIDS, and was still allowed in.
the anti-sven pile-on was uncalled for IMHO. So she talks about Cameroon, or other places she’s been with the Peace Corps or whatever. I find it interesting, usually, and I can’t be the only one.
I’m probably reading too much into this statement, but I think 24 months is plenty long enough of a sojourn in another country to be entitled to open one’s mouth about it. Whether the words that come out of that mouth are worldwise or narrowminded, or meet with the approval of the inhabitants or otherwise is something to deal with as it comes. But to say one isn’t entitled to an opinion until you think they’ve lived there long enough is…well, a most unusual opinion.
This is a really depressing thread. The Straight Dope is meant to be chock-full of smart and savvy people who share their wisdom and wit with others from all points of the globe.
Instead we’ve got a fucking sophomoric catfight happening. I thought I left all that shit behind in high school, and being 50, that was many many years ago.
Grow the fuck up lezlers and all you other pile-onners. You’ve got smart stuff happening, why are you resorting to this retarded bullshit?
The above quote is a serious rebuttal for all of the snarkers on even sven.
If lezlers, who clearly takes notice of at least some of sven’s posts (or we wouldn’t be having this Pit thread), was until recently unaware of the latter’s Cameroon connection, I can only surmise that sven’s fault is not in overplaying the Cameroon card, but in not mentioning Cameroon often enough. :eek:
Seriously, though, the SDMB has major under-representation in certain parts of the globe. As far back as I can remember, the only Doper resident between the formerly-Egypt-based Cairo Carol and the always-good-value South African contingent was – for two years – even sven in Cameroon. IMHO, she could have pitched a 24/7-all-West/Central-African SDMB forum, and it would have been a net benefit to the boards.
Would that give a completely accurate picture of sub-Saharan Africa? No, of course not. But just like sven never claimed to give the final verdict on other places that she has written about, she provided (and still provides) some great insights on cultures that most of us have not yet experienced.
She has always come across as someone whose mood is deeply influenced by her location. So, while I couldn’t place most US-based Dopers geographically, sven has always written strongly about her current location. In Santa Cruz it was a post-graduation woe-is-me fest (because she made a mistake in staying there), in Oakland it was the joy of discovery of a thriving (if greatly under-appreciated) multicultural city, and thence to the adventures of Cameroon and China. Personally, I like the fact that Dopers write about their locations, and not in ways that the local Chambers of Commerce might do.
I find her much more restrained when talking about her experiences in China, which is perfectly appropriate. She knows that she is not the only SDMB resident based in that country, and I always read her posts from there as being written from the aspect of a foreigner planted there on an offer from the US Government, not as a wannabe insider.
Finally, she posted in a thread about Timbuktu (not her OP) having just been there by goat-laden boat down the Niger, and that gives her a hell of a lot of cred in my book. If it hadn’t been for those meddling kids, she would have posted to the SDMB about Timbuktu from Timbuktu.
[And while I’m at it, although they are in many ways polar opposites, I appreciated Collounsbury’s posts, too.]