Obviously, since I am from central North Carolina, I know a lot who DO get it.
My home county went for Obama by over 60,000 votes and the two largest adjacent counties
(college towns both) went for him by even higher percentages.
Yesterday, however, I lost my rating ability in what had begun as a snark thread
about Texas secession, because (while talking about conservative white pro-military Texans) I got falsely accused of "trashing all Texans".
The side-issues that this brought up got me tons of HRs for things that
would not have been HRed in other contexts. I eventually gave somebody a retaliatory HR and got unrated. The utter idiocy of this (yes, this means you, whatever FPer was fool enough to do it) is mathematically demonstrable by the number of completely unjustifiable/guideline-violating HRs I had received before
it happened -- a state of affairs which nobody who can fix it gives a shit about.
I insisted (and insist) that the person who said the following was
Lying As Usual (as people defending/excusing/enabling the ongoing
bigotry of the majority of white southerners in general are doing:
I'm not defending right-wing terrorists, I'm
defending those Texans who aren't bigots and those that could one day wake up.
In the first place, the Texans who aren't bigots DON'T NEED any defending FROM ME because I never attacked them -- THOSE Texans Did And Do vote For And With ME, or at least their counterparts in North Carolina do. In the second place, the ones who "might one day wake up" not only don't need any defending, they don't DESERVE any unless they are under 25: they have already had since 1965 (when the Voting Rights Act was passed) to wake up! Wherefore my retort was as follows:
Everybody who has not "woken up" ALREADY ABSOLUTELY IS A BIGOT!!
Racism is the raison d'etre of the Republican party!
How in THE HELL do you think that people whose wages are stagnating and are suffering the middle-class squeeze are going to vote for policies that will make the rich people who are already abusing them MORE rich and further ahead?? THE ONLY reason these people vote this way is because the Republican party proves that it hates niggers, wetbacks, and faggots MORE. It also proves that it wants the nation to "win" in foreign conflict, so that even if you ARE poor, well, at least your TEAM is still #1.
The fact that these are sort of understandable human emotional
responses to the Republican brand of crack (which REALLY SHOULD be outlawed, the first amendment notwithstanding) DOES NOT CHANGE the fact that they are FOUNDED ON HATE -- hate of people who obviously are not as hardworking or virtuous as you, or who came here "illegally", or who, just for being foreigners, deserve to be poorer than you and to be militarily defeated by you, since, after all, it's your birthright to be in the richest and "strongest" nation in the world.
These voters/people DO NOT DESERVE ANY sympathy of ANY kind!! THEY DESERVE THE EXACT SAME KIND OF GUNS THAT EISENHOWER GAVE THEM in 1957!
And the fact that you are arguing for something less VERY much makes YOU part of the problem AND a fellow traveler.
My responses in the thread that ensued also got HRed to death.
The most relevant of those I diaried yesterday"; it was that some
of the people had fought "for America" and deserved my respect,
as a fellow American, for their "patriotism". This was bullshit to
the extreme. About the only time southern white men bearing arms fought
for MY civil rights was in Little Rock in 1957, when they had to point guns at rock-throwing mobs of their own relatives so that nine black students could integrate Central High. The rest of the time, they were mostly intervening in third world to support the interests of fatcats and colonialists while claiming (falsely) that that was "American" because it was "anti-communist". As is richly detailed in William Blum's Killing Hope.
I would next like to cite a few more excerpts from these arguments, just to highlight the disparity between the way I was treated and
the way my antagonists were treated.
They are linked to below, but they are also present in full text in orange, because the links will not work if you are not TU, since the comments are hidden (which is the only reason why I have to diary them).
After insisting that the good white people of Little Rock got exactly what they deserved ( and a damn good thing, too), I pointed out that Texans who STILL didn't get it were even MORE deserving, and was met, idiotically, with
Unsettling.(+11)
You're wishing violence on those you hate.
This is not only ignorant bullshit, it is ignorant RACIST bullshit.
I did not say I HATED the white people in Little Rock that the white
National Guardsmen were pointing guns at. The guardsmen surely didn't hate them either. I DID AND DO, however, say that THEY HATED ME, AND the black children that they were trying to keep out of that school. Hated them enough to be THROWING ROCKS at ARMED National Guardsmen (and at the children too, in some cases). I therefore retorted:
Enforcing the law IS VIOLENCE BY DEFINITION (0+ / 3-)
Unsettling.
You're wishing violence on those you hate.
DAMN, you're stupid.
Did anybody say that about the Navy Seal snipers who shot the pirates to rescue Captain Phillips?
More to the point, WOULD YOU have said it about THE NATIONAL GUARDSMEN -- since your ignorant bigoted ass likes to praise the Americanness of southern national guardsmen so hard -- who POINTED GUNS AT THE GOOD WHITE PEOPLE OF LITTLE ROCK IN ORDER TO INTEGRATE CENTRAL HIGH in 1957??
Please do yourself a favor and realize how bad this is for you and those around you.
Please do people of color in general a favor AND SHUT THE FUCK UP WITH YOUR IGNORANT RACIST ATTACKS ON ME, and YOUR EQUALLY IGNORANT RACIST DEFENSES of Texas Republicans.
While I usually think I know almost everything, there is one thing here that I honestly don't get: howizzit , given that this is a liberal site, chock full of white people who like black people enough to have worked their butts off for Obama, that I, defending the use of state force in defense of the equal protection clause and human rights, get accused OF HATING, while the person who is defending militaristic white male right-wing Texans who vote Republican (pardon the redundancy, but without it, I would again be accused of having "trashed all Texans") gets 11 recs?
Something is very seriously wrong there.
Something is also very seriously wrong here, a comment I did NOT have to reproduce, since "Lying puckered asshole" Is REC'd +6 rather than hidden, while my response is hidden.
The lie I had allegedly puckered up to tell was just reproduced above.
Since "Lying puckered asshole (+6)" IS NOT a refutation, I replied,
You can't JUST SAY that something is a lie (0+ / 2-)
You have TO ACTUALLY REBUT it.
All I said was that enforcing the law is inherently violent. THAT'S WHY the root "force" OCCURS IN THE WORD. If the capacity to inflict violence against people breaking a law did not exist then BY DEFINITION the law COULD NOT BE enforced.
I am just talking about what it actually factually took to desegregate Arkansas (and Texas) to whatever degree they have in fact been desegregated.
Calling a black southerner who is arguing about racism and segregation in the south a "lying puckered asshole" WITH ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO BACK IT UP certainly can't be doing wonders for YOUR credibility,
You lying GAPING asshole.
I am not insisting that the tag-line wasn't legitimately HRable.
I am insisting that the double standard is NOT in accordance with the official published guidelines of the site. If his insult could occur IN THE TITLE/SUBJECT, which you would see even if you didn't want to click&read, while mine was visible only to people who wanted to read to the end, and his gets rec'd while mine gets hidden, THERE IS NO EVEN playing field.
More to the point, responding to ANY argument by insulting the arguer is just intellectually dishonest. If you're going to insult somebody, you do have to first explain why they deserve it. I have done that.
The people on the other side of the rec/hr divide here have not.
And that is actually a much worse reflection on the administration of the site than it is on any of the participants.