Now that you mention it I’ve never personally met Pol Pot either. Maybe I should rethink those assumptions I made about him being a bad guy.
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And the next time you can’t understand why conservatives stand by and let the gov’t get heavy-handed and militarized going after some occupy or anti-free-trade protestors just because some Wall Street Journal editorial told them that those youth are the exact terrible stereotype you think they are and have it coming to them… then just think back to that “of course he is… I hope the BLM drives over that racist &@$#@%* with a tank” feeling you have now. See how easy it is for the cronies and lifetime politicos to stay in power even though the majority of people on the left and right want to clean house. They just have to make sure that the sides don’t both want to do it AT THE SAME TIME. Don’t worry, the time to demonize the next Occupy movement is coming up soon.
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Being open-minded is one thing. Being obtuse is another. The quotes provided in the BB article speak for themselves, and your chiding people for discussing something that they haven’t read* ignores the fact that there is almost no context that could be provided in the article that would make his words anything other than what they appear to be on their face.
*which assumes that people are not able to find the story any way other than by clicking the link from BB
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Funny. But Pol Pot has been (or was) notorious since the late 1960s and there’s lots of documentation on him. You probably hadn’t heard of this rancher before ten days ago or so though. Not quite the same situation. Let me be clear: I’m pretty sure the rancher is a racist, but I’d just like to decide for myself, based on facts. Are you really gonna ridiculte me, or anyone, for wanting to be sure of those facts before deciding for sure? C’mon…
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A DAY IN THE LIFE OF A TEA BAGGER
The Bagger gets up at 6:00am to prepare his morning coffee. He fills his pot full of good clean drinking water because some liberal fought for minimum water quality standards. He takes his daily medication with his first swallow of coffee. His medications are safe to take because some liberal fought to insure their safety and work as advertised. All but $10.00 of his medications are paid for by his employers medical plan because some liberal union workers fought their employers for paid medical insurance, now the Bagger gets it too. He prepares his morning breakfast, bacon and eggs this day. The Bagger’s bacon is safe to eat because some liberal fought for laws to regulate the meat packing industry. The Bagger takes his morning shower reaching for his shampoo; His bottle is properly labeled with every ingredient and the amount of its contents because some liberal fought for his right to know what he was putting on his body and how much it contained. The Bagger dresses, walks outside and takes a deep breath. The air he breathes is clean because some tree- hugging liberal fought for laws to stop industries from polluting our air. The Bagger begins his work day; he has a good job with excellent pay, medicals benefits, retirement, paid holidays and vacation because some liberal union members fought and died for these working standards the Bagger’s employer pays these standards because the Bagger’s employer doesn’t want his employees to call the union. If the Bagger is hurt on the job or becomes unemployed he’ll get a worker compensation or unemployment check because some liberal didn’t think he should loose his home because of his temporary misfortune. It’s noon time, the Bagger needs to make a Bank Deposit so he can pay some bills. The Bagger’s deposit is federally insured by the FSLIC because some liberal wanted to protect the Bagger’s money from unscrupulous bankers who ruined the banking system before the depression. The Bagger has to pay his Fannie Mae underwritten Mortgage and his below market federal student loan because some stupid liberal decided that the Bagger and the government would be better off if he was educated and earned more money over his lifetime.
The Bagger is home from work, he plans to visit his father this evening at his farm home in the country. He gets in his car for the drive to dad’s; his car is among the safest in the world because some liberal fought for car safety standards. He arrives at his boyhood home. He was the third generation to live in the house financed by Farmers Home Administration because bankers didn’t want to make rural loans. The house didn’t have electric until some big government liberal stuck his nose where it didn’t belong and demanded rural electrification. (Those rural Republicans would still be sitting in the dark) He is happy to see his dad who is now retired. His dad lives on Social Security and his union pension because some liberal made sure he could take care of himself so the Bagger wouldn’t have to. After his visit with dad he gets back in his car for the ride home. He turns on a radio talk show, probably Douche Limpbaugh who keeps saying that liberals are bad and conservatives are good (He doesn’t tell the Bagger that his beloved Republicans have fought against every protection and benefit the Bagger enjoys throughout his day). The Bagger agrees, “We don’t need those big government liberals ruining our lives!
Have fun with this read, it’s meant as a running funny ha ha intended to raise our awareness of the American GOP/TeaBagger/NeoCon individual. [note sarcasm]
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Unless you’re planning to interview him yourself, those “facts” will come from media reports exactly like this. If that quote is even close to accurate—and I have seen no reason to believe otherwise—then his own words condemn him as a horrible racist.
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It’s a mistake to think these people will simply die out. Things have been gradually improving overall, but it’s been a century and a half since the Civil War, and people like Cliven Bundy are still fighting it. He’ll teach his children his overt racism and cultish militia culture, and they’ll teach their children. I do hope that someday they’ll die out, and we can all just worry about the hidden racism that pervades every aspect of society instead, but sadly, Bundy and his ilk are not going to just vanish from old age in a couple decades- they’ve already infected future generations with their hate.
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I can’t believe you are still defending your point. First, there is no reasonable context where the opening statement “I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro” could possibly be benign.
Second, discussions about this are everywhere. You don’t need Boing Boing to spoon feed you link which, by determining it doesn’t work, constitutes your full due diligence in gathering actual facts to defend your point.
Try this. It’s way worse than you even imagined.
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Perhaps he should be lionized in the old Roman tradition.
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Being racist, or a baby eater, or whatever, should be orthogonal to whatever rights he is claiming. One of my favorite movie quotes:
Larry Flynt: “If the First Amendment will protect a scumbag like me, it will protect all of you.”
So careful thinking he deserves to lose his case because he is a racist jerk. That kind of logic can bite us all on the ass. If he deserves to lose, it’s because he’s wrong.
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Or just even telling him he’s wrong.
In your heart you know he is extremely right.
(First thing I thought when I saw the name of the town, Bunkerville.)
All things being equal, wouldn’t want to jump to conclusions, the devil is in the details, hitler had some good ideas, bob’s your uncle, it is what it is, your mileage may vary.
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Huh. So that thing about the EPA being both proposed by and created with an executive order from Nixon are just unfounded rumors? Come to think of it, I think he signed the legislation creating OSHA too. I’m sure that can’t be right. Republicans are always for dirty water and dangerous work conditions. And we all know that some ambitious politician or lawyer who ‘raises awareness’ of an issue and then takes credit is the one who actually solves it; not the scientists, engineers, technicians, and workers who… you know… actually have to do the hard work of improving technology. (who cares how cars actually handle or diseases actually spread… I care and The Other doesn’t! Vote MEEEEE!!!)
Maybe it shouldn’t be couched in the language of “rights,” but some people think members of a privileged class run a serious risk of douchebag when discussing less privileged folks. Personally, I find that shutting up is more fun than being a dick.
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If the man didn’t actually say these things then that’s one thing, and if he said them while reciting lines for a play then that’s another. But the words don’t need a huge amount of surrounding context to make sense of.
And there is no need to think he is a horrible person. He may be a perfectly nice person who thinks and says racist things. His words aren’t a call to violence. He looks around himself and sees people in such dire poverty with so few prospects in their lives that he wonders if they wouldn’t be materially better off if there were kept as slaves instead.
Of course he says this from a contemporary position where he doesn’t understand what slavery was really like. Even racists have been inured to contemporary humans rights ideas and probably can’t think of what the world would be like for slaves who had essentially no access to protection under the law (even if it was illegal to beat your slave half to death for fun - and I don’t know if any such laws existed - how would that ever be enforced?).
And while he looks around and sees that people in such dire straights are black, he is so stuck in racist lines of thinking that he sees that as a trait of black people (that is, a “thing about the Negro”) rather than recognizing that those racist lines of thinking are exactly what lead to the situation.
People think some pretty dumb things, old people are particularly prone to think dumb things that weren’t regarded as so dumb when they were younger, and everyone is prone to fall into the dumb traps set by their culture. When I read what he said, I recognized the terrible shame of the kernel of truth in what he was saying. There are people in the US (and in every developed nation, but the US seems to have a special problem with it) who are so badly off that there probably were slaves who were treated better than them (not all or even most slaves, but I have to assume that somewhere in history there were some individuals who thought their slaves were human beings with dignity and treated them as such within the severe limits of that relationship).
So we don’t have to jump to the conclusion that he’s a horrible person, and we can see him as a flawed human being. But saying that you need more facts to make up your mind that he’s racist seems pretty disingenuous.
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…‘cause them rednecks got nothin’ to do, their cattle are all off roamin’ around on their gubmint-subsidy free grazin’ land.
And they brag about how it’s been that way for generations, like they’re proud of it. They’ve even come to see it as an entitlement.
Buncha lazy-asses lappin’ at the public teat, I tell ya.
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I think you’re partially right, and in a vacuum, 100 percent right. But his reach can only go so far, really, when it comes to future generations.
I think we can safely say that when it comes to the millennials, this kind of thinking is basically gone. As a gen X’er, I know that it’s not gone from MY generation (particularly older ones who, like me, were born when LBJ was prez) but we were the first to get the warm embrace of the internet and it came after childhood. And more integration.
Ask any 25 year-old - even from some shitty backwoods state - what they think of gay marriage and they will likely just shrug. And the idea of thinking about race like this old fart - doubtful.
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Remember, kids, it’s ok if the Gov. trods all over someone if they are horrible people. And naturally anyone who supports him for one issue must also share all his others views.
Disclaimer: Given what I know about the Bundy situation, while I empathize with resisting gov. intrusion and reach, I don’t think he has a leg to stand on.
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I think you re missing christian_ceris’s point. The bagger will claim no one has ever helped me while enjoying the life that others have helped and disparage those that are trying to change the current unfair practices. By todays tea bag standards Nixon, even Regan (he raised taxes and vetoed bills that had too many ear marks) would be cast out as RINOs.
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