seriously- i've been offline for the greater part of the day, and lo and behold when i return rick has posted a month's ration of detailed(pulled from archives, etc.) posts in the time i've been away.

all that effort for fear of drowning.

i just can't imagine how you can have any kind of a job, or relationship, or life with the compulsive need to post so much, so often.

steve wrote:

Rick Reuben wrote:You can be in a crowd at a show by, I don't know, Sarah Silverman, and she'll make a lot of 'outrageous' jokes connected to race and people will be laughing it up because it's such a relief to hear all that dirty laundry aired out, but then you walk out of the theater and you're back in Political Correctness World.

Yeah, comedians say things onstage that we don't hear in regular life. Seems like just about every kind of performer does that.

That's like the pot calling the kettle...

Best not say it just in case I open a can of mexican worms.

Rick Reuben wrote:Now, Warmowski will probably claim that he wasn't trying to infringe on Marsupialized's free speech by painting him as a racist, but as we all know, any time you 'prosecute' someone with their words on a public forum, you are definitely playing to the jury. Warmowski wanted to convince the onlookers to ostracize Marsupialized, and to see him in a darker light than most see him: as a great and honest original mind, a supreme entertainer, and a person with no malice behind his controversial wisecracks.

Dude can say and do whatever he likes, he can call me names till the cows come home. That's fine. Good for him, let him get it all out. Just project everything he wants to say to people he comes across every day but is too bound up by his own layers of rules and regulations to be able to actually do it. Let a tiny bit of that pent up energy boil over. Just point it right at me and fire. I am cool with that, I'll live. Dude ain't got shit that'll make anywhere near a dent. Might make him feel better, and hey if it makes someone feel better I am more than willing to entertain them for a few minutes.
I just wish he'd answer me when I ask where he gets off accusing me of singling out 'darker skinned' and 'spanish speaking people' for ridicule 'constantly' when a huge portion of my posts are ridiculing and ranting about how much I absolutely detest hillbilly, corporate or religious WHITE culture.
Those posts, they are invisible to him. They don't fit nicely into his little 'racist' box he has for me, so we'll just ignore that whole aspect.
The posts where I find say something 'mean' about 'darker skinned' people are very few and far between. In fact the only one he could find to parade down the street with was a obviously over the top comedic anecdote I told about INDIANS. Last I checked most American Indians didn't speak Spanish, but hey I am just completely culturally ignorant and hurtful maybe they do.

steve wrote:
Because of this they think race isn't an issue (or shouldn't be an issue) for anyone. It's like how rich people think about money and having a place to live -- it just never crosses their minds that it could be a problem.

When someone (not rich or not white) suggests that it is something to be considered and taken seriously, a rich (white) person thinks that person is being hysterical because for him, everything is fine.

I saw Hotel Rwanda with the ladyfriend earlier. I liked it a lot, or as much as you're supposed to like a film about something that horrible. I guess 'appreciate' is a better word. Early on, they made the point that you really couldn't even tell a difference between the two groups that were at war. I kept thinking, "what a bunch of idiots, you can't even tell the difference. A third group told you that you were different, and you're killing each other over it." And then, for whatever reason, I kept thinking about this post.

I think that I'm probably guilty of this. I grew up not destitute and not really exposed to any racism on the part of my parents. I really don't see racism (or sexism) in my life and I feel like, it must not be going on as much as people make it out to be, that it's just perpetuated by talk of it. I feel like everyone just needs to move on and be as forward thinking as I like to think I am.

Anyway, maybe I'm guilty. I have a hard time understanding how one group of people would walk around killing their neighbors because they perceived them to be different at this point in history. I feel like that's over with, but maybe it's just because of my experience.

Being left-handed, on the other hand....

my mother once told me not to put coins in my mouth cause "some chinaman" could have done it as well. I was a little confused but trusting my mother my young impressionable mind decided that chinamen must be really filthy. this kind of comment is out of character for my mum but it's one of my earliest memories.

The Code is Almighty wrote:
I really don't see racism (or sexism) in my life and I feel like, it must not be going on as much as people make it out to be, that it's just perpetuated by talk of it. I feel like everyone just needs to move on and be as forward thinking as I like to think I am.

Do you understand, though, that you feel this way only because you are insulated from it?

In other words, are you really saying that "people should just move on" and that racism is not pervasive, or are you saying that you "feel like" it is "over," but recognizing that you are not correct?

I'm not attacking you; I'm just wondering what you're really saying here.

It would be really easy for me as a white person to say that people who belong to ethnic minorities need to get over it and stop complaining so we can all move on, when I, being white, have never had to endure the stigma of racism (at least to the extent that certain other ethnic groups have) and I don't personally experience firsthand evidence of its pervasiveness on a daily basis. It would also be very easy for me to say that because I'm not offended when somebody calls me "cracker" or "gringo" or "goy" or whatever, that nobody else ought to be offended when I slur their race or ethnic heritage or culture.

Unfortunately, we don't get to decide what is deemed offensive to other individuals or groups. We don't have control over the opinions of others. The only thing we can control is what comes out of our own mouths, and thereby the extent that we might offend others or reflect badly on ourselves as individuals.

The argument that some of you seem to be putting forth is that if everybody was just a little bit more racist, then racism itself would somehow vanish and that seems to me to be a completely ass-backwards approach to the situation. No amount of wishing alone will make the racism issue go away, so the best we can do is not to exacerbate the situation by making racially insensitive remarks and invoking peoples' ethnic differences in disputes.

The whole "anti-PC" argument is pretty irrelevant here, because it assumes that others oughtn't be offended by things that they obviously do find offensive on a visceral level. Denying the offensiveness of racist speech is insensitive. This is not about legislating speech, it's about having a little common decency and social skills.

Is it really that difficult to exercise a little self-control in the interest of not deeply offending people and not widening the perception of racism in our society?

tommydski wrote:On topic - Is 'racist' even the correct word? If you did hate Mexicans are you a racist? Mexico is a country but I am unsure as to whether or not it is actually considered a race. Wouldn't that be 'Hispanic' or something? I genuinely don't understand how it works. Maybe someone can explain it to me.

From a scientific standpoint Mandroid and the Mexican Painter are both homo sapiens so they are of the same race.
In the sense commonly used in conversations such as this one, race is a social construct. Each person is assigned a race arbitrarily based on groups of observable physical characteristics as well as behaviors. In this sense Mexican is absolutely a race. Whether these racial distinctions have any merit is another matter.

fat_frog_138 wrote:In the sense commonly used in conversations such as this one, race is a social construct. Each person is assigned a race arbitrarily based on groups of observable physical characteristics as well as behaviors. In this sense Mexican is absolutely a race. Whether these racial distinctions have any merit is another matter.

Very lame, Derrida.

If you're denied service at Denny's or beaten up by the police or deported because of a "social construct", then yeah, it matters.

longdivi wrote:

The Code is Almighty wrote:
I really don't see racism (or sexism) in my life and I feel like, it must not be going on as much as people make it out to be, that it's just perpetuated by talk of it. I feel like everyone just needs to move on and be as forward thinking as I like to think I am.

Do you understand, though, that you feel this way only because you are insulated from it?

In other words, are you really saying that "people should just move on" and that racism is not pervasive, or are you saying that you "feel like" it is "over," but recognizing that you are not correct?

I'm not attacking you; I'm just wondering what you're really saying here.

That paragraph was just one part of the post where I was conveying my own perspective on these things. With the post I was admitting that there's a possibility that there's more to it than what I've merely been exposed to.